Exploring Florence

   

 “...con altra voce omai, con altro vello

ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte

del mio battesmo prenderò cappello...”

-Dante, La Divine Commedia, Paradiso, Canto XXV

On my first free weekend, I paid a visit to the legendary city of Florence. I had remembered that from my first visit to Assisi with my family about four years ago that there were trains directly from Florence just like there were to Rome.

In fact, it was more complicated for me to get from my house in Assisi to the local train station than to get from that station to Florence. This is because the old historic city of Assisi sits up on a hill overlooking the valley (most ancient and medieval cities were built that way for defense reasons). Instead of sending the train up there, tracks pass through the commune of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a small town just below Assisi. The Porziuncola where St. Francis first heard the call to the vocation he would pursue and where he gathered his first friars around him. Now, of course, the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli (a truly gorgeous baroque basilica) is built around it. I will speak more about the Porziuncola later in this post.

However, for my trip to Florence, I went rather underprepared, having only solidified the necessary arrangements (like buying the train tickets and reserving entrance to the Uffizi) the night before at around 11:30 p.m.

Having never been to Florence before, I found myself flipping through a 2003 Fodor’s Italy guidebook in the library of the residence where I am staying. The guidebook actually had some very helpful tips on visiting the city, and it helped me to focus my top destinations since I would only have one day to visit. For short, day visits, planning is the key, and blessedly, I was able to arrange all of the essentials even with the short runway I had left myself.

On the morning of my little trip within my trip, I woke up at about 4:30 to give myself enough time to get myself ready, get my bag together, and hike down to the Santa Maria degli Angeli train station in time for my 6:30 a.m. train.

I slipped out through the front door and zigzagged downhill through the desolate streets of Assisi and then along a long empty country road, still tranquil at that early hour of the morning.

Assisi is increasingly a city of tourists, vacationers, and pilgrims, and such people have no reason to get up at such an unreasonable hour on a Saturday.

The train ride passed uneventfully as most train rides do, and by 8:30, the train was pulling into the station of Santa Maria Novella. I had arrived.

The Santa Maria Novella train station is situated right next to Florence’s Centro Storico, the rather compact but fascinating historical district of the city filled with some of the richest bits of the city’s long past. It is in this part of Florence where I spent my entire day.

Upon getting out of the train, I figured that the first order of business was to get to a Mass. Thinking that the most obvious place to go was the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, or more commonly known as Florence Cathedral. It is the one with the large red-tiled duomo that is so commonly seen in pictures of Florence’s skyline.

Upon arriving, I realized that the large church did not have a clear entrance, so I went up to someone who looked like they knew a thing or two about what was going on.

“Could you tell me how I could get in to the Cathedral?” I asked in Italian.

“It opens at 10:00,” I was told.

“But isn’t there Mass earlier?” I insisted.

“No,” I was told. It opened at 10:00.

Well, that was alright, I told myself. I would go to an evening Mass as I had found out there was to be one at 5:00. That would be plenty of time before my train at 8:15 and would allow me to have dinner afterwards. One trick I have learned for visiting famous churches on limited time is to combine the visit with a Mass because then you get to spend more time in the space and pray in it, which is always more meaningful to me than just walking through a church as one would a museum. And also you get to skip the line.

In the meantime, I walked down to a well-known café I had read about called Gilli, which is located on the Piazza della Repubblica, one of the biggest and most notable squares in Florence, having been the old Roman forum and thus the center of the city in Roman days.

In medieval times, it was the location of the market, and the Jewish ghetto was also situated near there. In fact, two synagogues were located on the square, though neither of them are still in operation today.

Gilli Caffe has an interesting story itself, having been founded in a different location by a Swiss family of the same name in 1773. It moved once in the late nineteenth century and then again in the early 1920s to its current location. It quickly became one of the city’s “literary cafés,” a kind of venue that I also described a bit during my time in Paris. The particularly attentive readers might remember my mentioning Les Deux Magots, where Jean-Paul Sartre and several of his friends were known to hold meetings in the 1950s.

In this case, Gilli was a café that came to be associated with the Futurist movement of the early twentieth century, an artistic and literary movement born in Italy that emphasized speed, progress forward, and the new technologies that seemed to about in accelerating rapidity in the early 1900s. The train, the telegraph, the automobile… All of these were the way of the future, said the futurists. We must not worry ourselves about our old, stuffy libraries any longer, they would insist. Science and innovation in technology are the future of man.

Such thinkers as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Alberto Caligiani were known to frequent the caffè.

At the same time, tourists, particularly British, began to frequent the city in increasing numbers, as described in period novels such as E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. The caffè became a favorite for them as well. In the novel, the use of the standard English-language guidebook, Baedeker’s, is spoofed as a humorous way to be chaperoned about the city by some unknown “expert.” However, it was only a very faint tremor of the kind of enormous enterprise that mass tourism would become in the ensuing decades.

When I entered the caffè, I immediately noticed the high arched doorways, the rich wood paneled walls, the marble countertop on the bar so clean that I could check my teeth on it, and the waiters bustling about in immaculate white shirts and navy blue vests with matching bow ties.

Like a true Italian, I consumed my croissant and coffee al bar, that is to say, at the bar. Italians do this because they are generally in a hurry for breakfast and because sitting at a table incurs a service fee while eating at the bar does not.

After having finished this rather dignified meal, I walked down to the Santa Maria Novella Cathedral, having read that it was a church worth visiting while in the city. I was a bit surprised to be charged an admittance fee as it is an operating church. However, the admission included entry to the adjoining museum, so I decided to make the most of it.

The church has a rather distinctive white façade with intricate dark green lines intertwining across the front. This is seen in a number of Florentine churches, but I have not seen this outside the region of Tuscany. Of course, they do exist, such as Orvieto Cathedral in Umbria, but I do believe it is primarily a Tuscan style.

The church was completed in 1420, after nearly 200 years of construction, and served as a hub for the Dominican order in Florence.

The interior is particularly striking for its intricate Renaissance-era paintings, particularly the two behind the altar, which I have photographed and included. One depicts the life of the Virgin Mary, including her birth, presentation in the temple, marriage to Joseph, the murder of the innocents, and her assumption. The other depicts the life of John the Baptist. These two saints often are on either side of the altar in older churches, symbolizing the old and new covenants.

Also in the church are two very notable works including Giotto’s Crucifix, an early work of his, as well as Masaccio’s Holy Trinity, notable for its use of linear perspective.

It is a beautiful Renaissance church, well worth simply wandering around in for a while and praying in. The stained glass windows are also quite elegant and liberally feature Dominicans such as St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Dominic himself.

Since where the museum is now used to be a convent, on the interior is a beautiful courtyard, quiet and peaceful, with birds singing that one could simply spend some decompression time in.

However, since I was not wishing to waste any of my time in Florence, once I was satisfied I had seen the important parts of the church, I decided to move onto my next destination.

At this point, after running an errand that would have been more difficult in Assisi and after helping an Argentinian couple get headed in the right direction to find their hotel, I ended up in a small, hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant for lunch.

My bodily needs having been sated, I headed myself in the direction of the Uffizi. Along the way, I walked across the Ponte Vecchio, a well-known bridge across the River Arno. The bridge is adorned with little jewelry shops that from a distance give it a unique appearance, as of having little houses situated on it, overlooking the river.

The Uffizi are art galleries that contain works starting in the Roman era (primarily sculptures) through late medieval works (such as those of Giotto), the Italian Renaissance, and the baroque period.  The museum was constructed in the late sixteenth century to hold some of the great treasures of Florentine art since Florence had been the premier hub of the art world during the Renaissance. The Uffizi are the most visited art museum in Italy and have survived much over the years, including a car bomb explosion in 1993 that damaged nearly forty pieces of art.

Much as I said with regards to the Louvre, I do not wish to systematically catalogue all of the pieces of art in the museum, nor do I wish to do some kind of exhaustive analysis of the building as a whole; rather I will simply stick to works that are especially well-known or which particularly impressed me.

Upon arriving at the top floor where the visit begins, the visitor will notice that the building follows a square design and that the central hallway is of a particularly majestic sort, with woodframed windows and detailed frescoes on the ceilings. Along the left and right sides are statues and busts from the Roman period. Every few feet, there is a gallery on the left-hand side which follows a chronological sequence, starting with the oldest works and moving towards the most recent. But obviously the oldest of all are in the hallway, so I walked fully around the building through the hallways first in order to properly appreciate the sculptures before even entering the side halls.

To me, however, the works of Giotto and those of the Florentine are the cream of the Uffizi’s crop. I have always loved the Middle Ages’s very didactic art and iconography, though I cannot help but appreciate with the Renaissance’s irrepressible desire for physical beauty. The inherent goodness and orderliness in the human person and in architecture has always agreed with me, and the Florentine renaissance has produced some objectively dazzling products of human creativity.

However, to start with Giotto, a painter about whom very little is known but whose influence on the Renaissance is hard to understate, a work that I quite liked was the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints. This seems to me (someone untrained in art or art history) to be a nice bridge between the medieval iconography and the later Renaissance art. The figures are graceful with upturned gazes to the central figure of the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus. The sense of perspective as the Virgin holds the Child is quite nicely done, in my opinion.

Another image of the same subjects is The Virgin and Child Enthroned between St. Sebatian and St. John. This one was particularly noted during the Renaissance because of St. Sebastian’s seeming obliviousness to the pain being endured from the arrows he has been struck with.

Another Biblical scene that is the subject of many paintings from this time is the Annunciation, and one of the nicest I think is Leonardo da Vinci’s version, also included here. The Virgin is shown reading a text and in a posture of both serenity and surprise (indicated by the elevated right hand). It is one of da Vinci’s earlier works, and it is often remarked that the Virgin’s calmness marked a bit of a break with art that showed her averting her gaze or in a particularly submissive posture. The painting has been praised for the very birdlike style of Gabriel’s wings.

Then there is, of course, Rafael’s famous portrait of Pope Leo X reading a Bible and flanked by two cardinals. Leo X was one of the most important of the Medici popes; his Pontifiate included the break with Martin Luther and the first Spanish mission to Mexico.

One of the most impressive rooms in the Uffizi is the Niobe room, a majestic hall filled with various sculptures and immense paintings, such as Henry IV’s Triumphant Entry into Paris, which is just lovely to behold.

Another room worth mentioning is La Tribuna, a room with red velvet walls containing the “crown jewels” of the Medici family’s art collection, granted by Francesco I de’ Medici in 1584 to the Tuscan government. It is a bit like forbidden fruit, however, since you are not allowed to enter but only to stand at the entrance and admire it for about ten seconds before behind hustled out by security guards.

Towards the end of the tour are the self-portraits of notable artists, which are more numerous than I expected. I will include four here: Raffaello Sanzio, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, and Diego Velazquez. I leave you to figure out who is who.

The artist Filippo Lippi, who when young would reportedly fill his school notebooks and textbooks with nothing but drawings, produced one of my favorite images of the Virgin and Baby Jesus. Madonna with the Child and Two Angels captures the grace and beauty of the Virgin Mary as well as her solemn adoration of her divine Son. The joyful mischief on the face of the leading angel provides a lighthearted contrast.

There was also The Adoration of the Child by Correggio, a sixteenth century painter. This painting, taking inspiration from St. Bridget of Sweden’s account of the Virgin’s adoration of the Christ child at dawn, does a beautiful job not only of showing the Virgin Mary’s unique love for her Son but also showing probably the first instance of what we now know as Eucharistic adoration, simply sitting with Jesus and looking upon Him. Correggio was a master of using light and darkness in a proper and efficacious way, a technique known as chiascuro. I especially like how here, the Mother’s face and that of the Child are illuminated by a soft light, so subtly done that we only see the illumination it produces and not the light itself.

 Moving along, we find Giorgio Vasari’s portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the head of one of the most important Italian banking families in the late 1400s. The Medicis quite literally transformed politics through their banking practices. Previous to that period, monarchs had been little more than very powerful nobles, the noble that the others recognized as the de facto leader of the realm. However, their power depended on staying in good graces with the nobles, keeping the realm safe, and projecting power and influence. Otherwise, the monarch would begin to lose his influence and face a rebellion. Oftentimes nobles were given titles or posts in order to reward them for loyalty or to ensure their future cooperation.

Unlike the common portrayal of the Middle Ages, it was actually quite a complicated system, and it served as a check on the monarch’s absolute power.

Through the rise in modern banking such as the Medicis oversaw, monarchs could now systematically borrow much larger sums of money than every before and in so doing finance much larger armies, now no longer local militias scrambled in times of need to defend against petty invasions by a nearby lord, but massive merchant armies, capable of invading whole kingdoms and waging multiple-year campaigns.

A successful war would mean enough spoils to pay off the debt owed to the banks, and if the war was not successful, the banking families still could be assured of their payments because with his standing army, the king could effectively enforce the collection of taxes. Politics would never be the same again.

In Vasari’s portrait, however, Lorenzo is shown in simple clothes with a drawn, lined, melancholic face. He is surrounded by garish masks, clearly reminding the viewer of the finite life of man and the inherent poverty therein which every man possesses, even the rich.

As I say, there are many other works of art in the Uffizi which are worth mentioning, many that I wished to include but could not. However, after satisfying myself that I had visited all the corners of this extraordinary museum, I exited and directed my steps towards Santa Maria del Fiore.

Santa Maria del Fiore is the crown jewel of Florentine architecture, and it is impossible to miss when one visits the city. Pictures taken of the skyline are dominated by this imposing church with its enormous dome. Its story is nothing short of exceptional.

The story of the church begins in the late thirteenth century, during Florence’s ascension to economic dominance. The city, which had not reaped the full benefits of the Italian economic boom that had lifted neighboring city-states like Pisa, in the thirteenth century began to see its day finally come. The city’s wool refineries, settled on the River Arno’s stable waters were the beginning of the emerging textile industry. A key innovation in commerce during this time was the invention of the florin, a gold coin used for currency. The florin, one of the first truly gold currencies in Europe for quite some time, quickly spread around the region, replacing the Carolingian denarius and the Pisan grosso (which were both silver). It included a complex design that guarded against counterfeit coins, and soon many parts of the continent were using the florin. This fueled a rapid rise for city and facilitated the commercialization of the Mediterranean, as any transaction could be effected with any region now that the exchange rate and rampant risk of counterfeiting was avoided.

The merchants of Florence also began to transform European commerce through their innovations such as bills of exchange (whereby a purchase could be made without money directly on hand) and double-entry bookkeeping (whereby all income and output can be measured next to each other to assess overall assets). These inventions also preceded the rise of the banking families like the Medici I mentioned a short while ago because out of this new, ascendant merchant class would come brokers who would go beyond simple bills of exchange to loaning large amounts of moneys to companies or stock ventures in order to enable them to take advantage of a commercial opportunity. In return, that loaner (or banker) would receive some price reduction on his future purchases (the interest). With time, certain particularly successful bankers such as the Medici would come to be able not just to loan money to commercial ventures but to kings and nobles.

In the midst of this economic ascension, it became obvious that the city’s cathedral, built in the fifth century, and literally falling apart from age and neglect, was not sufficient or suitable for the city’s growing population and needs.

In 1294, the city approved a design for a new church submitted by Arnolfo di Cambio, who had designed the Church of Santa Croce and the Palazzo Vecchio. Construction began, but when Arnolfo died only eight years later, the pace slackened until the Arte della Lana, the wool merchant guild (and therefore the guild in charge of one of the most important commercial activities in the city) assumed the patronage of the project. Giotto, who was mentioned earlier, was brought in and designed the campanile, or bell tower. By 1380, the main church was complete and ready for use.

The only hurdle still left to conquer was the construction of the dome. A church of these proportions must have a majestic dome befitting the great city it was in, and Arnolfo di Cambio’s original plan included one.

In 1418, the guild announced a competition for the design of the dome. The race came down to two main competitors: Lorenzo Ghiberti (whose masterpiece were the Gates of Paradise gold doors on the Baptistery in front of the Cathedral) and Filippo Brunelleschi, two bitter rivals. Brunelleschi won but was soon probably asking himself why he had thrown his hat in the ring for such an imposing undertaking. He was, after all, a goldsmith by training, and the project before him was enough to stump even the best engineering minds.

The dome had to be built on the existing church walls and cover a horizontal distance of nearly 150 feet. Additionally, the design called for not using flying buttresses, the Gothic innovation for dealing with the weight of such a dome.

What Brunelleschi did was to construct two domes, one nestled inside the other, with four chains around the inner dome to prevent the spreading force that threatened the structural integrity. Further, to enable to bricks to be laid in the dome shape, Brunelleschi invented a new form of laying the bricks so that they would not fall of as they were being laid in an ever-inclining pattern.

Brunelleschi also invented other mechanisms to facilitate the construction, including amphibious boats to prevent the marble for the interior being damaged in land transport from the harbor. He also designed an ox-powered crane to get the enormous stones high enough for laying.

The actual interior of the dome is something extraordinary to behold. There is an interweaving, vivid depiction of the Last Judgment that was begun by Giorgio Vasari (the one who painted the portrait of Lorenzo de Medici I mentioned earlier) and finished by Federico Zuccari.

The façade of the Cathedral was added much later, in the 1860s by Emilio di Fabris. It is di Fabris’s capolavoro, and it includes white, red, and green marble in an intricate and very beautiful neogothic pattern that blends in well with the surrounding structures such as the Baptistery.

I was able to make it in to the Cathedral after normal visiting hours by attending the 5:00 p.m. evening Mass. The Mass was in a side chapel, but afterward the usher let me photograph the nave and the inside of the dome, which pictures I have included here.

The Baptistery, which stands in front of the basilica, is a remarkable structure all on its own; having been consecrated in 1059, it was the site where the great poet Dante was baptized, as he remarks himself in the quote I included at the beginning of this post.

The design is quite original, seeming to gain some inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome, but overall seeming to exhibit a sort of proto-Renaissance style, which is quite mysterious given that it was built centuries before the Renaissance. I was not able to enter the Baptistery since I was a bit short on time, and it was necessary to pay an entrance fee. However, I was able to see the circular dome with its elegant frescoes from the doorway.

After visiting the Cathedral and the Baptistery, I had some dinner, walked along the River Arno, and then headed back towards the train station for my evening train back to Assisi.

As we left the station, I caught my last few glimpses of the famous Duomo and then was comfortably gliding along back towards the south. I had to be sure not to fall asleep during the train journey for fear of missing my stop. I did not wish to wake up and find myself in Foligno, which was the train’s final destination. However, after two and a half hours had elapsed slowly enough, I heard the conductor call, “Prossima fermata: Assisi!” over the loudspeaker and made my way to the door.

At that late hour (it was past 10:30 when I got to the station), there were no taxis, and I was not certain if there were any buses. Not wanting to wait, I immediately set off walking.

However, it is not a short journey on foot, and it is steeply uphill. From the valley it is not so hard as one can simply look up and see the city spread before him and walk in that general direction. However, my phone died just as I entered the city walls, and I was not comfortable enough with all the streets and alleys to find my way back to the Casa Papa Giovanni, so with the help of some slightly intoxicated men outside I restaurant, I found my way to San Francesco’s and from there to the guesthouse.

It had been a long day with an early departure and late arrival home, but it was quite worth it to get to know as extraordinary a city as Florence and bask in the richness of its history. My next post will be concerned with the next week of classes and my visit to Pisa the following weekend.

To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE