Tag Archives: Florence

Apr17

Christmas in Italy – Visiting the legendary Accademia Gallery!

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Christmas in Italy – Visiting the legendary Accademia Gallery!

In keeping with the tradition of adventure, Sarah and I went on a big trip for Christmas and New Years!

This year, we met up with Sarah’s family in Italy, traveling to Rome and Florence; not quite a perfect midpoint for everyone, but it was close enough. And, also, you know. Rome. Florence. Amazing!

Please forgive me for some of these being a bit out of order… the posts are organized somewhat chronologically… but also organized by theme and location.  Some may not be exactly in chronological order, so for reference please see the initial summary post, which has a complete day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of the adventure.

 

Saturday, 30-Dec-2018

 

Our visit to the Accademia was a bit unplanned – we hadn’t aimed to go today, but we found ourselves with a fair bit of time free, and quite literally ran into the entrance line while wandering around. Since we’re here, let’s see some sculptures!

But before we see art, we have to wait. The lines in Florence are impressive – earlier in the day we’d tried to get tickets to the Duomo, a famous church dome, and found that the line was over four hours long… to use tickets purchased three days prior. The Accademia isn’t quite that long of a line, but it still look all of Bill and Greta’s queueing prowess to see us through it quickly and sanely. Upside of them moving to Scotland – they are pros at the British art of the queue.

 

Once we’re inside, we find a museum setup that I’m pretty used to – instead of the usual single-track path, the Accademia has a whole series of interconnected galleries, just like the Museum of Science in Boston, or the Portland Art Museum.

Map in hand, we systematically work our way through, staying as a group and learning / joking about the exhibits. I think a lot of us had started hitting the saturation point, in terms of museuming, so we started breaking down a little bit… not in a bad way, but in a giggling, “hehe look at the baby faces with wings! This one is eating St. John’s toe!” sort of way.

Yep. Baby faces with wings. Turns out, everyone paints angels slightly differently. These ones were disembodied baby heads with six wings.

 

On a different note from baby heads – we saw the oldest known violin! This one was Leah’s goal in the Accademia – She’s a quite skilled musician, so getting to see the old instruments exhibit was her version of what the DaVinci museum was for me – the rest of us were a bit lost, but she was getting to see the origins of her entire style of music. Pretty amazing.

Ohh, yeah. There was the one other sculpture in the Accademia. The one by the famous guy? Maybe you’ve heard of “David”?

Yep. David was there, in all his naked, ripped glory.

First off – dude’s tall. 20Ft tall. I was not aware that David was that big – we learned that the block of marble was strictly controlled, and was only awarded to the absolute best sculptor, due to its size and perfection… kind of neat, and the end result was obviously worth that investment. The way it was displayed was also really neat – the path to David was lined with unfinished sculptures, seemingly showing figures forming out of the rock itself. And then, in this distance, the perfect figure standing in glory. Really great curation.

The rest of the museum was sort of like the Vatican, unfortunately. It was very interesting, but just so crowded that it was almost impossible to really appreciate any individual piece. That wasn’t a huge loss though, since most of the pieces past David were casts or models… test pieces for other pieces spread across the world. They were interesting, but most had some sort of irregularity or imperfection… which was just that much more obvious after seeing David.

The Accademia was honestly amazing though, and the chance to see it was well worth the initial line.

Apr16

Christmas in Italy – The DaVinci Museum

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Christmas in Italy – The DaVinci Museum

In keeping with the tradition of adventure, Sarah and I went on a big trip for Christmas and New Years!

This year, we met up with Sarah’s family in Italy, traveling to Rome and Florence; not quite a perfect midpoint for everyone, but it was close enough. And, also, you know. Rome. Florence. Amazing!

Please forgive me for some of these being a bit out of order… the posts are organized somewhat chronologically… but also organized by theme and location.  Some may not be exactly in chronological order, so for reference please see the initial summary post, which has a complete day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of the adventure.

 

 

Saturday, 30-Dec-2017

 

As we wandered the city on Saturday, we unexpectedly stumbled across one of the spots that I’d earmarked for later in the week – the Leonardo DaVinci museum. Since we didn’t have any specific plans for the morning, our original plan of seeing The Duomo being derailed by sold-out tickets, we stopped in to explore.

This museum was a bit smaller than the large art galleries that we’d been seeing so far – it was honestly mostly luck that we noticed it at all, catching sight of the small placard on the wall and by the street corner. As a specialized museum it didn’t seem to draw in the same crowds as the Uffizi or Academie… but we quickly learned (to my joy and everyone else’s slight concern) that this “specialized” museum was actually targetted directly to the 4 year old in me.

 

Seriously. I was transported to when I was little, giggling and playing with tinker toys, legos, and rocks and ropes in the woods. This museum was a playhouse for me, and I never wanted to leave.

 

The DaVinci museum was, obviously, dedicated to Leonardo DaVinci, but specifically to interactive recreations of his mechanical inventions. Where Galileo was known for advancing science, DaVinci advanced engineering, using known principles in unexpected ways to solve countless problems faced in Renaissance life. And this museum was full of those solutions… most of which I could play with.

So, I stayed and giggled and acted like a giddy toddler on Christmas morning.

I ended up staying a fair while after everyone else had headed out – going through each individual project, seeing how each one solved a specific problem in a novel way, and trying to somehow absorb Leonardo’s ingenuity by touching his creations.

The picture gallery included has snapshots of almost everything in the museum, but a few standouts that bear mentioning:

  • A workout machine. You know those Cybex machines that you find in gyms? Leonardo created one purely to study human motion, and which muscles were activated by which actions.
    Sarah and I got a quick workout in.
  • A hydraulic saw. Using a water-wheel for power, this was effectively the precursor to present-day lumber mills, automatically loading, advancing, and cutting trees down for lumber.
  • An underwater breathing apparatus. Not a SCUBA kit, technically, but this would allow divers to breath underwater by pumping air through a suit.

Short version – Ben could not even. Continued not-evening even after everyone else had left. Bought a book on not being able to even, and reads it every so often. Still cannot even to this day.

Apr15

Christmas in Italy – The Uffizi gallery, and a quick walking tour of the city

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Christmas in Italy – The Uffizi gallery, and a quick walking tour of the city

In keeping with the tradition of adventure, Sarah and I went on a big trip for Christmas and New Years!

This year, we met up with Sarah’s family in Italy, traveling to Rome and Florence; not quite a perfect midpoint for everyone, but it was close enough. And, also, you know. Rome. Florence. Amazing!

Please forgive me for some of these being a bit out of order… the posts are organized somewhat chronologically… but also organized by theme and location.  Some may not be exactly in chronological order, so for reference please see the initial summary post, which has a complete day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of the adventure.

 

 

Friday, December 29th

The Uffizi gallery. I hadn’t heard of it before, but from the horrified looks that Sarah and her Dad gave me when I admitted as much, I assume that it’s a pretty famous museum. Sort of like the MFA in Boston… except older, and roughly a bajillion and a half times as famous, and full of the kind of paintings that people spend entire weeks studying in Art History classes.

So, I was excited.

 

What I learned is that the Uffizi is, unsurprisingly, that it’s a whole experience. From the minute we first saw the building through ’till we walked out the exit, we were marinated in peerless artwork.

The building itself is nestled inside the canyons of the city, butting up against the river that runs through town. So, similar to Rome, it was a bit like being ambushed when we turned a corner and were suddenly in a plaza full of statues of famous renaissance personalities.

And I mean a plaza FULL. Every column was fronted with a statue of someone, people like Galileo, Rafael, and Michelangelo. All of the Ninja Turtles were here, in famous artist form. Looking out on the plaza, acting half as guardians and half as docents.

Past the statuary were more outdoor works, mostly recreations of famous sculptures seen elsewhere in the Uffizi and other galleries. But since they were outdoors, there was something different about them… having the moving light play across the stone, something about it was really interesting and made it seem like we were seeing completely new statues.

 

Inside, it was honestly like any other art museum, except somehow a bit more so. Everything was beautiful – the curation was amazing, with the art progressing from the oldest examples to the newest works as we walked through. The pieces were spread out too, much more so than in the Vatican museums – there, it seemed like we were walking through a storage facility… but here, we were obviously in a museum dedicated to showcasing everything about the art on display.

For the art itself – Baby Jesus was, unsurprisingly, a pretty popular subject for painting. Lots of annunciation scenes (I learned from Sarah that an “Annunciation Scene” is when Mary was impregnated by the holy spirit. The common themes were, as I was told, Mary looking sceptical as a space lazer blasts down at her, while an equally skeptical angel looks on), but also some really beautiful late-Renaissance works too.

My personal favorites were a few pieces by Van Honthorst near the end, showing a wedding feast. Most of the pieces in the Uffizi were staged paintings – paintings commissioned to show a specific famous scene from history or the bible. As such, they were pretty rigid and unrealistic, more instructional than decorative. Van Honthorst’s pieces were happy though, showing a slice of Renaissance life full of songs and smiling people.

While the museum was huge, we didn’t stay forever. Something else I’d noticed: Museums in Italy aren’t quite as large as those back in the States. They’re more focused, but so don’t need a full day (or two or three…) to walk through. The Uffizi could have lasted longer, if we’d forced it, but as it was we were pretty well done by lunchtime.

So, after a lunch in the cafe, we moseyed onto the town. The group had split up in the museum, as everyone had their own pace, so Sarah and I were left to our own devices for a bit. Which, clearly, meant walking around and looking for gelato.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Florence is beautiful. It’s stately, and walking around was truly an enjoyable experience. It’s a trade off – I would have loved to spend more time wandering aimlessly, looking in random shops and secret courtyards, but at the same time I’m super thankful that we hit so many famous sites, and wouldn’t want to have missed a single one of them.

 

And yes, don’t worry. We did find gelato. It was exactly as glorious as one would expect.