Travelling to Rome

17 October 2007
Travelling to Rome, after a quick detour to Pisa, to see the famous leaning thingee. We had to get a bus to it, and it does lean fairly dramatically (the thingee, not the bus - though that was pretty rough as well). I wouldn’t trust getting on it, though people were climbing to the top quite happily. The cathedral it’s alongside is also leaning a bit, I think, though Celia wasn’t convinced.
Pisa was very hot, and it’s got hotter since. We’re travelling down the coast some of the time, though at present we’ve lost sight of it. It’s nice to be near some sea again.
My post about yesterday’s sightseeing was a bit short, and during the early hours I was thinking what else I should say, but, as though things do, they’ve now dissipated. I meant to explain what a double recorder was: seemingly it’s something you can blow two notes on at once, as it not only has two mouthpieces (very close together) but also the note holes are separated into two halves. Be interesting to have a go on. There were richly endowed early keyboards, one with some thousand jewels embedded into its surface. The serpent I spoke of yesterday is a serpent-shaped horn, seldom used in orchestras or bands these days, but reasonably popular in its brief heyday. There were some other pseudo-serpents: instruments that looked playable but were probably just for use in a theatre performance. One violin had an absolute encrustation of carving on its underside; would have been quite uncomfortable to hold, I think. It was sitting alongside a Stradivarius, that doyen of violins. There was an upright piano - literally. The keyboard was still in the same position as usual, but the strings were vertical, as they are in modern uprights. However, the difference was that these strings were arranged in the way a grand’s strings are.
The Palazzo Vecchio, apart from what I said about it yesterday, has room after room upstairs with decorated ceilings. I don’t mean a pattern painted on, but umpteen paintings, some mythic, some religious. The artists must have worked years on the place. It also has many wonderful craft works on display: items that are for practical use but have been adorned by men (perhaps women) with an artistic nature, and the results are just wonderful. Superbly fine carving in bone with details so minute you wonder how they managed to avoid damaging the work. It was the same with Michaelangelo’s David: one misstep in the making, and this enormous work would have had to have been abandoned. The actual statue is twice human size, I’d gauge, and it stands on a plinth that’s about human size again. So it towers above you. You can’t see some of the detail, but we were looking at a book after we’d viewed the statue, and the eyes are done in such a way that they appear to be looking at something. They’re not just blank, in other words. The strap of his sling is pitted, as though it was some material. The details of the limbs are extraordinary (though of course Michaelangelo wasn’t the only master of such details); but there is a sense of human flesh under the skin, and there are even veins showing in places.
We also saw statues by Benvenuto Cellini yesterday - he was virtually Michaelangelo’s equal in his ability to work with stone, and various other wonderful artists whose names didn’t mean so much to me.

Just a quick note

As I'm running out of time in the Internet shop. By the way, Italian keyboards have the ' up the top, the @ as a third option on a key in the middle row, and various other quirks. Makes typing interesting.
We spent the day visiting galleries. Missed out on the Uffizi, unfortunately, because there was a huge queue and we weren't sure how long the other galleries were open. But managed to get into the Palazzo Vecchio, the Galleria Academia (where the 'real' David statue is - and what a wonderful piece of work it is) and the Bargello, which also has some Michaelangelo work.
David is outstanding. We stood and looked at it for ages, and nothing else in the gallery comes near to it. Though there was an intriguing and quite unrelated exhibition of old and odd musical instruments there too - double recorders, for instance. And a serpent (you'll have to look it up!)
The cinquecentro gallery (not the quatrocentro, as I originally had here!) in the Palazzo Vecchio is wonderful, but there was a conference going on in half of it, so we couldn't get up close to some of the statues. Nevertheless (in spite of Celia counting all the steps we climbed) it was well worth a visit.
Left the hotel at 8.50, walked to the Uffizi, where we decided that spending an hour in a queue wasn't the best option at that point, and then spent nearly an hour trying to get in to see David. Very tiring day, but mentally and aestethically very stimulating. Though of course we had to visit a supermarket on the way back to make it complete! (And that was around four o'clock, which gives you an idea of how long we spent out gallery-visiting.) Rest day tomorrow, I suspect, when we go to Rome.

Bit more update

Celia's over in the corner reading another Ian Rankin thriller - he's become our writer of the month while we've been on holiday, even though we had to leave behind one of his novels because of the weight (we'd finished it, of course) along with a Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey) that I brought with me.
Anyway, today we've been on two city bus tours, and seen a good deal of the place, including Fiesole, the kind of 'other' city that exists near Florence. (It's virtually a suburb these days.) Seemingly the two places have a long and entwined history of conquering and being conquered. I didn't realise Florence was the capital of Italy for a relatively brief period in the 19th century, either.
Fiesole is set up on the hill above Florence. The villas there are surrounded by cypress trees, many of them planted by the British when they fell in love with the place in the 19th century. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried in one of the city's inner cemetaries, along with other British worthies.
We haven't yet got into any of the galleries - some of them were closed today - but that's on our agenda for tomorrow. I thought we'd found Michaelangelo's David, yesterday, but it turned out to be a copy they have in one of the squares here (along with some dozen other famous statues). It's full-sized, and is still a remarkable piece, but in fact the real thing is inside a major gallery here in Florence. We'll track it down tomorrow.
Michaelangelo is Florence's famous son, of course, but he shares fame in the city with Dante, Goldini and a heap of other well-known names. Did someone mention Da Vinci? Think he's well connected with the place too, if I remember rightly, but my brain's gone a bit numb listening to an endless commentary while on the buses.
Part of our day today involved doing the laundry. Things like that shouldn't happen on holiday, but of course there was no way we could carry enough clothes with us not to have to do the laundry at all. Celia sat in the laundrette chatting to a couple of New Zealanders who were there at the same time.
I've bought what she calls a 'man bag' after my wallet loss. It slings around my shoulder and curiously enough it's a lot easier way to carry far more than I could ever carry in my pockets - and it's still relatively compact. Jokes about the ' man bag' have been rife, but I've got big enough shoulders...
Tonight we dined in the Chinese restaurant across from our hotel. Had four and five course meals between us, sharing a good deal. Ended up with fried ice cream. Yup. Ice cream inside a ball of batter. In-ter-est-ing.
Our hotel room has a balcony with shutters on the outside of the window, french windows inside that (made of aluminium), ordinary french windows inside that again, lace curtains, and shutters on the inside over the glass in the inner french windows. Hope you're thoroughly confused. The only doors that actually shut out of that lot are the outside shutters.
There's an antiquated lift that will only hold the two of us (getting inside it with our backpacks was a mission), but it works well. Needs to, as we're on the fifth floor. Our hotel reception is on the second floor (piano in Italian) and another hotel has the floors between. There's a third hotel on the same side of the building somewhere, plus the two or three in the other half.
Italy is certainly different. The bathroom basin doesn't drain for ages, there are bidets everywhere you look (in the bathrooms, I mean - we had one in our bedroom in Milan), all the wall plugs are funny shapes (Switzerland's were worse, with about six holes to a plug), our room overlooks a balcony below, and right into the windows opposite.
But Florence is a delight. After Milan, it's just lovely. And sunny! Eat your heart out, all you poor freezing Dunedinites!