Florence With a Friend

 Annamaria on Monday

My friend Kate and I bonded as fellow Lit majors and have remained in close touch all our lives.  During lock down, she in LA and I in New York kept each other company over Zoom by doing what we had done together all those decades ago. We studied.

Since neither of us had liked our long-ago course in Shakespeare, we started with the plays.  We read biographies of the Bard and books of criticism about his works.  Over the next year and a half, each week, we chose a play.  We read the professorial stuff, the play itself, and watched a movie of it.  Kate read the play first and then watched.  I did the reverse.  Then the following Sunday, we met to discuss what we had learned. We loved it.

But, eventually we decided to switch topics and took up Renaissance art, staring with Michelangelo, using the same sorts of source material and lots of gandering at the photos of the works.  Based on the facts of his life and the magnificence of his paintings and statues, we became completely enamored of him.  We followed up with Leonardo and Bernini.  It was about this time last year, when I was in Florence and could visit the masterpieces in person that we started to hatch a plan which this past week came to fruition.

Kate arrived on January 4, and we have spent the intervening days finding the works of the artists we have studied and those of their contemporaries who influenced them or were influenced by them.  Here is a taste of what we have seen so far.

(Ah well! Blogger has decied that you should see my photos in  reverse chronicle order.  It probably wants me to argue with it for an hour or two before I cry "uncle" or some unprintable curse.  But I have already learned how useless it is to try to impose my will on Blogger Almighty.) 

Going backwards in time: 

These next few phoitos are of Michelangelo sculptures that line the corridor leading up to his  David.  They are known collectively as The Prisoners.  Some think them unfinished work.  Michelangelo described his process as seeing the people trapped inside the block of marble and taking away the excess stone and liberating them.  Some people (and I am one) say that they are not unfinished, but left as they are because they said what he wanted them to say: They are still prisoners.

 

This one is particularly moving to me because

the face so closely resembles Michelangelo himself.

What do you think this baby is about to do?

I love annunciations, and particularly the myriad

ways painters have designed the wings of 

Angel Gabriel.

Another prisoner.  I have no idea why Blogger put it here.

The last night of Christmas projections on the Ponte Vecchio.

We visited the Palazzo Vecchio and saw the apartments where the Medici lived.

Mask of Dante

 

I like to look at the expression of Mary's face 

when she gets the new.  This one is rare.  She 

really seems to be saying, "What? Me?"

This vast space was the main gathering room for the

 Medici court and is still used as such.

The Medici collected  examples of newly discovered

African animals.  

Lorenzo the Magnificent had  a giraffe 

in his private zoo,

 

This 16th century Last Supper was painted by a woman!

The Church of Santa Maria Novella

Massacio's  Holy Trinity undergoing restoration

Museo Galileo

 Annamaria on Monday

Science has fascinated me since my high school chemistry course, when - in lab one day - I followed the teacher's instructions, mixed some chemicals, cooked them on a bunsen burner, and made the most beautiful purple crystals.  It felt like magic.

Yesterday, I indulged my life-long fascination with science, and my creative focus on history, and took myself on a tour of Florence's wonderful museum dedicated to the history of science. It preserves and makes accessible five centuries worth of the tools and writings of seekers of truth.

It's library is available to researchers

Can you guess what this is?

It's a clock.  One that was erected in a tower and chimed to announce the passage of time.

The museum displays lots of clocks, but here is a gorgeous gizmo that does that and much more!

Some astrolabes would fit on your desk...

Others fill up a good-size room!

Here is a map of the world drawn by Fra Mauro of Murano (Venice) between 1457 and 1459.  He evidently thought the world was round, but not global. 

I took the photo with this very large man in

it, so you would see the size of the image.

Here are some details to show the beauty of Fra Mauro's image:

M

The museum possessions that I was most excited to see were Galileo's telescopes.  I had seen one of them before in a special exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi.  And I knew the story of Maria Luisa Reghini Bonelli, who in 1966 was the director of the Institute of the History of Science.  At that point, most of the collection was stored on the ground floor and in the basement. Dangerous places considering what was on its way. 

As the horrid flood waters rose, Maria Luisa Bonelli rescued those instruments through which the great astronomer gazed at the moons of Jupiter and worked out his brilliant, break-through discovery!

Top: telescope by Galileo 1609- early 1610

Bottom: telescope by Galileo circa 1610

The last thing that interested me was something quite strange - the middle finger of Galileo's right hand. 

Here is what the information card said about it.

I could not get a clear picture of it. Given the bright sunshine pouring in through the windows, here is the best picture I could take of the relic. 

I found this excellent photo on the museums's website.  The photographer's name M. Rohan.  I credit him, a Florentine guide.

There was no information about why this part was separated from the rest of Galileo’s body. Or what displaying it is supposed to mean.

Italians have a different hand signal for angry dismissal.   Not the one we New Yorkers call the NY salute.  But I could not help seeing Galileo’s body part through my eyes.   Given the treatment Galileo received when he published his findings, I find that raised middle finger an appropriate signal to anti-science bigots who want to punish those who study and reveal the truth.  

A tale of two cities

 Annamaria on Monday

I have stolen this title from Charles Dickens, as I'm sure you all know. But I think I have the right. This is a story about highly improbable coincidences. But every word of it is true.

Dickens, as I have written about before in these precincts, was a master unparalleled at making outrageous coincidences believable in his fiction. No one but he could have gotten away, for instance, with the number of times David Copperfield accidentally encounters Mister Micawber. 

As you've probably noticed, I have nothing approaching Dickinsons's skill. Well, whether you believe it or not, what I am going to tell you today is the truth, every word of it.  It won't be as weird a tale as the one Caro told last week, and very likely not as entertaining, but I can't help but recount it because, on some level, my strange story also feels paranormal.

Ultra-fortunate person that I am, I live in two apartments, each in one of the most wondrous cities on our sacred planet.  Over the past few months, the buildings that house my two apartments have been living uncannily parallel lives.

Both Florence and New York have, this past year, required apartment buildings to inspect their façades and to correct any faults.  Consequently, in both cities the building managers and owners scrambled to get this work done and avoid hefty fines. In both Florence and New York, the buildings where I own apartments have found that work needed to be done.  During the work, both buildings required scaffolding to protect pedestrians from any accidents.  Both buildings also had roofs that needed repair, and it was decided that, since scaffolding would be in place, it would be a good time to repair the neglected roofs as well.

As plans went ahead in both cities, it became clear that there were not enough materials available to erect scaffolding in so many places in order to have the repairs completed before the end of 2021. In both cities, the government extended the deadline because of the lack of available scaffolding. In both cities the management and the residents of the buildings decided they would postpone beginning the work until the end of March.

I had been laughing at the fact that these buildings were leading parallel lives, and chalked it up to an unlikely but possible coincidence. I do know for sure that I am the only person who owns an apartment in both these buildings.

Then something really weird happened. About a week ago, I came into my building here in Florence and found the elevator was out of order. Some nitwit had opened the doors before the elevator came to a halt, managed to get out, but left the elevator out of service. I called the number posted to ask for assistance and walked up to the seventh floor. When I got to my place, I checked my email only to find that my neighbors in New York were emailing each other, including me, that the elevator was broken.  These two buildings, six time zones apart, both had a broken elevator at the same moment                                                                                               

The next thing that happened put the icing on the paranormal cake. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon in Florence, my doorbell rang.  It was the elevator technician, asking me to let him in so that he could make the repair. As I was pressing the button to open the front door, I received a message on my phone.  It was from the building manager in New York, where it was 9 AM, asking if I could buzz in the elevator technician who was waiting at the front door.

????.......