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rushthatspeaksI had intended today to go to the Bargello, on account of being annoyed at it about yesterday, and failing that (or possibly afterward) to go to the Mercato di San Ambrogio and poke about the used clothing stalls, as Thrud has mentioned the possibility of good semi-formal clothing for about three Euros a piece. But both Thrud and I overslept drastically, meaning that she didn't make it to her Institute, so she decided to come out with me and we wound up having a bit of a ramble.
First down the Corso towards San Ambrogio, because although we expected the market to be closed-- the markets generally close at noon-- there might still be some of it open. We stopped in at Vestri for the day's gelato. Vestri is the best chocolatier in the city; they make bars and truffles and bonbons and a spreadable fondente in jars and hot drinking chocolate in several varieties and panforte (a substance which defies ready description-- it Has Everything) and of course gelato. I got stracciatella, which is vanilla or white chocolate with chocolate chips, in this case seventy percent dark house-made chocolate chips, and cioccolatto con arancia, or chocolate with orange, very smooth and flavorful. And then after the gelato we shared a cup of the sixty-five percent drinking chocolate and the seventy percent to warm up. I'm usually all for dark, but the sixty-five percent is better; the seventy has coffee overnotes, and I hate coffee, whereas the sixty-five is fruity, but not in the usual way of fruit-note chocolate. Usually chocolate resonates with raspberries, which is one reason it's so often served with them, but this wouldn't actually have gone well with raspberries. It had notes of apple, peach, and rose, and I want more of it.
San Ambrogio, shockingly, was closed.
We were heading back toward the Bargello, so that I could go in and Thrud could go home and do some work. This took us through the piazza of the Duomo, and we noticed that there was no line, and inspiration hit us suddenly: we could go see the relics of Saint Zenobius! He'd feel so loved!
(Okay, okay. So there really isn't much to Saint Zenobius, it's just that he's the patron saint of Florence and nobody ever mentions him. He was the city's first bishop and converted it to Christianity and at one point miraculously cured an elm tree of some kind of elm disease. And he had two friends who were deacons and they were buried with him and stand next to him in pictures and have no other attributes. He's the kind of saint who needs to be labeled in paintings because the congregation is not expected to recognize him... even in his own city. But he has a very nice column in a piazza, and he's buried in Santa Maria della Fiore.)
So we went into the Duomo. I love the Duomo, I always have. It has a great marble floor full of trompe l'oeuil designs that all have perspective such that if you stare at them too long you get vertigo, and it has Ficino's tomb, and it doesn't have Dante's tomb even though it morally should because that's over at Santa Croce and they won't give him back, but it does have a very nice painting of him standing in front of his cosmology. And the awesome thing was, traditionally they have a barrier so that you can't get very near to the altar, and you can't look at the interior dome painting very easily, but today the barrier was so far back that we could see the entire inside of the dome. It was stunning. There's Christ the Judge, flanked by his mother and John the Baptist and Adam and Eve, and we were able to see Satan directly across from him and all the different monsters, including the horse that Peter Martyr cast the demon out of, which is the only accredited miracle to take place in Florence. Spent a long time playing spot-the-saint-and/or-archangel-and/or-theological/cardinal virtue, and came to the conclusion that the iconography of that dome is confusing but that Vasari is a better painter than either of us remembered.
The crypt is open, too-- it wasn't a few years ago. The Duomo was built over a previous church, Santa Reparata from the thirteenth century, and there's all kinds of Roman mosaic and just layers and layers of stuff down there. You can pay a few euro and look over a very neat exhibit of all the potsherds and the tombs in situ and maps which show which layers come from when and then you turn a corner and bam, there's Brunelleschi's burial site, with candles burning in front of it: well, we did come to see saints. Hail, master, and may the centuries ride over you as lightly as the dome.
The question, though, was where was Saint Zenobius? We found Santa Reparata, of the original church, and several other minor saints of whom we had never heard, but no Zenobius. At last the attendant, when we inquired, pointed up and explained: he is behind the highest altar. It's nice to know someone's paying attention, though he's in the part of the church that isn't open to the public.
Every time I go into the Duomo I remember that someday I need to do the tour where you climb the inside of the thing. Well, maybe this trip I will finally manage it.
So then it was late and we wandered around looking into shop windows and going through the amazing cooking supplies shop and picking up a few supplies for dinner, and the whole thing was just exhausting, and the Bargello has yet again eluded me; but it was good. Dinner was mushrooms stewed in white wine, garlic, and salt, with pancetta and a tiny swirl of butter, over bucatini, made at home. Delicious. Cooking here is very easy as all the ingredients are so good.
And so to bed, or at least to typing, but I keep feeling like I'm leaving out all of Florence, the way it really is. I mean, I haven't mentioned the harassing clown, although I've seen him like four times now. He lurks at the corner of the Palazzo Vecchio and does annoying imitations of people and you have to dodge him, and Thrud says she keeps having to tell her friends to look out for him only to have him catch them as she gets to the middle of “Look out for the ha--”
Or the Palazzo Vecchio itself, that particular corner with the replica of Michelangelo's David and the real thing of Cellini's Perseus, which is just as good as he thought it was and which cannot be copied because the bronzework is so technically complex that no one has been able to duplicate it. And it is still across from the statue of Hercules that Cellini rants about so much in his autobiography, a rant that when you read it first just feels like sour grapes, and then you see the statue: Worst. Statue. Ever. It is terrible in every conceivable direction. The head is out of proportion, the thigh is connected to the hip wrong, the lionskin folds weirdly, it just looks like a bad joke, and here it is across from the Perseus, and oh, poor Cellini, I feel his pain every time I walk by the thing. (Saw his manuscript in the Uffizi! His handwriting is surprisingly beautiful. Readable, even, who would have thought it.)
This city, that should be sensory overload, and is if you spend too long out in it, but which is friendly in a way few cities are, this city which wants you to love it, and I do. I feel as though I ought to be carrying a video camera but even that wouldn't manage it, because it wouldn't get the complex mix of allusions and histories which boil down, here, into everyday life. This city, here, now, these days that I'm staying in it. My own particular Florence, the one I'm leaving out of this writing, because yours would be different.
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comments over there.
First down the Corso towards San Ambrogio, because although we expected the market to be closed-- the markets generally close at noon-- there might still be some of it open. We stopped in at Vestri for the day's gelato. Vestri is the best chocolatier in the city; they make bars and truffles and bonbons and a spreadable fondente in jars and hot drinking chocolate in several varieties and panforte (a substance which defies ready description-- it Has Everything) and of course gelato. I got stracciatella, which is vanilla or white chocolate with chocolate chips, in this case seventy percent dark house-made chocolate chips, and cioccolatto con arancia, or chocolate with orange, very smooth and flavorful. And then after the gelato we shared a cup of the sixty-five percent drinking chocolate and the seventy percent to warm up. I'm usually all for dark, but the sixty-five percent is better; the seventy has coffee overnotes, and I hate coffee, whereas the sixty-five is fruity, but not in the usual way of fruit-note chocolate. Usually chocolate resonates with raspberries, which is one reason it's so often served with them, but this wouldn't actually have gone well with raspberries. It had notes of apple, peach, and rose, and I want more of it.
San Ambrogio, shockingly, was closed.
We were heading back toward the Bargello, so that I could go in and Thrud could go home and do some work. This took us through the piazza of the Duomo, and we noticed that there was no line, and inspiration hit us suddenly: we could go see the relics of Saint Zenobius! He'd feel so loved!
(Okay, okay. So there really isn't much to Saint Zenobius, it's just that he's the patron saint of Florence and nobody ever mentions him. He was the city's first bishop and converted it to Christianity and at one point miraculously cured an elm tree of some kind of elm disease. And he had two friends who were deacons and they were buried with him and stand next to him in pictures and have no other attributes. He's the kind of saint who needs to be labeled in paintings because the congregation is not expected to recognize him... even in his own city. But he has a very nice column in a piazza, and he's buried in Santa Maria della Fiore.)
So we went into the Duomo. I love the Duomo, I always have. It has a great marble floor full of trompe l'oeuil designs that all have perspective such that if you stare at them too long you get vertigo, and it has Ficino's tomb, and it doesn't have Dante's tomb even though it morally should because that's over at Santa Croce and they won't give him back, but it does have a very nice painting of him standing in front of his cosmology. And the awesome thing was, traditionally they have a barrier so that you can't get very near to the altar, and you can't look at the interior dome painting very easily, but today the barrier was so far back that we could see the entire inside of the dome. It was stunning. There's Christ the Judge, flanked by his mother and John the Baptist and Adam and Eve, and we were able to see Satan directly across from him and all the different monsters, including the horse that Peter Martyr cast the demon out of, which is the only accredited miracle to take place in Florence. Spent a long time playing spot-the-saint-and/or-archangel-and/or-theological/cardinal virtue, and came to the conclusion that the iconography of that dome is confusing but that Vasari is a better painter than either of us remembered.
The crypt is open, too-- it wasn't a few years ago. The Duomo was built over a previous church, Santa Reparata from the thirteenth century, and there's all kinds of Roman mosaic and just layers and layers of stuff down there. You can pay a few euro and look over a very neat exhibit of all the potsherds and the tombs in situ and maps which show which layers come from when and then you turn a corner and bam, there's Brunelleschi's burial site, with candles burning in front of it: well, we did come to see saints. Hail, master, and may the centuries ride over you as lightly as the dome.
The question, though, was where was Saint Zenobius? We found Santa Reparata, of the original church, and several other minor saints of whom we had never heard, but no Zenobius. At last the attendant, when we inquired, pointed up and explained: he is behind the highest altar. It's nice to know someone's paying attention, though he's in the part of the church that isn't open to the public.
Every time I go into the Duomo I remember that someday I need to do the tour where you climb the inside of the thing. Well, maybe this trip I will finally manage it.
So then it was late and we wandered around looking into shop windows and going through the amazing cooking supplies shop and picking up a few supplies for dinner, and the whole thing was just exhausting, and the Bargello has yet again eluded me; but it was good. Dinner was mushrooms stewed in white wine, garlic, and salt, with pancetta and a tiny swirl of butter, over bucatini, made at home. Delicious. Cooking here is very easy as all the ingredients are so good.
And so to bed, or at least to typing, but I keep feeling like I'm leaving out all of Florence, the way it really is. I mean, I haven't mentioned the harassing clown, although I've seen him like four times now. He lurks at the corner of the Palazzo Vecchio and does annoying imitations of people and you have to dodge him, and Thrud says she keeps having to tell her friends to look out for him only to have him catch them as she gets to the middle of “Look out for the ha--”
Or the Palazzo Vecchio itself, that particular corner with the replica of Michelangelo's David and the real thing of Cellini's Perseus, which is just as good as he thought it was and which cannot be copied because the bronzework is so technically complex that no one has been able to duplicate it. And it is still across from the statue of Hercules that Cellini rants about so much in his autobiography, a rant that when you read it first just feels like sour grapes, and then you see the statue: Worst. Statue. Ever. It is terrible in every conceivable direction. The head is out of proportion, the thigh is connected to the hip wrong, the lionskin folds weirdly, it just looks like a bad joke, and here it is across from the Perseus, and oh, poor Cellini, I feel his pain every time I walk by the thing. (Saw his manuscript in the Uffizi! His handwriting is surprisingly beautiful. Readable, even, who would have thought it.)
This city, that should be sensory overload, and is if you spend too long out in it, but which is friendly in a way few cities are, this city which wants you to love it, and I do. I feel as though I ought to be carrying a video camera but even that wouldn't manage it, because it wouldn't get the complex mix of allusions and histories which boil down, here, into everyday life. This city, here, now, these days that I'm staying in it. My own particular Florence, the one I'm leaving out of this writing, because yours would be different.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
