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.