On 10 June when we arrived at our apartment in Florence our host presented us with a map and some visiting suggestions. Among other things, he recommended that he have dinner at Santo Spirito, which is a plaza where people hang out at night and there are also restaurants there. We decided to go there that night.
Fabian was walking slow but seemed to be improving, and wanted to walk. Our apartment was just outside the Accademia, so we walked south to the the Duomo and Baptistry. The Duomo was striking for how loud the color and decorations were, and for the size of the thing. It dominates the city and can be seen from anywhere, as it seems there is a building code that prevents any structure from rising above the base of the dome.
When we arrived at the plaza it was crowded. It was 11pm and the restaurants had one-hour waits for outdoor seating where the music and crowds were. We wanted to eat immediately, and found a restaurant called Tomare which seemed like it had vegan options and which could seat us. This was a noodle restaurant advertising contemporary presentations of traditional Italian meals.
We asked for “vegano”, “vegetariano”, “senza animali”, “senza formaggio”, and “senza latte”, which I thought would cover things. In the end, there was only one item on the menu which was available to us, which was noodles with vegetables. We both ordered that as the only possibility. We should have said “senza uova”, because eggs were served on top. Fabian was a sport and put them aside because it was almost midnight and we wanted to eat. We try hard to avoid any animal product and this might have been the first time that we compromised by removing the animal product from the food. After the food the waiter offered limoncello, and we had some. It seems that many restaurants here offer limoncello after meals. We wandered a bit in the plaza with the crowd and went home. The city has a lot to see at midnight and is pleasantly walkable.
On Saturday June 11 we woke up late and looked outside. At the Accademia, the line was slow to move and was very long. I presumed that the line would be simliar at the Uffizi. We had not made reservations and did not want to pay for the local pass to these and other museums, so we resolved to visit these two most popular museums first thing on other mornings by coming a bit before each opened to avoid lines.
Instead, we went to the Duomo Museum. I thought this was one of the better curated museums for English speakers because exhibit notes were translated into English and they were thoughtful for giving information that was interesting to me. They also had an English-language video about the production of the Duomo that I thought made it easier to understand what we were seeing.
After the Duomo Museum we thought to take it easy and go to the lookout at Piazzale Michaelangelo and the San Miniato Church. We arrived at the church in time for a 5:30 service that included Gregorian chant. I attended the service and had communion. Fabian explored church grounds on his own. There were posters advertising a night event at 8:30, and we decided to stay for that. In the meantime we went back to Piazzale Michaelangelo, then later back to the church, and ended the night by taking a bus back at the plaza. The Michaelangelo plaza has vendors selling typical snacks but also any kind of booze from beer to wine to liquor. It seems that anyone can buy a bottle of wine or liquor, and the seller will give them also plastic cups. The cost is not much more than from a liquor store, and apparently kids can drink there. Cops are everywhere so I guess that keeps order.
At the end of the evening we had learned something about social trends. Older people like the lookout at the church, and hang out there. Students hang out at the Michaelangelo plaza at night. People aged between older and younger can go to the Santo Spirito.
On Sunday 12 June I was ready earlier than Fabian so I went to stand in line at the Uffizi to be a little earlier than Fabian. There was hardly a line there 15 minutes before opening, and I was able to get tickets quickly after they opened. Immediately after that there was a long line. Fabian arrived just as I was getting tickets. There was a place nearby that sold vegan sandwiches, so that was breakfast, and then we went inside. We stayed in the Uffizi for five hours, which is a bit beyond the usual tolerance either of us has for museums but this place lived up to the hype. By this time a lot of the museums were becoming an endurance task of wonders. We were seeing wonders and laughing about things, and we wanted all we could take, but also by this time we had clocked many hours every day of historical thought and artifacts. I felt like I was seeing so many things that I recognized, and Fabian wanted to photograph so much. After we got out we went home for a nap. When we woke up it was raining heavily, so we stayed in and cooked and talked.
Many museums in Florence are closed Monday so on that day we decided to day trip to Pisa. Fabian wanted to see the tower, and I was interested because he was excited. It is about an hour from Florence, so we went to train station and hopped over. The interesting context from me is was that the Tower of Pisa and surrounding complex was from a few centuries before the height of Florence, so I was able to learn something about art and design from before the Renaissance. Both Florence and Pisa have huge baptismal buildings separated from the church. I learned that the custom in the past was that only the baptized might enter the church, so the baptistry must have been kept separate as a place to prepare a person to be allowed in the church.
In Pisa there was a cemetery included in the complex with the tower, church, and baptistry. I did not know what to make of the cemetery. It was said to be old, but it had open-air frescos which seemed to be in better condition than what I expected old paintings could be. I did not know if they were original, restored or replaced. There was a museum for the complex, and in the museum, they had a virtual world restoration of what the cemetery would look like when it was restored. I suppose it will be a trend to create virtual world restorations of every ruin to preserve a representation of its ruined state, propose restoration plans, so it how it was in its imagined original state, and to share the appearance of the place with people who might only visit virtually. Their software for demonstrating restoration plans was in poor shape for having graphics that seemed like video games from the early 00s but I suppose these kinds of things lag behind the contemporary standard. I wonder if their demo could have been made with a contemporary game engine by employing people who reskin games, and if reskinning video games with places is even an occupation.
On Tuesday 14 June somehow Tuesday we looked at the schedule and decided that we could see a lot of museums in a day. We were around the corner from the Accademia, but did not have reservations. As with the Uffitzi I went there before they opened when the line was short and got tickets quickly. I think anyone unable to show up so early should get reservations. That museum is small, and really is only a venue for showing the David, but the crowd and line is huge.
David lives up to the hype. I had seen the replica in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006, where it is placed in a crowded court of statue replicas. I like the idea of replica distribution, and wish that it replica collections could be in circulation to make the art more accessible. I am not sure that I would say that any portable, replicable artwork is best seen in its original form when most of the value of the work can be duplicated in a nice copy. I am not going to say that the original David should be seen in the Accademia if it is possible to see a copy in an appropriate setting, but this gallery does do the best presentation of this single work that I can imagine anyone doing. The David probably is the most interesting statue I have seen. The quality of work is obviously beyond what anyone else of the era was able to accomplish for representing the human body in a realistic way. The pose is emotional, the concept is simple enough to not distract from the experience, and the monumental size and unnatural changes to the body are interesting enough to make the work more attractive than a replication of what could be seen in flesh. Other people have said enough and I do not need to say more, except that the gap in quality between this and other sculpture is something that is not difficult to recognize. I look forward to the day when this and other sculpture can be virtually replicated, and 3D printed and carved, and for when future sculptures become finer than this one through technology.
The Bargello Museum has amazing sculptures. It and the Duomo Museum are fantastic museums, but it seems that neither of them have the reputation of the Uffizi or the David, so neither museum have many visitors. The Donatello David is in the Bargello, and is said to be the first nude male statue in the Western world since Roman times. It is a lovely statue that I knew already but when I saw it here I began to wonder about the circumstances of its creation. There are other Donatello works around Florence that I saw, and as I remember, they were all religious figures looking haggard. I do not know what is typical for this artist, or what was typical for the time, or if it seemed like a big deal at the time to cast a large male nude. But by the story that I got, some guy who made his way doing wood carvings of the most desperate religious penitents was asked in this conservative age to create an adolescent male nude in a self-assured pose while wearing a frilly hat. Is this how the Western world was reintroduced to nudity in art? I think that this work was exhibited after creation and has always been admired, but to go from being conservative about nudity to this is not the kind of transition that I would expect. For its subject matter, the statue would be bizarrely placed almost anywhere in public today were it not for its history. It sort of reminded me of a nude Final Fantasy character or fan-made comic book erotica of the sort at DeviantArt.
Pitti Palace is great for being a huge palace and for having good art. It was a fun museum to wander. Everywhere I went I wanted to see the Caravaggios, and in every museum on this trip when I found where they were supposed to be there was only a note saying that the painting was on tour. I wonder if these works are often on tour, or if I just happened to come at a time during an infrequent tour. It must generate income for a museum to send its most demanded works on tour. Almost every exhibit at every museum I visited in Italy seemed underfunded for having noticeable wear in its location, or insufficient curation, or just being in a building that could have more care. In 2006 when I visited the British Museum for the first time and as my first major museum visit, I thought it was a perfect museum. Since moving to New York, I suppose that I have visited the Met on average twice a month, and although I could still criticize the Met it is always clean, the exhibit cards are kept up, the in-house advertising of exhibits is apparent and useful, the staffing is excellent because information desks are everywhere, and the displays of all works always seem like they are maintained in a clean, orderly, and updated way. When I visited the British Museum again in 2014 I saw that even this museum must be lacking in staffing and order, or at least, presentation comparable to a storefront commercial product standard was not their priority to the extent that this sort of presentation is to the Met. There are exhibits in the Met which seem to have been barely changed for years or longer, and perhaps decades. I felt the same way visiting the Louvre, and in Italy none of the museums seems to have capacity to care for art in the way that the Met does. At practically all the major museums in Italy touching ancient statues is possible, and tourists throughout the day actually do this. In Rome at the Capitoline Museum, for example, I saw tourists regularly touch the Capitoline Wolf bronze. I thought of speaking up when people touched it, but when I saw someone do this to pose with a picture, then someone else do the same thing immediately after, I realized that daily for years this and many other statues would be handled and this is just how art is managed here. I feel like art should not be touched because that is the American rule. I suppose that ancient things are not so scarce here to encourage anyone to keep such strict rules. The Pitti Palace gave me a personal experience – Fabian and I seemed to have the place to ourselves, as we only sometimes crossed paths with other visitors, and only a fraction of the rooms seemed to have any guard. The day must be coming when all such museums at least have video cameras in every room. Probably this museum has this, but if it did not, I would not be surprised, and I know that cameras will become standard within a few years.
As the Pitti Palace was closing for the evening at 7pm, it happened that in the courtyard there was some rehearsal for some opera. We sat out and watched it. They had an orchestra and actors in street clothes, so in this palatial setting we saw the most informal looking bunch perform beautiful music in a place designed for shows of another era. I know that orchestras dress up to perform, and I wonder if that makes them extra-casual on their days off. In general, I think, people on the streets in Italy are better dressed than people in the United States. For this performance though everyone seemed dressed for comfort of the sort that Americans like.
This was our last day in Florence and the Pallazo Vecchio stays open till midnight and it was on our way home, so we stopped in to be more thoroughly exhausted with wonderful things to see and experience. We climbed the tower to see the Duomo again. It can be seen from everywhere. I have never seen a city so designed to favor a single building in a way to make everyone continually recognize the building. We saw palace apartments, and art, and enjoyed the museum. It happened that there was another concert here in the main hall, and so again, we heard more music. There seemed to be chamber music everywhere we went.
The plan was to cool it with the curated collections after Florence, and for Venice and Milan, we would slow the pace of consuming exhibitions and only be more reflective of where we were and what we were thinking.