VETaly – Day 13: Meet David

So here we are, the last full day on this Italian not-quite-a-fortnight trip. The third and final day we are doing things in and around Florence (other than the flight home tomorrow afternoon). We passed some people today on our first stop and overheard the husband hurrying his wife because this was the beginning of their two days in Florence and it got me thinking at how we’d have cut these three days into two. Well, we didn’t have to.

Breakfast was some ‘breakfast biscuits’ that we got from the local Conad as a way to help get us out of the accommodation and see some things close to opening time. They have been really useful on this final leg of the journey and, hey, sometimes a bit of dark chocolate first thing doesn’t go amiss.

Since we are staying near the main train station, our first stop was at the Santa Maria Novella Basilica. It’s another beautiful stripy church (I do love a theme) that has a larger complex that is part of the ticket price.

Unlike Santa Croce, there aren’t many ‘big name’ tombs unless you are into your Italian history and recognise some names of the larger Italian families. Even so, there are some gorgeous tombs to have a look at and admire the craftsmanship.

As we are here in the middle of the month, they do not have all the older frescos on display – they are instead hidden behind larger paintings that I assume will just swing open on hinges. There are still some great frescos to find, such as a gorgeous Nativity scene by Botticelli that I just had to buy a postcard of in the ‘bookshop’.

Also on wider display in the main church is a hanging crucifix painted by Giotto and chapels that are covered in frescos from the 14th and 15th century. Really, the only religious building that isn’t too interesting on the inside is the one with the hour long lines. Someone really needs to be updating the guidebooks on this one.

Other than the church, there are two cloisters to wander around in – one called ‘Cloister of the Dead’ because of all the tombs – and plenty of buildings to explore. One, referred to as the green cloister, had an old fresco depicting Genesis that was damaged during the flood of 1966 and talked about the restoration efforts. On the whole, a really interesting start to the day.

A short walk away got us to the Medici chapel. The closest equivalent I have for this is when I was in Vienna and we went to see where the Hapsburgs were interred. Well, the Medicis were never one for subtlety and this did not disappoint. They even had a bunch of interesting reliquaries in the entrance hall. The entrance fee is a little steep for what is essentially two rooms, but what two rooms they are.

The first one you get to is the major one, a large octagonal room where six of the heads of the Medici house are commemorated. They aren’t actually in the giant granite urns, but instead are interred underneath. As with so much in their life, this room is a giant show of a family that (by this point) were beginning to fall from grace – like how only two of the six tombs actually have statues.

Because this room is constructed so much in the round, a single photo doesn’t really do it a lot of justice. It was also just too busy for me to get away with standing in the middle of the room and doing a photosphere.

The second room is smaller and contains the tombs of other members of the family. It also contains a number of Michelangelo sculptures that really show how he had no idea how to properly carve a nude woman. Just beautiful naked men, tucking their penis and wearing lemons. Granted these are all still amazing art pieces and I’m someone who can’t even thread a needle.

Time for lunch and this meant I got to go to the Mercato Centrale. The ground floor has some places offering sandwiches, but it’s mostly an actual food market. So we went upstairs where there’s a lot of different food vendors. Since my husband had been wanting a pizza slice lunch this whole trip, that’s where we ended up. Both were delicious, but special mention to the meatballs on the pizza to the right. Utterly delicious.

Around the food market, there are also other market stalls – but more along the lines of leather goods, some jewellery and touristy things. Between this and the food market, we did a lot of our gift shopping for the in-laws.

We still had well over an hour until our reservations at the Galleria dell’Accademia, so that was enough time for us to venture over to the former San Marco Monastery. This is exactly what it sounds like, an old monastery that you can visit and see all the frescos that are painted inside. Most of the artworks coming from monks who resided here.

As a place it has some pretty weird opening hours, so we got a bit lucky there. You start in the cloister, which has its own set of frescos and there are other rooms (like the refectory) to go in and look at the artworks.

The unique selling point is when you go inside the main building as it still has the cells of the monks divided as they were, each with a fresco inside. Many of them are variations on the theme of Saint Domenico weeping at Jesus on the cross, but every now and then you get something a little different.

By the time we were finished, we had enough time to go collect our tickets and get in the shorter line to see the Galleria dell’Accademia so that my husband could see Michelangelo’s David for the first time. What a lot of people in the queue ahead of us didn’t seem to get is that this isn’t just a place for David, but there are other artworks here too. Not too many, but a fair few. Then again, we were here mainly for David so who am I to judge.

David is early enough on the walking route to stop too much confusion, but in that same room you also have the Prisoners. These are a group of 5 partial-sculptures by Michelangelo where either the contract fell through or he was unable to finish for some other reason. Given their partial nature, it’s really interesting to just see how some of his pieces look as works in progress. There’s also a weird sadness to seeing these forms who will never escape their marble prison.

Now onto David. This is my second time seeing him and, like before, I am still struck by just how tall he is. Sure, there’s a replica near the Palazzo Vecchio, but just him on his own really helps to emphasise the height. It also makes me chuckle at how the seating here is behind David, meaning there’s just a row of people staring up at his rear end. Look there’s nothing much I can add to the discourse on David – it’s just really amazing to see in real life.

We were some of the 5% of visitors who went upstairs to the rest of the gallery, but there’s not much here to say. However, there is a room that is really worth visiting. There’s a large room leading off from the David room which just contains plaster models of statues, i.e. the models they would create to take measurements from before making the final stone versions. What’s really neat is that two of them were statues we’d have seen in other places and maybe aren’t quite at the forefront of the memory.

Time for the final gelato of the trip, which means I get to have pistachio as a flavour bookmark to the stracciatella that I had back on the first night. I also had a scoop of mint as this was the last major flavour for me to have before calling it a day. This means that I have had 22 different flavours of gelato in 13 days, the best probably being the banana scoop from Bologna. However, this pistachio was a strong one to finish on, so it probably comes second.

Our final stop of the trip was at a church on the other side of the river where there are plenty of ‘no photo’ signs in the main building. This is the Basilica Di Santo Spirito and it’s a shame that they were strict on the photography as they had one hell of a carved altarpiece that I hope to remember. But hey, it’s in their gift to prohibit photos – just wish this hadn’t been the final stop on our trip.

We then went back to the accommodation to chill and prepare to pack before heading out for dinner. One thing we’ve yet to do in Italy is visit like a local food chain, something we tend to do where we can. Thankfully we had one such place not too far away and it was perfect because it makes our final meal an homage to the food heaven of the holiday.

Dispensa Emilia is a chain that is all about food from the Emilia region – aka the historical region with Bologna as its capital. We each ended up having a selection of stuffed tigelle, mine was the classic group which was just the perfect way to experience them properly for the first time.

So that’s it. Nearly two full weeks of things done in Italy and boy am I going to enjoy having some chill time before it is back to work on Monday. Some repeats, a lot of new things and three provinces visited. I ended up calling this series of posts ‘VETaly’ because I thought it was cool to be seeing parts of Veneto, Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany as we made our way down the top of Italy’s boot.

We already have a short break booked for November, so it won’t be as long before my next travelogue. Then hopefully some exciting things for 2024.

VETaly: Day 12 – Florence’s Galleries and Gardens

Throughout this whole trip, it feels like we’ve not had full consecutive days in the same city. You could argue for the two Venice days, but the islands of Murano and Burano feel so outside the city proper that I don’t feel it counts. I guess that’s what made today (and then tomorrow) that bit stranger. No bus, boat or train in sight for a second consecutive day in Florence, just increasingly tired feet.

Fears of large queues dragged us out of bed fairly early and we made it to the Bargello museum at just after 9 am. This former palace-turned-prison-now-art gallery focuses mainly on sculpted art from the 15th to 17th centuries. I kept it vague about ‘sculpted art’ because between the marble, bronzes, terracottas and ivories, I wasn’t sure how else to describe it.

The most famous pieces here are bronzes by Donatello and marble pieces by Michelangelo. Donatello’s bronze of David is especially special to see in real life, especially as we are hoping to see Michelangelo’s own David tomorrow. Also cool because, at least according to the card, this particular David brought the male nude back into sculpture… again interesting considering the nudeness of Michelangelo’s own David was part of a teacher being forced to resign in the US just last year.

Outside of these larger pieces, it is worth talking about the volume and quality of the bronzes and glazed terracotta works. I kept thinking that some of the glazed terracotta art pieces might be made of porcelain, they just looked so shiny and beautiful hanging up on the wall.

We also found many cool bronzeworks depicting animals and various scenes in mythology. I really enjoyed a group of bronze birds that were once part of a rich person’s grotto.

Given that this building has a complex history of its own, many of the rooms are themselves pieces of art. There are old frescoes from the Giotto school that are fading in places now. Even areas that had been repurposed into jail cells have painted ceilings because of their past life as a palace room. Madness.

After a good bit of time here, we needed some kind of breakfast. So we stopped by a café on the way to our next location and had a coffee and a pistachio aragostine. Sure it was small, but it was full of delicious pistachio creme with some super flaky pastry. It kept us going just that little bit longer.

Next up was the Basilica Di Santa Croce. Now this one was beautiful on the outside and was extremely interesting on the inside. This church is major enough to have some pretty big names interred here such as Galileo, Machiavelli and Michelangelo himself. This was also the intended transfer space for Dante’s bones had the Ravenna monks not stolen and lost them.

There is another Donatello here on general display, with another of his in a prayer only area. In reliquary-watch, there is a chapel dedicated to a ‘Blessed’ woman called Umiliana where her head and her body are in separate vessels that were separated for centuries and only reunited back in 2008. I just find this all so interesting.

The tickets into Santa Croce also get you into some cloisters, the refectory and an additional outside chapel. On a sunny day, like today, the cloisters made for such a peaceful place to have a walk around before stepping into see more works like the glazed terracotta of the Pazzi Chapel or the massive tree of life fresco in the refectory.

For the remainder of the afternoon, we would be on the other side of the river Arno, which also allowed for me to have an excuse to drop in on a web reviewers favourite for lunch. Gustopizza is on so many lists of places to try and, given the line to eat in, we went for the shorter route of having it to take away and eat on some nearby steps.

10-15 minutes later and we were eating their Pesto pizza on the stairs of a church that, had it been open on Wednesday’s, we would have gone inside afterwards. This is a pizza with pesto oil and burrata on… which gets interesting to have as take away. Thankfully they gave us plenty of napkins so I could maul that cheese like a bear and spread it out. Talk about a fantastic bit of pizza.

We only had to walk a few blocks to get to our final area of the day: the Pitti Palace and the adjoining Boboli Gardens. First it was the Pitti Palace where, for both of us, the art fatigue of nearly two weeks of churches and art started to get to us a bit once we finished the first floor.

The first floor of the Pitti Palace is arguably the most interesting part to look at. Sadly half of it was unavailable due to renovation works, but we still got the Palatine Galleries where most of the good stuff is anyway.

This palace has its own history with the Medici family, Napoleon and the Habsburgs all having some form of ownership of it. As such, rooms have chopped and changed with most of them having more recent decoration than the 16th century style of the Medicis.

Each room has a name and a general theme in terms of the ceiling paintings and other general decoration. Then there is all the other artwork to be found. The interesting thing is just how the paintings and sculptures don’t feel grouped in any other way, unless it specifically agrees with the name of the room (i.e. a Venus statue in the ‘Venus Room’ or murals of Hercules in the ‘Hercules Room’).

In one of the rooms, I was laying on my back on a bench trying to get as much of the ceiling decorations into frame. I really am going to miss these painted ceilings.

On the second floor is the modern art wing… which mostly means things from the 1700s and 1800s. I guess compared to everything on the first floor, this really is comparatively modern. As things had gone away from the more fantastical mythological and religious paintings to more portraits and pictures of battles, this is when we both hit a bit of an art wall. I mean, one room was literally just cow paintings. Still, we saw some really cool pieces here and a bunch of paintings featuring dogs in various states of sleep or play.

We paid a quick visit to the collection of Russian religious iconography, but by this point we wanted some nature time and the Boboli Gardens were there across the courtyard just beckoning us over.

Built on the already existing Boboli Hill, the Boboli Gardens are a landscaped garden that makes great use of its physical geography. Sadly, since it was October, most of the fountains and grottos have been switched off, so we can only get an impression of what they would normally be like.

Still though, we were able to take a good two hours to meander our way around to make sure we saw all the places pointed out on the map (even the Fountain of Tiny Birds… which was not running and had no tiny birds). Towards the end of our route, we came across the only one of the grottos that was still running – and no one else was there. So that was a nice surprise.

Other than being in the green or going on walks, a lot of people are here in the gardens as it is a well manicured garden that, in places, has beautiful views of the surrounding areas. From the very entrance, you get a lovely view of the Duomo and Bell Tower. Further up near the Porcelain Museum (which was closed) you get a stunning photo opportunity of some surrounding Tuscan countryside.

I can see that, with enough drinks in the backpack, this could be a place where you can laze around for hours and hours whilst taking your time wafting around the twisting paths with tree arches, water features and outdoor sculptures. I mean that’s what one group was doing when they asked me to take a picture of their group.

We ventured back to the hotel to drop things off before heading out for dinner. This is probably the longest I have been without eating something that is in the East Asian family of foods and this will continue for a bit longer.

For starters we split some quite traditional bruschetta and a plate of ham and melon. Don’t think I’ve tried ham and melon before as, most of the time, I am not the biggest fan of melon when in the UK. I think I get it now, the salt and sweet combination just works so well.

As a main, I had gnocchi with gorgonzola and walnuts. Well, I wish I was not in public as I could have just licked the plate clean. For me, this was one of the top dishes of this holiday and I am so glad that I did not have to share it. Only wish there had been a bit more of it as I didn’t want the plate to end.

For dessert, we had to go out for the daily gelato. I can now add strawberry and Ventri’s ‘Summer Mix’ to the flavour list. Means that tomorrow I have to now find pistachio to finish off the list, which in Florence will not be too hard.

Tomorrow is the last full day in Italy before heading home in the early afternoon on Friday. At this point, I know I am going to welcome a familiar bed and not having to apply sunscreen. Sure it is going to be cold and rain, but hey that’s home.