Florence

After Pisa, Theresa and I spent a couple of days in Florence, Italy. Florence is the capital of Tuscany and the self-proclaimed birthplace of the renaissance. A stroll through the museums there is like an episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.....all about Donatello and Rafael and Leonardo and Michelangelo.

The intro picture has Theresa posing in front of the Basilica Santa Croce, or Church of the Holy Cross. The building is a pilgrimage for art students and architects who are studying the Italian masters. To the rest of us, it is known as THE place to be buried if you die in Florence. Galileo is buried there. Michelangelo is buried there. Dante would have been buried there but he had the poor fortune to die while on a trip to Ravenna and that city wouldn't give Florence his body. Finders keepers.Above is a picture of the Palazzo Vecchio, or old palace. This was the home of the Medici family when they were just filthy rich...before they came obscenely rich and moved across the river into the Palazzo Piti. Originally, Michelangelo's staue of David stood in the plaza outside the Palazzo Vecchio and right next door to the Uffizi Museum. Later, the city moved the statue to the Galeria dell'Academia to protect it from the sun and rain and car bombs. In the shops around the palazzo, you can buy miniature statues of Michelangelo's David. My favorite is the version below, which has been updated slightly for the 21st century.

Florence is a city of many old and famous churches. One of them, shown below, is the Basilica de San Lorenzo, or Saint Lawrence Church. I really like this church for three reasons. First, for many years Theresa and I went to Saint Lawrence Church in Lafayette, Indiana. San Lorenzo in Florence is kind of like an Italian relative. (Saint Lawrence, if you remember, was martyred by being burned alive on an iron grill. Inside San Lorenzo, there is a great, gruesome painting of the martyrdom. Unfortunately, they do not allow picture-taking so I could not provide you a photo.) The second reason I like this church is because Donatello is buried in San Lorenzo of Florence. (that would be another of the ninja turtles). The church is adorned with a good deal of his artwork - especially sculpture.

And thirdly, the church does not have a facade. (I remember being 18 and trying to figure out what the word "facade" meant. It would have been so much easier if I could have simply compared the opening photo, which shows the facade of Santa Croce with the photo below of the facade-less San Lorenzo. A picture or two can say a thousand words.) The story goes that there was a design competition held for the facade design. Michelangelo won the competition but became so aggravated with Florentine politics that he walked away from the city before starting work on the facade. The citizens of Florence must have thought him to be an ass. To this day, the building still waits for him to begin his work.

Finally, below, is a poor photo of the main church of Florence, the Duomo. The Duomo, or Sainta Maria del Fiore, is stunning with its stone veneer in white, green, and red marble. The engineer in me also reveres the Duomo for its architectural achievement - the Dome of Brunelleschi. This is the largest span for a cupola every built of masonry - before the age of iron and steel. And it was all built without any bracing, forms, or interior support. This is one of those things that you look at and wonder "how the heck did they do that".From the outside, the dome towers above the city of Florence and is the defining landmark upon its skyline. From the inside, the dome is decorated with frescos from which the saints seem to climb out of the ceiling.The last photo we leave you with is a view from the Ponte Vecchio, or the old bridge. This shows you the river Arno that cuts through the heart of Florence. It also gives you a feel for the cramped, close packed buildings that are so typical of Florence and any other large Italian city.