This is my third try at posting what we did on Wed of this week. We went to Florence with a senior couple, Denis and Jackie Hawkins, who live and work in the area offices in Germany. He works with me on finance and she with the mental health issues of missionaries (young and old) for about 12 missions in Europe. She mostly uses skype to work with missionaries, and did it in her hotel room, while he sat with me helping me with things I am still learning. They are going home from their 23 month mission this fall and are making another tour of Europe, they were in Rome last week. He worked with me on Monday and Tuesday and then asked if we could go with them to Florence on Wed, which the president readily agreed to. We left about 8:30 am, riding the Frecccaosa, the red arrow train (fast), getting in at 10:30, and we had 11:15 entrance tickets to the Uffizi Gallery, one of the world's most famous. I will post a few of the hundreds of pix I took, with some brief comments. Again, this is my third try, for the other two I was about finished and during proofreading must have done something wrong, because this blog lost my pix and comments and I had to start all over.
Train station at Rogoredo, Milano, closest to where we live, There is a subway, bus and train station here and is very convenient. It cost 100 round trip for each of us to go to Florence. It takes almost 4 hours to drive there on the freeway.
Out the window of our car we could see the countryside, until about Bologna. From there down it is hilly and the train goes mostly underground for about an hour.
Occasionally the train came up and we could see the hills, this one with a church on top. The lines are for the train electrical wires. The train was very fast and smooth and pleasant to ride.
The train station at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, looks pretty much like I remember it 50 years ago, although we didn't have the red train. We had to go on the milk route, which stopped at almost every little town.
We had to walk a few blocks through downtown Florence to get to the Uffizi Gallery. There are few cars because there are so many tourists and the streets are narrow.
The Uffizi, literally means offices, were built in the 1500s by the Medici family, which ruled Florence and the Renissance for almost 400 years--the US isn't even that old. They were government offices, three stories (there were no elevators then) with long hallways and large office rooms, which now house art collected by the Medici and their successors.
It is arranged chronologically, this is one of the first things we saw, a Greek casket from about 400 BC.
Again, there are 3 stories of hallways, with pained ceilings (from the 1500s), doors leading into offices, now with art, and with a lot of statues and paintings in the hallways. Notice the many small portraits along the ceiling, which have been there for over 500 years.
.Looking out the window, you can see the piazza below, with more art.
If you aren't into Greek and Roman nudes, and hundreds of Madonna and Child, you may not like this art.
One of the Ceasars made in his lifetime, with black and white marble.
At least six feet high, made for a church. There are hundreds of altarpieces, which were taken from churches by the Medici. When they saw one they liked, they took it and had something else done to take its place.
It's amazing how large some of these are, and they used real gold in the paint, so the light can reflect from it. The colors are still very bright.
Detail from a large altar piece of Gabriel saying the first Hail Mary, the words, in Latin of course, are written between his mouth and Mary, in print that comes off the surface of the wood.
I am still in awe of the ceilings, and tried to take a few pix of them. It would have been good to tour this place on a liter, looking up, because there are lots of interesting scenes on the ceilings.
Inside one of the old offices off the hallway,
I don't know whether you can enlarge and read this or not, but the signs are in Italian and English.
Detail from a painting, showing Satan about to drop a bomb on some poor soul. Generally the backgrounds are recognizable places and where people are shown, as in spectators, they are the rich people who paid for the painting.
A detail from the ceiling, showing what this part of Florence actually looked like in the 1500s, when this was painted The large building is the city hall, in front of which Michaelangelo's David originally stood, and where now stands a copy.
Detail from the bottom of the painting, showing a dog. Italians still love their cani.
There are a few Jesus paintings, but Mary and baby Jesus were the most popular, every artist had to make them. Many also show Jesus's cousin, John, who was beheaded, which was a common way of getting rid of someone, so the people could relate to it.
There were a few with John the Baptist's head
Looking out the window on the third floor you could see the city hall with its large tower and the dome of the duomo (cathedral) in the background.
Turn around and look out the other window and you can see the River Arno, with its famous Ponte Vecchio (old bridge). According to Dad (Lamro) who camped on this side of the river for six months in a tent during the winter, they did not bomb out this bridge because it was not wide enough to get a tank through--all the rest were bombed out.
If you have ever taken an art history class, you will remember many of the paintings in this gallery.
This round one, which is very large, is by Michelangelo.
Michaelangelo's room has red walls.
Little cousin John playing with Jesus.
Many of the signs include Braille
One of the most famous paintings had thick glass in front of it for obvious reasons.
Someone liked pomegranite, so they painted baby Jesus with one
This ancient Greek youth reminds me of one of our missionaries, who needs to begin shaving
End of a hallway, with large paintings, statues and, of course, tourists.
Not all of the ceilings are painted with pictures.
Martin Luther was admired by the Medici, so they had this painting of him and his wife. The Medici family produced two popes, because they could buy their priesthood.
This sign is next to the bust of the Emperor Nero as a child. This announces its restoration. Below is the bust.
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Look from the third floor down and you can see statues of all the most famous from Nero's time through about the 1700s
Look out another window and you can see houses where regular Florentine people still live, and lived when Dad would take his army rations in the evening, when they stopped shooting at the Germans. The Italian housewives would cook up the American rations, along with what they had, and make nice home made meals. Dad said he tried to teach them the gospel in his poor Italian with no translated materials. He also said the electricity went off at night, so the Germans could not see what to shoot at, so they used lamps and candles behind closed shuttered windows, which they still have.
In the blue rooms they have the "foreign" masters, like Rembrandt.
Rembrandt's self portrait
Not all of the paintings, this is by a German, are very attractive. This is the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Looks like they ate a few too many figs.
Madonna with a long neck, which is very famous
The master painters had workshops, and they concentrated on painting the faces, while their students worked on the details, like this. If you look closely, two of the flowers have faces, perhaps the budding artists wanted to remember themselves.
There weren't as many crucifictions as I thought there might be, but there were a few.
I didn't know whether to include this famous painting, for obvious reasons, but thought the two people in the background, with a little girl apparently looking in a chest, were interesting.
Before I left the Uffizi (after 3 hours) I had to go to the bathroom, and Italy is notoriously short of public restrooms, so I went in the only restroom at the Uffizi. I had to walk down into the basement, a long way, and passed by such scenes as this, with old stones onto which people had thrown down money. I did not realize, until I got to the bottom and saw the next pix, that the Medici had torn down an old church to build the their office building.
A diagram of the old church that was torn down, with a sign, about in the middle, showing "you are here."
Outside is the portico with more statues.
Turn around from the last pix and you see the front door of the city hall, with a copy of Michaelangelo's David (the original was moved in the 1800s into its own building, to keep him out of the weather). Inside this building is also a museum, which we did not have time to see. There are many museums and art galleries in Florence.
A couple of blocks away is the cathedral, the baptistry and the bell tower. The baptistry, an 8 sided building, is in front. Now, if they did not think baptism was so important and did it by immersiion, why did they build such a large impressive building. There is a large font in the baptistry, but they have a statue of John baptizing Jesus by pouring water on his head from a sea shell, obviously a later addition.
The bronze doors to the baptistry are very famous. We did not enter because we didn't have a ticket.
We did go into the duomo, or cathedral, because it was free, although they moved us in and out like cattle. Of course, I wanted to take pix of the organs, of which there are 3, two on the walls and one large one on the floor. This church is very plain inside, unlike outside and the other churches in Florence.
Even though there are a lot of tourists, and this is not the height of tourist season yet, we felt safe, because about only cars we saw were police,and there were army soldiers, with machine guns,and regular cops, all around us watching carefully. This is fairly recent. I am sure Italy fears radical Islamic issues like other famous cities in the world.
Well, I am going to post this before the blog dies again. I will write more about our city tour on a bus and other things we did.
Very nice post. Thanks for keeping us all up to date.
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