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rushthatspeaksNovember 14th
Yesterday we met up with a colleague of Thrud's for lunch at Buca Mario, which was founded in 1884 or 1886 or something like that. It's a maze of twisty little mirrored dining rooms, all alike, so you keep mistaking mirror for archway and good luck finding the bathrooms without ending up in the wine cellar. Arriving at twelve-thirty, we were about the only people there, clearly intending a late breakfast rather than a lunch if the expressions of the waitstaff meant anything. It filled up around two p.m.-- when we were, in fact, still there. I had a traditional Tuscan ribollita, stew of white beans, stale bread, and black cabbage, which sounds terrible but is perfect winter food, filling and hearty without being stodge. Thrud and I got fried artichokes-- they are in season-- which were so good we proceeded to order them again. Just artichokes, very lightly breaded and fried in olive oil with salt, optional squeeze of lemon, but the ingredients were so fresh and the frying so delicate that they were the best artichokes I have ever eaten. The rest of the table proceeded on through wild boar ragout and various pasta, the whole primi and secondi route, but I waited for dessert, which was an extremely dark chocolate cake worth sacrificing my secondi to. And the house Chianti was more than drinkable. Which is good, because of course one has to buy water in Italy, and it's expensive, and they don't give you much in a bottle, and the waiter doesn't really expect you to want more of it. Wine is cheaper than water and a topic of more general interest. Still, I get dehydrated, especially over meals like this, with a lot of salt. I guess one has to be used to it.
Buca Mario then proved, when the check came, to be staggeringly, painfully expensive, which I had started to expect about halfway through but which was still sad. It was definitely a restaurant I recommend-- friendly service, utterly delicious food, they even handed us a little packet of wrapped cookies on our way out-- but for special occasions only, and if we'd known the price range when Thrud's colleague suggested it we probably would not have gone.
The intention was then to go to the Bargello, which is a medieval fortress containing some of the Medici art collection, but the Bargello, although its website does not say so, turns out to be closed on the first, third, and fifth Sundays of every month for no apparent reason. Also on the second and fourth Mondays. They do this to bother you: it is common museum practice around here.
So we wound up at the Uffizi, as you do. And I wound up in front of Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat for forty-five minutes, as you do. Someday I am going into the Uffizi and-- this is revolutionary-- starting from the other end. It is U-shaped, and the first galleries are Florentine Painting From The Middle Ages Onward, and after about five rooms you get to the Botticelli room and stick, and then you are Done With Museums For Today because the Botticelli room is total and complete overload. There is a reason it is the only gallery in the Uffizi with benches, the only place you can actually sit down looking at paintings. So I have a deep, in-depth, friendly knowledge of everything in the Uffizi that comes before the Botticelli room, and after it I know the pieces of art that are the landmarks on the way to the bathroom, and this is non-ideal. If, at some point, I go straight to the Madonna of the Magnificat, put in my requisite forty-five minutes, and then walk very briskly turning my head neither to the right nor to the left all the way to the other end of the building, I may find out what they have in the galleries over there, for at present for all I know it could be Russian Futurists or something.
But anyway the Madonna of the Magnificat. There are several things in the world that have the genuine possibility of being the world's best object, the thing that is just the best thing, the most beautiful thing in existence. You know, like the Nike in the Louvre. This particular Botticelli is one of them. It is far and away his best painting-- I know the two secular ones are the most famous, the Birth of Venus and the Primavera, but I really think the Primavera is popular mostly because no one has any idea what the hell, and fond as I am of the Birth of Venus, it and the Madonna are hung next to each other and I defy you to look at the Venus when you have seen the other one. The thing is the Venus reproduces better, so the postcards actually kind of look something like it. The Madonna of the Magnificat is not photographable. Its reproductions look like an ordinary painting, which is a crime and a tragedy but does not surprise me, because the thing that this painting has that is irreproducible and irreplaceable is its angels. There are five of them, and they are the best angels in art. They have no wings. Two have no halos, and the other three have halos which are not circular, which are very faint aureoles, little almost subliminal gilt lines radiating from around their entire heads and shoulders, not impinging on one's consciousness but present. It is however immediately obvious that they are angels, that they can be nothing else; you never for one instant mistake them for human adolescents. They have a gaity and gravity, a calm joyous intellect mingled with youth and dignity, an impossible snarkiness linked with deep solemnity. They radiate. The two without halos are crowning the Virgin, lowering onto her head a crown of stars, and you can see in the way they are holding it both that it has weight and that it has no weight, that this impossible object has a physical existence and would hold together and that its principal weight, shown in the care with which the angels hold it, is a moral one.
Then there's the angel behind the Virgin, the second crowner, the one who is thinking about mortality and the future and the world. I can't talk about him. The great paintings of the world produce experiences which are as intimate and unsayable as the exact experience of making love. It is not possible to look too long at that angel.
So, as I have before mentioned, we then inevitably left the Uffizi, and had the day's gelato, which was Per che non again-- the obligatory fruiti di bosco, chocolate mousse (which isn't gelato, it's actually just chocolate mousse, and very good too, though I am told I must look out for the strawberry version), and fiori di latte con amarena, which is the whipped cream flavor with amaretto-soaked cherries. I have to say, though Giolitti's holds some of the keys to my heart, that was pretty much my ideal cup of gelato.
And after that skipped dinner and the rest was an evening at home.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
Yesterday we met up with a colleague of Thrud's for lunch at Buca Mario, which was founded in 1884 or 1886 or something like that. It's a maze of twisty little mirrored dining rooms, all alike, so you keep mistaking mirror for archway and good luck finding the bathrooms without ending up in the wine cellar. Arriving at twelve-thirty, we were about the only people there, clearly intending a late breakfast rather than a lunch if the expressions of the waitstaff meant anything. It filled up around two p.m.-- when we were, in fact, still there. I had a traditional Tuscan ribollita, stew of white beans, stale bread, and black cabbage, which sounds terrible but is perfect winter food, filling and hearty without being stodge. Thrud and I got fried artichokes-- they are in season-- which were so good we proceeded to order them again. Just artichokes, very lightly breaded and fried in olive oil with salt, optional squeeze of lemon, but the ingredients were so fresh and the frying so delicate that they were the best artichokes I have ever eaten. The rest of the table proceeded on through wild boar ragout and various pasta, the whole primi and secondi route, but I waited for dessert, which was an extremely dark chocolate cake worth sacrificing my secondi to. And the house Chianti was more than drinkable. Which is good, because of course one has to buy water in Italy, and it's expensive, and they don't give you much in a bottle, and the waiter doesn't really expect you to want more of it. Wine is cheaper than water and a topic of more general interest. Still, I get dehydrated, especially over meals like this, with a lot of salt. I guess one has to be used to it.
Buca Mario then proved, when the check came, to be staggeringly, painfully expensive, which I had started to expect about halfway through but which was still sad. It was definitely a restaurant I recommend-- friendly service, utterly delicious food, they even handed us a little packet of wrapped cookies on our way out-- but for special occasions only, and if we'd known the price range when Thrud's colleague suggested it we probably would not have gone.
The intention was then to go to the Bargello, which is a medieval fortress containing some of the Medici art collection, but the Bargello, although its website does not say so, turns out to be closed on the first, third, and fifth Sundays of every month for no apparent reason. Also on the second and fourth Mondays. They do this to bother you: it is common museum practice around here.
So we wound up at the Uffizi, as you do. And I wound up in front of Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat for forty-five minutes, as you do. Someday I am going into the Uffizi and-- this is revolutionary-- starting from the other end. It is U-shaped, and the first galleries are Florentine Painting From The Middle Ages Onward, and after about five rooms you get to the Botticelli room and stick, and then you are Done With Museums For Today because the Botticelli room is total and complete overload. There is a reason it is the only gallery in the Uffizi with benches, the only place you can actually sit down looking at paintings. So I have a deep, in-depth, friendly knowledge of everything in the Uffizi that comes before the Botticelli room, and after it I know the pieces of art that are the landmarks on the way to the bathroom, and this is non-ideal. If, at some point, I go straight to the Madonna of the Magnificat, put in my requisite forty-five minutes, and then walk very briskly turning my head neither to the right nor to the left all the way to the other end of the building, I may find out what they have in the galleries over there, for at present for all I know it could be Russian Futurists or something.
But anyway the Madonna of the Magnificat. There are several things in the world that have the genuine possibility of being the world's best object, the thing that is just the best thing, the most beautiful thing in existence. You know, like the Nike in the Louvre. This particular Botticelli is one of them. It is far and away his best painting-- I know the two secular ones are the most famous, the Birth of Venus and the Primavera, but I really think the Primavera is popular mostly because no one has any idea what the hell, and fond as I am of the Birth of Venus, it and the Madonna are hung next to each other and I defy you to look at the Venus when you have seen the other one. The thing is the Venus reproduces better, so the postcards actually kind of look something like it. The Madonna of the Magnificat is not photographable. Its reproductions look like an ordinary painting, which is a crime and a tragedy but does not surprise me, because the thing that this painting has that is irreproducible and irreplaceable is its angels. There are five of them, and they are the best angels in art. They have no wings. Two have no halos, and the other three have halos which are not circular, which are very faint aureoles, little almost subliminal gilt lines radiating from around their entire heads and shoulders, not impinging on one's consciousness but present. It is however immediately obvious that they are angels, that they can be nothing else; you never for one instant mistake them for human adolescents. They have a gaity and gravity, a calm joyous intellect mingled with youth and dignity, an impossible snarkiness linked with deep solemnity. They radiate. The two without halos are crowning the Virgin, lowering onto her head a crown of stars, and you can see in the way they are holding it both that it has weight and that it has no weight, that this impossible object has a physical existence and would hold together and that its principal weight, shown in the care with which the angels hold it, is a moral one.
Then there's the angel behind the Virgin, the second crowner, the one who is thinking about mortality and the future and the world. I can't talk about him. The great paintings of the world produce experiences which are as intimate and unsayable as the exact experience of making love. It is not possible to look too long at that angel.
So, as I have before mentioned, we then inevitably left the Uffizi, and had the day's gelato, which was Per che non again-- the obligatory fruiti di bosco, chocolate mousse (which isn't gelato, it's actually just chocolate mousse, and very good too, though I am told I must look out for the strawberry version), and fiori di latte con amarena, which is the whipped cream flavor with amaretto-soaked cherries. I have to say, though Giolitti's holds some of the keys to my heart, that was pretty much my ideal cup of gelato.
And after that skipped dinner and the rest was an evening at home.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
