I was too busy to keep updating much here about what we've been doing, but the short version is we loved Florence. As the guidebooks say, you can walk everywhere, and we did. We hit absolutely every sight noted in our short guidebook, and we ended up circling around to several sites for a second visit. We've gotten used to wandering from one gallery to the next without seeing anyone else. Today we even found our way to a Medici library so overlooked that no one onsite spoke English, and the guard couldn't understand why we were there. He kept trying to direct us to the Medici Palace down the street and once we got in, the librarian seemed pretty surprised to have a visitor.
It was interesting to me how different Florence felt from Rome. One, though it is overrun with tourists in the same way, they are much more patient with us here. Most everyone is wonderfully easygoing. Two, it feels like a city entirely devoted to a 100-year period of art history -- 1450 to 1550 -- with very little reference to proto-history, antiquity, the Roman Republic, the middle ages, the Baroque, the turmoil of different papacies, etc. Whereas in Rome, all of that can be seen literally layered on top of one other wherever anyone has dug a hole. There isn't even very much presentation of Renaissance history beyond the art. If you want to learn about the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, why they were building all all these palaces and towers, or the economic and social factors that nurtured all this art, you're on your own.
A typical day for me here was an hour or so working before Ilene got up, hitting a museum about mid morning, a big Italian lunch, hanging around a piazza reading as much and as fast as I could on Renaissance art history, coffee, gelato, more reading, and a big dinner. It was a great crash course in a single period of art. The second visits, in particular, were a luxury that make all the difference in what I experienced and learned. You can concentrate a lot more on the art when you walk in already knowing where the bathrooms are.
We weren't so successful with the side trips because of a couple of sick days and some weather delays. Long story short, I ended up tagging along on a wine tour that even Ilene didn't enjoy and didn't go along with her to Sienna yesterday, which I would have much preferred.
We've been living a little rough and are tired. Our landlord was great and the location of our apartment couldn't be beat -- a few steps from the Uffizi, the Arno, and Santa Croce. But the apartment is a carved out cell in a medieval building with just enough light and air to breed mosquitoes but not to dry our laundry. The airport hotel tomorrow is going to feel like a holiday.
Next up, leapfrogging back over ancient Roman ruins to the ancient Greek art that inspired everything we've been seeing so far.
