The Husk Adventures: Florence, Italy

This blog and the following one on Venice was delayed due to poor internet service in Athens, Greece.

Remember to click on each photograph to enlarge it.

The city of Florence, Italy is the home of the Renaissance with its narrow medieval streets, many churches, art galleries, street markets and the best gelato (iced cream) in Italy which we sampled liberally while there. I think we ate our way through Italy with all the pasta that is available in every restaurant. I thought they were going to make us get on the baggage scale as we were leaving the country. We took the high speed trains from Rome to Florence to Venice.

Example of the narrow streets of Florence

Our hotel in Florence was a former palace with its high ceilings, narrow rooms and a well just outside our door in the lobby. The ceilings were the wooden beams and boarding left in place along with artifacts from the palace.

The hotel lobby with its wooden beam ceilings

Artifacts from the palace along with the well on the right side of the computer room

The museums and galleries we visited prohibited photographs. They did sell books with the many paintings and sculptures. One of the interesting things was to view the different styles of paintings and how they changed throughout history. Art in the Dark Ages was drab, gloomy and one dimensional. With the Renaissance art became much more colorful and “life like.” These museums contain many original statues as well as reproductions from famous artists of the Renaissance. The original David by Michelangelo was housed in the Galleria dell Accademia. It is much larger than either of us imagined.

Statues found in many of the plazas

Every square or plaza housed an old church in the center. Many of them were very large and all were very old.

Religious Center of Piazza Duomo

Basilica of Santa Croce

Interior of Santa Croce

A bridge over the River Arno is called the Ponte Vecchio and up until the year 1565 was lined with butcher shops which used the river as their waste disposal. In the year 1565, the powerful and princely Medici family enclosed the passageways and removed the meat markets giving them a safe and private passageway from their palace south of the river to their offices on the north side. Today, the bridge is lined with elegant jewelry as well as gold and silver shops.

Ponte Vecchio

The last ‘palace’ we visited was the Pitti Palace purchased by Medici in 1549. He was the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In the late 18^th century it was used for a time by Napoleon, then as the Kings palace until King Victor Emmanuel III donated it to the people of Italy in 1919. Since then it has become a huge art gallery and museum. It contains huge gardens behind it and fantastic views of Florence and the surrounding mountains. There are over 140 rooms open to the public including apartments of the royalty, galleries of porcelain, silver, costumes, carriages, art, modern art, etc. The only one I would have ‘pitti’ on in that palace would have been the poor cleaning lady.

Dale standing in front of the center section of the Pitti Palace