Italian Highlights

The Cradle of the Renaissance

One day in Florence? What an impossibility! You might as well try texting War and Peace! One of our guides came to spend a month as an art student over twenty years ago, and she's still there! This is one of the richest cities in Europe for the art lover. One day? The only thing worse would be no days. Now you know why this web site is called "Italian Highlights."

The old city walls and towers are still there, surrounding a maze of narrow streets. The River Arno flows through the middle, on its way to Pisa, and the sea. Florence was founded by Julius Caesar as a retirement community for his legionaires.

Roman Florentia grew to medieval Firenze and became the principal city in Tuscany. Around the year 1000 it started attracting artists, artisans, and craftsmen and became the cultural center that it has been ever since. It was also a commercial center creating fine jewelry and leather goods. Florence gave its name to the gold Florin, the most widely used coin of the period.

We started our tour at the Accademia di Belle Arti, which houses the famous Michelangelo statue of David. There is a replica where the original stood in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. It turns out that exemplary Renaissance Man, Michelangelo Buonarroti, was not a very pleasant fellow. Short, ill-tempered he never had any students and did all of the laborious hand finishing of his statues himself. He liked sculpting, especially the male torso, not painting, and only did the Sistine Chapel because the Pope demanded it.

Our next stop was the 14th century duomo (cathedral) the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. It revealed itself slowly as we walked the narrow street to the Piazza, Then burst upon our senses in all of its gothic glory.

The dome of the cathedral, by Filippo Brunelleschi, is a revered landmark in the engineering world. They had built the cathedral, but had no idea how to build a dome larger than that of the Pantheon in Rome. The short version of how he did it is in Wikipedia, the long version is on Amazon.

The Duomo and its Baptistery

Brunelleschi's Dome	The Cathedral	14th c. Italian Gothic	Giotto's Bell Tower
Mosaic of Christ enthroned with Mary and John the Baptist	The Nave	The interior of the dome.	A weaver; one of crafts on the tower

Lorenzo Ghiberti spent 27 years on these Baptistery doors, dubbed by Michelangelo the "Gates of Paradise". He signed them with busts of himself and his father. These are replicas, the originals having been moved to the Cathedral Museum. There are also replicas on Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

The Old City

From the religious center of old Florence we went to the political center, the old town hall.

Today's Piazza della Repubblica was once the site of the Roman Forum.	The Bargello	Sidewalk restaurants
The Orsanmichele was a grain market converted to a church by the Guilds of the city	The walls of the Orsanmichele are decorated with enameled terracotta plaques by Luca Della Robbia.
Michelangelo's David (replica) and Baccio Bandinelli's Hercules and Cacus flank the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio.	The Palazzo Vecchio was the old city hall.	Piazza della Signoria
Over the doorway to the Palazzo Vecchio	The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna	The Loggia dei Lanzi now serves as an outdoors sculpture gallery.
The Ponte Vecchio (old bridge).	San Miniato al Monte faces Florence from across the Arno.	The Ponte Vecchio now has jewelers, art shops and souvenir stands. In medieval times it had butcher shops.

The Uffizi Galleries

The afternoon was spent in a tour of the Uffizi Galleries, one of the world's foremost art museums. I have tried to summarize what we learned on a separate page.