Il Duomo

Thursday involved another morning at the Uffizi, as recounted earlier, with the privilege of contemplating many masterpieces in almost complete solitude, then a bland pizza for lunch (Florentine cooking doesn’t use much salt), some marketering and onto Il Duomo, the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, the largest brick dome ever constructed!

We cheerfully paid our 8 Euro each for admission, thinking we’d both be able to contemplate the dome from floor level and then I’d climb the steps to the top, with Net safely left in that state of contemplation on the floor, as she has a fear of heights. Alas, entrance to the Dome means exactly that: as soon as you go through the turnstile you start climbing the stairs and immediately Net felt very uncomfortable. I’m not a big fan of heights myself particularly but I was determined to continue and encouraged Net to keep ascending. When we reached a small sanctuary where we could at least not be on the steps, we’d already scaled 150 of them, all over 500 years old. Net knew she wouldn’t be able to face the ordeal and I was feeling rather daunted myself. Reluctantly, I left her on the landing in the company of a group of marble sculptures and kept ascending. The staircase got narrower and more corkscrew-like until I started to feel dizzy, not from the increasing height but from continually being obliged to turn around and around as I scaled the now infernal steps (and I though the Inferno was downwards!) It was hot and claustrophobic; which was a strange sensation because you’re also aware that at any moment you’re going to be rudely released from claustrophobia to the very opposite sensation and look down from 90 metres to Florence below.

Suddenly you come to an opening and you step into the inside of the dome itself, suspended on a little platform, the frescoed walls adorned with ghastly images of purgatory at eye level and heavenly images of heaven at the very top and you look down to the floor of the cathedral and feel very nervous, unless you’re one of those strange people who likes rock-climbing and other such insane pursuits. A young French couple were at the entrance as I arrived and the male half was unable to step into the dome, despite encouragement from his girlfriend.

But there are so many more steps to go and they get narrower and more twisted and even more calustrophia-inducing, especially when there are many people either in front of you or attempting to squeeze past you as they come back down.

Finally you’re at the top and it’s marvellous! It’s actually not nearly as frightening as being inside the dome with the frescoes because you can’t see directly to the street below - the curvature of the dome ensures that you can only see a certain distance before it curls away from your view. But you keep thinking about the poor workmen who fixed all those tiles into place or helped haul the 4 million bricks up by hoist.

Florence and the shadow of the Duomo




View from the top of the Duomo

I’d read a brilliant book on the building of the dome, called Brunelleschi’s Dome, a few years before and I’ll read it again when I get back to Oz. It’s an amazing feat of engineering - Brunelleschi was a genius! From Wikipedia: "A modern understanding of physical laws and the mathematical tools for calculating stresses was centuries into the future. Brunelleschi, like all cathedral builders, had to rely on intuition and whatever he could learn from the large scale models he built. To lift 37,000 tons of material, including over 4 million bricks, he invented hoisting machines and lewissons for hoisting large stones."

When I finally came back down to earth, physically and mentally, Net and I set off on another stroll towards the Piazza della Signoria and stumbled upon a heated demonstration in the street. People were yelling through megaphones and blowing whistles and jeering at hapless local politicians as they marched in the same direction as we were going. The chant was “Acqua Publica!”, to do with opposition to a referendum about privatisation of water. It was all quite exciting and impassioned (in Australia the chant “Public Water” wouldn’t have quite the same ring to it).

Tomorrow, an excursion to Certaldo in the Tuscan hills.

We Have No Speech!

We are now officially speechless - especially after the Uffizi, Siena and then the Duomo in Florence. For the last couple of days we’ve had to communicate by sign language, which is easy to pick up in Italy because the Italians speak with their hands all the time.

We’d booked tickets for the Uffizi Gallery online back in Australia, which was definitely the best thing to do. If you turn up just on opening time, your priority entrance gets you in before all the tours and the thousands of people who are queuing up at the other entrance. The Uffizi is a beautiful building with two long corridors parallel to each other, whose marble floors absorb the sound of thousands of feet, and whose windows look out over the iconic view of the terra-cotta Florence rooftops, the Tuscan hills and the Arno River. Statues abound in these corridors and the ceilings are decorated lavishly but the real treasures are in the rooms that you enter via these wondrous corridors: paintings by Giotto, Botticelli (the largest collection of his paintings in the world), Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Giorgione, Caracci, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Bronzino, Goya, Rubens, El Greco, Corregio, Durer, Veronese, Mantegna and hundreds more. It’s too much for the eye and brain to absorb, even though we spent over six hours there during our two visits. On the second visit, I made a beeline for the Titians, Raphaels and Michelangelo, which are all furthest away from the entrance and I was alone in rooms of great art for what seemed an eternity, though it was probably not much more than half an hour. I stood in front of Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” for almost half an hour and I was the only person in the room! It was the same with the room that has three Raphael paintings and one Michelangelo. It was hard to believe that I could have all these masterpieces to myself for so long. I made my way back to the other side to look at the Botticellis again and the tours were already starting to fill the room.

Most of the tour groups are Japanese, who seem particularly fascinated with Botticelli and Leonardo. But even in the Botticelli room you can spend plenty of time in front of any of his religious paintings because the crowd favourites are the ones with the pagan themes: “the Birth of Venus” and Primevera”, both of which are absolutely ravishingly beautiful and audacious in their brilliant technique.

I could go on forever about the Uffizi, especially about some wonderful paintings that don’t get looked at as much as the biggies (Corregio is probably my favourite lesser-known painter, and there’s a Caracci work called “Venus with two satyrs and cupid” that’s very luscious and quite lascivious!) but I’d better not.

After all that culture we decided we needed lunch and then a haircut. I was expecting a trim of hair and beard but somehow ended up with the whole works: haircut, number zero for the beard, my ears shaved, and then I was whisked off to another room where my hair was shampooed, massaged, shampooed again, massaged, conditioned, blow-dryed and styled. I am now officially a metrosexual! I even sport a straw fedora!

On Wednesday we decided that a train trip to Siena was in order. This Tuscan hill town is about 90 minutes from Florence and we travelled through beautiful landscapes and some lovely towns, the most beautiful of which is Certaldo.

There are a series of escalators from Siena train station that go up for so long that I had to restrain Net from turning back. I had no idea where they were taking us but I assumed it should be to something interesting and so it turned out to be. Siena got to be what it was partly because it was able to defend itself from its hill-fort. The only thing I really knew about the town, beyond the paint colour it gave its name to, was Il Campo, a Piazza with a huge tower overlooking it. There is a crazy horse race, called the Palio, held in the Piazza twice a year.

The symbol of Siena: she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus


Il Campo


Fountain in Il Campo

The Piazza is an amazing sight and we soaked it up for a while and then climbed further up the hill to Siena’s cathedral which is a real knockout from the outside.

After thinking about it for a short while I decided that we should cough up some money and have a look inside and I’m very glad we did - it’s absolutely mind-blowing in there! This was the point where we lost our ability to speak. The Duomo, as the cathedral is called, is beyond words and it’s really, really old; begun in the 12th century and finished around 1380 - though it was supposed to be even bigger than the finished product- it’s awe-inspiringly beautiful inside and there’s even a library, with a stunningly gorgeous ceiling and many superb illuminate manuscripts. The main dome is stupendous and the smaller domes are wondrous too. We walked around with our jaws dragging on the marbled floor!

The ceiling of the library

We staggered out into the bright sunlight and then wandered through the lovely narrow streets back to the train station and home to Florence, where we had a frugal repast in our hotel room and then a stroll through the city to the Piazza della Signoria, where Savonarola was burned at the stake 513 years ago.

Street in Siena

Tomorrow: the really big Duomo - Brunelleschi’s dome.

Arno You’d Love Florence

Let me apologise in advance for using terms like “awe-inspiring”, “phenomenal” “staggering”, “mind-blowing”, etc., to excess but that’s how Florence affects you.

From one frenetic railway station to another: Santa Lucia station in Venice was crazily busy when we left that beautiful city at 11.30am and travelled south, through Padua (Padova), Bologna and onto Florence’s Santa Maria Novella station which was also a madhouse. I’d Googled the hotel we were booked into and found that it’s only 3 minutes walk from the station, which was wonderful because it was terribly hot and the streets of Florence seemed grimy and the traffic oppressive after the pedestrian heaven of Venice. Our hotel is what many people would call “quaint”. It’s on the 4th floor of an old building and you get to it via one of those ancient elevators that fit only four people and is enclosed in a steel mesh with a visible counterweight. There’s also a stairwell that’s narrow and precipitous when you look down from the 4th floor. The hotel itself has a semi-Rococo vibe to it, with floral wallpaper in the hallways and candelabras adorning the walls. We don't have towels but, rather, large tea-towels, to dry ourselves after a shower! This takes a little getting used to.

None of the staff at our hotel speak much English at all, which is surprising because it seems almost every other Italian we’ve met so far has been quite adept at the language; it’s extraordinary how adept the average Italian is, more so than the French. It makes it difficult to gain a modicum of skill at a language when most people you interact with speak English at a much higher standard than you could hope to attain in their lingo during your short stay. Still, it’s great fun attempting to communicate in Italian because it’s such an expressive and flamboyant tongue, with all those lengthened vowels. English really is the lingua franca - and please forgive that bad joke I just made - of the 21st century.
There is an amazing amount of wondrous sights within easy walking distance of our hotel. Just across the street is the church of Santa Maria Novella, with its beautiful and capacious piazza and a little further east are the Medici Chapels, with a large dome and only a little bit further on from there is the stupendous Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral with Brunelleschi’s massive dome, The Duomo and Giotto’s steep bell tower, the Campanile. It’s staggering when you first see these buildings!

The Duomo close up


The Duomo and Giotto’s Tower from across the Arno River


The front of Santa Maria del Fiore


Giotto tower

We had tickets for a hop-on hop-off bus tour of Florence so away we went through the streets in the blazing sun on top of an open double-decker with commentary provided via headphones. The bus takes you up to the Piazzale Michelangelo, which affords a spectacular view over the city:

We jumped on another bus that took us to the beautiful little town of Fiesole, which is even higher up and gives you an awe-inspiring view of the Tuscan landscape.
In the evening we strolled further from The Duomo down to the Piazza Della Signoria, where the replica of Michelangelo’s David stands:

Then we passed the Uffizi and walked towards the Ponte Vecchio:

This city is stupendously wonderful, and makes Venice seem intimate by comparison. There’s so much more to explore and we spent most of the second day in the Uffizi gallery, which has a collection that just keeps blowing your mind as you move from room to room. We thought we were fit after walking scores of kilometres in Venice but that flat city’s only hills are its little bridges and we found ourselves panting after scaling the steps that lead to the Uffizi’s magnificent collection. While you’re still getting your breath back you enter a phenomenally beautiful corridor, like a less ostentatious hall of mirrors at Versailles.
The Uffizi is a world in itself so we’ll visit again tomorrow. Today, we’re hopping on a train to see Siena.

Last Day in Venice

Our last full day win Venice was hot. Italy is in the grip of a drought and, though it’s autumn here, every day so far has been very hot. The summer was much hotter, of course, with temperatures regularly passing 40 degrees. That would have been almost impossible to endure, considering there are even more tourists in summer. The beyond-gigantic cruise ships that keep coming into the Guidecca Canal are making things a lot worse; Venice can only have so many hotels but these monstrosities are huge floating hotels carrying thousands of passengers who disembark for a day or so in the city and descend onto the tourist traps of the Rialto and Piazza San Marco and then take off for some other unfortunate harbour.

But there is an advantage in most of the tourists clogging up those two icons and that is that many other fantastic sights in Venice are less molested. There are scores of lovely churches, designed by great architects, full of phenomenal paintings and sculptures and they’re often almost empty. On our long walk south from our northern region of Cannaregio we stumbled across a wonderful church San Francesco della Vigna in the Sestire of Castello. We sat alone in a beautiful room room with a Bellini painting and roamed through a superbly serene cloister, our only interruption being a tour guided by one of the Franciscan priests who then held mass, which was quite an experience for we two atheists.

We wandered down to the Arsenal and then through a beautiful, large park which is also the site of the Venice Biennale and then onto the little island of San Pietro di Castello, with its grand and beautiful church and leaning tower.

The Arsenal

House on the island of San Pietro di Castello


San Pietro di Castello's leaning tower and church

On our long way back to the hotel we walked around the enormous hospital, where we could peer into a room with a speedboat moored inside, perhaps one of the doctors’?

Venice hospital

Another long walk at night after dinner and it was goodbye to Venice. We were sad to go, it truly is as beautiful as everyone has ever said since its birth over 1300 years ago.

Venice by Night