Saturday June 4^th

Today we met up with a friend of a friend, who is here in Florence on an art history fellowship.   He has lived in Florence for the last year, and off and on for three years total.  When he offered to take us on a walking tour of Florence, we jumped at the opportunity.  We met in front of a huge statue of Dante at the Santa Croce church.  We arrived about 15 minutes early and watched as some sort of procession with men in Renaissance costumes carrying banners and playing brass instruments processed up the stairs and into the church.

I gave Katie the camera and asked her to run over and take some photos, then I watched as she was swept into the church with a crowd of people following the procession.  “Umm, where did she go?” I asked Paul. “Into the church,” he confirmed as we ran over to the entrance. Unfortunately, this was not the “official” entrance to the church and since you normally have to pay 5 euros to get in, the church guards had moved quickly to stem the tide of tourists flowing into the church for free and we were stuck outside.

I assumed that Katie was smart enough to find her way back outside again, so I just waited. But when I saw Florence police questioning tour guides who had tried to rush their groups in for free, I began to be worried that she might have gotten in trouble inside.  Paul forced his way to the front of the crowd and could see that she was fine, and signaled for her to come back outside.  Once outside, she confirmed that she didn’t necessarily want to go in the church, but couldn’t fight the tide of people and found herself inside.  Once in, she watched the ceremony before coming back out.

Now reunited, we waited for our new friend, who soon arrived.  He saw the men in costume and told us that they were costumed in traditional clothes of the town where Dante was born, so it was likely some kind of Dante related activity.  He also said that these ceremonies have not been going on continuously since the middle ages, but were restarted in Italy just after the unification of Italy into a country as a civic pride kind of thing.

We walked through some of the small neighborhoods of Florence, stopping at a small building that used to be a confraternity. These were small civic organizations that focused on different types of civic works. This one had some excellent frescos painted on the walls of the different types of works the group promoted – taking care of women during childbirth, helping with burials, and giving bread and wine to hungry women and children.  It was pretty interesting to see and was free (a rarity in Florence). Of course we made a small voluntary donation so that the man at the entrance didn’t give us the evil eye.  As I got ready to drop the coins in the box our friend said, “Not now, wait until he’s looking so we get credit!”

After leaving the confraternity, we passed a lunch truck like the one my brother works on in DC. Zach’s sells BBQ, but this one was  a bit more unique – it sold TRIPE!  Yummy.  Tripe and other really inedible parts of animals are a specialty in Italy, one I’ve eaten before and don’t want to again.  The day before, the man in front of us in the grocery store was actually buying tripe to cook at home, so it is commonly eaten.   So we passed this lunch truck up and headed on.

We passed by Dante’s house, which isn’t actually Dante’s house, but one the government designated as Dante’s house for a tourist attraction and civic pride. It is a nice example of a medieval house, and in Dante’s neighborhood, but there is no evidence that Dante lived there.  We passed through the center of town, skirted around the tourist hordes and near the Duomo looked at another confraternity house.  This confraternity specialized in orphans and their house featured a large front parch facing the Duomo.  In medieval times, lost children would be displayed here for several days in hopes that someone would claim them, but often no one did and they were considered abandoned and sent to the orphanage.  We soon walked past the orphanage, which featured a large “lazy susan” from its outside to inside on which desperate parents could place unwanted newborns and rotate them inside the building.  The inside area was monitored by a nun day and night looking for foundlings.

We soon reached the Accademia museum where our friend left us and we waited to get in with our reserved timed tickets. The Accademia is a very small museum with one big exhibit – Michelangelo’s David.  The wing with David was designed just for him, when he was moved here in the mid 1800s to prevent damage and erosion.  The space is dominated by David, with natural light pouring in and illuminating his dominating presence.  He is 17 feet high and located in what looks almost like a Greek temple with him standing sentry at the center.  The longer you look at him, the more is seems as though he was  a real person simply changed into marble, and is ready to come back to life any minute and stride off his pedestal. He looks posed for action, muscles tensed and ready to move.  It really seems that if you look hard enough you might seem him breathing.

We circled him and examined him in detail for all sides, just gasping at his perfection.  After a while, we finally pulled ourselves away and looked through the rest of the museum.  There are five unfinished Michelangelo statues in the same room as David, and the people within the marble still seem to be struggling to be let loose. 

Otherwise, the museum is unremarkable, with some basic renaissance paintings, some alter pieces, and a collection of musical instruments. We finished this section rather quickly and headed for a pizza lunch.

After a lunch, we went to the Leonardo da Vinci museum, which has no actual Leonardo artifacts, but I fun to see nonetheless.  What the museum has is a number of Leonardo’s sketches brought to life off the pages of his notebooks.   Da Vinci never made the vast majority of things he sketched, so this is a neat way to see some ideas realized.  Each display shows the relevant pages of the notebook, next to a beautiful wood version of the sketch.  All the items work, and many of them you can manipulate yourself.  We really enjoyed turning cranks and lifting levers making all of these contraptions come to life.  The museum is small, but fun.

Once we finished with this museum, it was looking like rain so we headed back to the villa.  Just a few minutes after arriving home it began to thunder, so our timing was great.  After the rain, Paul and Katie went out for gelato, but I was still so full from lunch that I reluctantly passed this time.