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rushthatspeaksSo what are the things not to like about Florence?
Well, I still haven't made it to the Bargello, because of the random hours in which museums are open, which is one thing; and the reason I didn't make it today is another thing, because even though I was up in time (it closes at two p.m., and of course one would like to be in there as long as possible) I was in too much pain to move, and that's another thing.
It is of course these damn stairs, and the general attitude that is summarized by these damn stairs. I am coming off more than a year of being drastically, direly, distressingly ill. The stairs are not my friends. They hurt me. It is true that I am out of shape, but I don't have the energy to spare; I was only beginning to be better when I came here. And the building has no elevator, and the thing is, most buildings don't. The museums and galleries don't, the shops above ground level don't, some of the streets have stairs. I am having a painful time hauling myself around some days, I am having a stretch here where I have jet lag and cramps and my general illness and I am leaving the house only because it would be a crime to waste any of my time in Florence and I know that my memories will not have the impress of pain over them, because my memory is kind that way. But I am burning myself at both ends, here, and I know it, and I will probably spend at least the month of December in bed and I know that, and the thing is that that is something of a luxury, isn't it. That I can grit my teeth and tell my legs to move, can take more painkillers and plan carefully how many trips a day I make up and down. If for some reason you can't do that, if you are a person who cannot do stairs, or one who has more pain and fatigue issues than I have, this would be a terrible place, a nightmarish one.
And then there's the drinking issue: this isn't Rome, Rome with its aqueduct-fed mountain-spring public drinking fountains. This is a city where you buy water (it is dear) or you buy wine (it is cheap) or you do without.
Which is probably why there aren't any bathrooms. The entire population is in such a state of dehydration that nobody ever has to pee. I mean, the Uffizi is one of the great museums of Europe, one of the ones everyone goes to, I haven't looked it up but I'm sure the statistics of how many people visit a day resemble those of the Louvre, and I do appreciate the sign in front of the entrance that tells you straight out that there aren't really bathrooms. I suppose they could have waited and let you find out for yourself. For the entire museum there is one bathroom per gender, with about four stalls in the women's, and the whole setup is halfway down the back staircase, on a landing. Yeesh. (To be fair, there is a cubicle on the main floor with the sign for a wheelchair-accessible bathroom; it appears that you would need to hunt down an attendant.) And this is also par for the course-- museums don't really have bathrooms, restaurants might depending, gelateria kind of do sometimes but you ought to bring your own toilet paper. If you actually need a public bathroom in Florence, go into the Rinascente department store and search the upper levels. They clean those, and as they don't have good signs very few people know about them so there won't be a line. But try not to need a bathroom. It only wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Fewer people smoke nowadays than the ninety-five percent or so who did when I was first here in 1999. I think it's down to under half the population, at least under half of the ones who are standing directly in the street breathing on you. And the gelateria and restaurants seem to have gone no-smoking at some time in those years also. So I don't think that makes it onto my list of things not to like, as it's so much better than it used to be.
Enough of the negativity. Today I did go to the Uffizi and start at the wrong end, whereupon I discovered that most of those rooms are under renovation, but that there is a nice chunk of Raphael and Titian and, of all people, Dürer. There's Titian's Venus, with her little sleeping dog and her amazing hair, the hair that gave the artist's name to the shade; there's (I think) Canaletto's Leda, with the whippet barking at the swan and a cat in the background trying to get into the cage of a duck. And Dürer's Three Wise Men, which is so odd, I'm not even sure you can call it a painting. It's clearly a line drawing colored in, so it has all the draftsmanship of Dürer's finest drawings and the blindingly bright colors of a mid-Renaissance Italian altarpiece. No visible brushstrokes; almost the feel of a lithograph or other inked print. A strange and beautiful thing.
And the other oddities of the gallery, Bronzino's double-sided portrait of the dwarf Morgante, made to show that painting was the greatest of the arts, greater than sculpture, for not only can the painting show all the sides and angles of the subject, but the front of the portrait and the back of the portrait take place at two different moments in time, just before and just after a hawking hunt. It's also odd in its attitude towards its subject. I cannot tell whether Bronzino is trying to ridicule the dwarf or not: the man clearly has Down's Syndrome, and it's an accurate and detailed display of that, but I don't know what the painter was feeling, and usually one can get some idea.
Oh, and there's an otherwise undistinguished Joseph Introducing His Family To The Pharoah by somebody or other which made me laugh because, since it is set in Egypt, it is painted as a town square full of gorgeous neo-Roman buildings except that someone in the background has, just casually, a rhinoceros on a little chain. Oh, Italian Renaissance conception of Africa! You can tell this person is just out on a nice spring day walking the rhino, and wasn't expecting to end up in a Bible story. Like you do. And there's also a Circe and Ulysses, in which most of his shipmates have already been changed into animals, so the courtyard is full of hyenas and foxes and lions and rabbits and one unicorn whose comrades are clearly giving him hell about it-- not as good with the ladies as you told us, huh, buddy?-- and two incredibly bemused, supercilious, nervous-but-trying-not-to-show-it camels. The human figures are pretty mediocre, but the artist deserves to be in the Uffizi just for the expressions on those camels.
The last couple of days have also included toasted pine-nut gelato, which was brilliant, and crema gelato drizzled with balsamic vinegar (delicious, split with Thrud as no human being can eat very much of that without overdosing), and a panino from Gusto Panino in the Oltrarno, the district on the other side of the Arno. I walked over, bought and ate the sandwich in the shadow of the great symmetrical whiteness of Santu Spiritu, one of Brunelleschi's early churches: mortadella, lightly cooked ham, and spread of ground mushrooms, pigeons fighting at my feet over any crumbs, sunlight and a pocket copy of Eddison: “There was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old house in Wastdale...”
Then back along the Ponte Vecchio, filled with those little jewelry shops that hang out over the water, the shops as ever filled with tourists trying to get views of the water and with the goldsmiths who have been there forever trying to sell things to the tourists. I am quite fond of the Ponte Vecchio; it is an entertaining combination of bridge and souk.
Onward; I have hopes of tomorrow. The Bargello cannot defeat me forever.
Well, I still haven't made it to the Bargello, because of the random hours in which museums are open, which is one thing; and the reason I didn't make it today is another thing, because even though I was up in time (it closes at two p.m., and of course one would like to be in there as long as possible) I was in too much pain to move, and that's another thing.
It is of course these damn stairs, and the general attitude that is summarized by these damn stairs. I am coming off more than a year of being drastically, direly, distressingly ill. The stairs are not my friends. They hurt me. It is true that I am out of shape, but I don't have the energy to spare; I was only beginning to be better when I came here. And the building has no elevator, and the thing is, most buildings don't. The museums and galleries don't, the shops above ground level don't, some of the streets have stairs. I am having a painful time hauling myself around some days, I am having a stretch here where I have jet lag and cramps and my general illness and I am leaving the house only because it would be a crime to waste any of my time in Florence and I know that my memories will not have the impress of pain over them, because my memory is kind that way. But I am burning myself at both ends, here, and I know it, and I will probably spend at least the month of December in bed and I know that, and the thing is that that is something of a luxury, isn't it. That I can grit my teeth and tell my legs to move, can take more painkillers and plan carefully how many trips a day I make up and down. If for some reason you can't do that, if you are a person who cannot do stairs, or one who has more pain and fatigue issues than I have, this would be a terrible place, a nightmarish one.
And then there's the drinking issue: this isn't Rome, Rome with its aqueduct-fed mountain-spring public drinking fountains. This is a city where you buy water (it is dear) or you buy wine (it is cheap) or you do without.
Which is probably why there aren't any bathrooms. The entire population is in such a state of dehydration that nobody ever has to pee. I mean, the Uffizi is one of the great museums of Europe, one of the ones everyone goes to, I haven't looked it up but I'm sure the statistics of how many people visit a day resemble those of the Louvre, and I do appreciate the sign in front of the entrance that tells you straight out that there aren't really bathrooms. I suppose they could have waited and let you find out for yourself. For the entire museum there is one bathroom per gender, with about four stalls in the women's, and the whole setup is halfway down the back staircase, on a landing. Yeesh. (To be fair, there is a cubicle on the main floor with the sign for a wheelchair-accessible bathroom; it appears that you would need to hunt down an attendant.) And this is also par for the course-- museums don't really have bathrooms, restaurants might depending, gelateria kind of do sometimes but you ought to bring your own toilet paper. If you actually need a public bathroom in Florence, go into the Rinascente department store and search the upper levels. They clean those, and as they don't have good signs very few people know about them so there won't be a line. But try not to need a bathroom. It only wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Fewer people smoke nowadays than the ninety-five percent or so who did when I was first here in 1999. I think it's down to under half the population, at least under half of the ones who are standing directly in the street breathing on you. And the gelateria and restaurants seem to have gone no-smoking at some time in those years also. So I don't think that makes it onto my list of things not to like, as it's so much better than it used to be.
Enough of the negativity. Today I did go to the Uffizi and start at the wrong end, whereupon I discovered that most of those rooms are under renovation, but that there is a nice chunk of Raphael and Titian and, of all people, Dürer. There's Titian's Venus, with her little sleeping dog and her amazing hair, the hair that gave the artist's name to the shade; there's (I think) Canaletto's Leda, with the whippet barking at the swan and a cat in the background trying to get into the cage of a duck. And Dürer's Three Wise Men, which is so odd, I'm not even sure you can call it a painting. It's clearly a line drawing colored in, so it has all the draftsmanship of Dürer's finest drawings and the blindingly bright colors of a mid-Renaissance Italian altarpiece. No visible brushstrokes; almost the feel of a lithograph or other inked print. A strange and beautiful thing.
And the other oddities of the gallery, Bronzino's double-sided portrait of the dwarf Morgante, made to show that painting was the greatest of the arts, greater than sculpture, for not only can the painting show all the sides and angles of the subject, but the front of the portrait and the back of the portrait take place at two different moments in time, just before and just after a hawking hunt. It's also odd in its attitude towards its subject. I cannot tell whether Bronzino is trying to ridicule the dwarf or not: the man clearly has Down's Syndrome, and it's an accurate and detailed display of that, but I don't know what the painter was feeling, and usually one can get some idea.
Oh, and there's an otherwise undistinguished Joseph Introducing His Family To The Pharoah by somebody or other which made me laugh because, since it is set in Egypt, it is painted as a town square full of gorgeous neo-Roman buildings except that someone in the background has, just casually, a rhinoceros on a little chain. Oh, Italian Renaissance conception of Africa! You can tell this person is just out on a nice spring day walking the rhino, and wasn't expecting to end up in a Bible story. Like you do. And there's also a Circe and Ulysses, in which most of his shipmates have already been changed into animals, so the courtyard is full of hyenas and foxes and lions and rabbits and one unicorn whose comrades are clearly giving him hell about it-- not as good with the ladies as you told us, huh, buddy?-- and two incredibly bemused, supercilious, nervous-but-trying-not-to-show-it camels. The human figures are pretty mediocre, but the artist deserves to be in the Uffizi just for the expressions on those camels.
The last couple of days have also included toasted pine-nut gelato, which was brilliant, and crema gelato drizzled with balsamic vinegar (delicious, split with Thrud as no human being can eat very much of that without overdosing), and a panino from Gusto Panino in the Oltrarno, the district on the other side of the Arno. I walked over, bought and ate the sandwich in the shadow of the great symmetrical whiteness of Santu Spiritu, one of Brunelleschi's early churches: mortadella, lightly cooked ham, and spread of ground mushrooms, pigeons fighting at my feet over any crumbs, sunlight and a pocket copy of Eddison: “There was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old house in Wastdale...”
Then back along the Ponte Vecchio, filled with those little jewelry shops that hang out over the water, the shops as ever filled with tourists trying to get views of the water and with the goldsmiths who have been there forever trying to sell things to the tourists. I am quite fond of the Ponte Vecchio; it is an entertaining combination of bridge and souk.
Onward; I have hopes of tomorrow. The Bargello cannot defeat me forever.
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Date: 2011-12-05 08:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-05 12:27 pm (UTC)You and