Today was our one month-iversary; it’s been one month since the wedding. We celebrated in style all day long! 🙂
We got up and had some breakfast at the hotel, then headed towards the Uffizi gallery, where Kim had helpfully pre-reserved tickets for a 12:30 entrance. Turns out this is really important to do, because the same day entrance line is really, really long! Fortunately we got to skip that and head for the reservations line, which is really, really short. Even shorter when we realized the tour group standing at the front wasn’t actually going in, they were just in the way. Once again, we’re reminded how much we don’t like tour groups…
The Uffizi gallery has an impressive collection of art, especially works leading up to, during, and just after the Renaissance. We saw original Botticelli paintings, including the popular “The Birth of Venus,” as well as work by Raphael and Caravaggio. Unfortunately you can’t take pictures or video in the museum, so we don’t have anything to show you here, but I can say it was a beautiful collection of fine artwork. The audioguide, however, really wasn’t very good. It was extremely sparse (focused on one or two paintings in a room of 6 or 7), with limited detail and terrible directions (occasionally it was accurate with “the painting to the left of the door you entered” but often seamlessly went from one painting to another without telling you where to find it). It had some interesting information when you could find the painting in time (tip for those travelling later: pressing the play button while the audio is running will pause it), but oftentimes we’d make our way to the painting being discussed, only to have the guide abruptly end with “the next room is 10.” The Rick Steves podcast, available for free via iTunes, evidently has better information. That’s what Kim and Wayne had, so we’d trade details back and forth as we discovered them, although Andrea and I rarely found ourselves with info they hadn’t heard.
The information cards in the museum for the works were much more focused on where the painting used to hang, who commissioned it, and how it found its way to the museum rather than what it’s of. Usually this meant they were uninteresting, but towards the end there were two pieces were it was very interesting, one discovered for sale in an English antique market, and another discovered in 1916 in a Medici storage vault. The latter was a painting by Caravaggio. How cool to come across priceless works of art like that…
When we finished at the gallery, we headed to the Casa di Dante, Dante Alegheri’s house in Florence. We didn’t actually go in, as we didn’t have enough time (we had reservations at the Accademia at 5 PM), but we got a look at the outside and visited the bookstore, where we bought children’s versions of each part of the Divine Comedy (hell, purgatory, and paradise, if you didn’t know). Andrea was hoping to find a really cool, bound version of the Divine Comedy, but they didn’t have anything quite like that. These children’s books were very unique though, so we picked them up.
The Galleria dell’Accademia has one main work, and it’s really all the little museum needs: Michelangelo’s David. Again (unfortunately) they don’t allow pictures or video, so we don’t have anything to share, but the sculpture is truly amazing. The biblical David, debatable whether before or after the slaying of Goliath, stands about 17 feet high, in a dome dedicated singularly to this incredible sculpture. The organic feel of the work when you see it in person is unreal; the veins in David’s left wrist and arm are defined so subtly and realistically, it seems impossible to accomplish with a hammer and chisel. And to think, this sculpture was originally meant for the top of the dome on the Duomo (hence the slightly odd head and hand proportions, as it would have been viewed from the ground at a great distance).
The museum also houses Michelangelo’s “prisoners,” a collection of unfinished sculptures so named as they seem to be imprisoned in the rock from which they were being carved. It was very cool to see the early stages of his work, and how a sculpture would begin to develop from a huge chunk of rock. There was also an unfinished pieta, where the body of Christ was far more defined than the other figures, showing the various stages of Michelangelo’s work all in a single sculpture. There was also a musical instrument gallery, which was small, but a fun change of pace from all the visual art we’d seen. It was here that I learned why a harpsichord sounds different than a piano (the former uses a mechanism to pluck strings, the latter hammers them).
Back near the hotel, we did a little shopping (Andrea got some new sandals) and we ate at Ristorante il Grande Nuti again. This time I (Matt) had the gnocchi with tomato and basil, which was good, but not quite as unique as Kim’s bleu cheese gnocchi. Wayne, Kim, Andrea, and I had a brief discussion about the coming days’ plans (there didn’t seem to be enough time to see Tuscan hill towns, then get to Venice, then catch the overnight train to Munich we’d already booked). We decided we’d head to Venice the next morning, so we booked a hotel online.
matt & andrea 