Renee post 2-10-11

 

This is a hodge-podge posting of some of the things I've noticed in Florence recently. We are nearing the end of the Chocolate (Cioccolata) Festival.  It is so strange to look out the windows (large casement windows with rounded tops and ancient latches) onto the piazza and see all the tents and people milling about.  The boys have overdosed on chocolate! They just walked outside the door to get warm nutella crepes.  I think my favorite samples were the violet and cinnamon chocolate.  We loved seeing the trumpeters, flag throwers/wavers and drummers on Saturday in the piazza…some tradition I’ve yet to know the history of. 



Cloisters at San Lorenzo

Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo designed by Michelangelo.  Virgil's Aeneid was originally stored here.

Staircase designed by Michelangelo in the Ricetto (vestibule) to Laurentian library.  It's a bizarre staircase--in the fashion of Mannerism.  The stone is pietra serena.

Michelangelo's Ricetto (vestibule into the Laurentian library at San Lorenzo where the Medici stored their ancient texts)

Morgante, the "Court Dwarf" to Cosimo I Medici (in Boboli Gardens).  The turtle was one of Cosimo's favorites: "Festina lente" =more haste, less speed.  The position of court dwarf was one that was offered by all the important rulers in Europe...as they were ascribed to be lucky charms or healers and collected like other exotic objects.  Over the top, no? 



View of Palazzo Vecchio (the original city council building started in 1299) and made of "pietra forta" (strong stone).  This is viewed from a an upstairs patio at the Uffizi Museum where the railings are made of "pietra serena"
The older buildings in Florence were made of pietra forta and the newer in pietra serena.



Merry-go-round in Piazza Repubblica.  For the record, the piazza was empty on this cold day.  It will be a mob scene here in a few months.

Courtyard of Palazzio Vecchio (old city council building) built in 1400s in Piazza Signoria

Sculpture in Bardini Gardens

I started an intensive Italian language course at the Michelangelo Institute about a five minute walk from the apartment.  It is on via Ghibellina very close to the original Buonarotti house (Michelangelo’s home…he was a stone’s throw from Santa Croce piazza) which is now a small museum.  In any event, I am finishing my second week of the course which runs from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. each day.  It is spoken almost entirely in Italian: seeing as there are three young women from Guatemala, a young man from China (who speaks only Chinese!), a Swedish man and me!  So, you can’t really explain things in English when the others don’t speak it—everything pretty much has to be in Italian and it’s quite lively.   The Guatemalan girls (just out of high school) keep saying “ciao, brother” to the instructor as his name is Hermano!  Idioms are flying everywhere. Because I hear the language spoken around me constantly (you can imagine doing yoga classes in Italian in a 14th century building...at least I understand the Sanskrit), I have begun to understand bits of it but it is still very hard to speak it and parse it into phrases…thus I decided to take the course since it is mostly all conversational.  After taking the first two weeks straight of the intensive, you can continue to add on weeks up to four months.  Not sure I want to take that much…my brain is hurting right now.

Did I mention bureaucracy here?  The boys have been traveling on the bus using a student bus ticket this month and they were tagged by the “ATAF militia” on the bus the other day for not having a proper student ID validating their “student-hood” even though they showed copies of their passports (nest time don't show the passport, boys...)…the fine was 55 Euros apiece.  I spent quite awhile in the post office trying to pay that one off and it was quite comical my trying to fill out the necessary forms before paying.  People go to the post office to pay their bills here and it is rather a complicated affair with four different types of cashiers and numbers you pull to wait in the queue.  I was told that I had to make sure to pay these things off…if not, you are not only fined 7 euros a day but they may tag you when you try to leave the country. That said, I shouldn’t complain.  There are little cameras everywhere and places you can and cannot go with a car unless you are a resident.  The tickets arrive in the mail long after your infractions.  The other day I heard about a woman who didn’t know that you couldn’t drive on one side of the Arno if you lived on the other side and after six months, she had accrued about 5000 Euros in fines! Today I spoke to a woman who has been here since September and just starting receiving her tickets: 500 Euros thus far! I am so glad not to have a car here.

I have talked about paradoxes here but have decided I will start a list.  Just a few: the street sweepers are out every morning cleaning the piazza and streets.  Shopkeepers are always sweeping in front of the shops.  Yet, no one ever cleans up after dog poop—it is smeared everywhere!   You will see the traffic guard stopping car traffic for children to cross a street but the motorbikes will buzz right around the cars and almost take the children out!  And so on…

Santa Croce district  (we are on Piazza Santa Croce) was originally home to one of the guilds for leather making and even the Franciscans at Santa Croce church did leatherwork. There is still a leather school right here and many shops with leather goods produced right here: gloves, boots, coats, etc.  It seems there is leather everywhere. I was in a shop the other day and met the owner who is originally Greek and trained as an architect but who came here to Florence to learn leatherworking 35 years ago and has remained: he now designs coats and writes Greek poetry!  He said that he has decided “life it too short to not live beautifully!”  We should all live by that adage.

There is a gray sandstone called “pietra serena” that has been cut from the hills near Florence and has been used in much of the architecture here: it is around the door frames in our apartment (from the 15^th century), it was used on the exterior of the Uffizi, and in Brunelleschi’s  beautiful and elegant work on the inside of San Lorenzo church (by the way, inside the old sacristy of San Lorenzo, last week I saw a tondi (round relief) by Donatello of St. Lawrence holding the real grill on which he was martyred!).  I saw some men re-paving a street with pietra serena the other day.  You walk in these old buildings in winter and the stone seems to retain all the cold and moisture…it is colder inside sometimes than outside.  The original stone here that was used for building was the “pietra forta” (strong stone) and it makes up the outside of many of the older buildings like the Palazzio Vecchio (see below), Barghello, and the old Palazzos like the Medici Palace and the Strozzi Palace (see examples below).  The old part of the city seems like it is a coffin of stone.  As we are right in Michelangelo’s neighborhood, I have been reading the historical fiction “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” about Michelangelo’s life and never realized that his wet nurse was a stonecutter’s wife and he lived out in the Florentine countryside his early years playing around the stone.  No surprise with all the natural stone and marble here that sculptors were "born" here.