First Days In Athens

We landed in Athens two days ago and had a much smoother transition than we did with the last two legs of the trip. We're getting better at the initial setup, and the internet was working, which removed a lot of stress. Our apartment here is much more comfortable than the previous two, thought it's not in the greatest neighborhood. The weather is pretty warm and very sunny, though, like in Italy, the humidity is surprisingly low. The same temps and sunshine at home would be a bigger drag.

We've had two great days since then soaking up a lot of archaeology. You may know that Greece built and opened a new Museum of the Acropolis about 7 years ago to display material from the Acropolis still in the country and to shame England into returning the Elgin Marbles. (Which we saw and loved at the British Museum in London.)



We spent all day there yesterday. It's a rarity in any circumstances to see a new large world-class museum, and this one is beautiful and, to my amateur eyes, does a great job. The key architectural and design decision was to site it with a view of the Parthenon from the top floor, to imitate that temple's footprint, and to lay out the surviving fragments in their relative position. Less frequently noted about the new Museum of the Acropolis is the presentation of artifacts from temples prior to the Parthenon and a gallery that imitates the climb up the hill. Also, the cafe there must be the best deal in the city.








I'm not going to take sides in the Elgin debate, but I'll share a couple of observations. One, the presentation of the new museum is gorgeous and more "accurate" in scale than the gallery in London, so when you're standing there, it does seem like a shame not to be able to view them all together. Two, when we were in the Egyptian collection at the National Archaeological Museum today, most of it "gathered by Greek collectors" in the 1800's, I didn't see any case being made for repatriating all of that to Egypt.



The National Archaeological Museum is also very well done, by the way, despite a pretty shabby exterior. (More on signs of the recent economic troubles here in a later post.) We spent hours there today just following the sculpture path and never got to the second and third floors. After nearly two months of museum going and reading, we've just about got to the point where we're connecting all the periods, understanding who was influencing who, and can develop our own informed questions and guesses.

We also spent a lot of time in a special exhibit on the Antikythera Machine. I had never heard of it before.

Leaving aside that we haven't climbed the Acropolis yet, laying eyes on it is the culmination of a long dream for us. Ilene, of course, was a studied this subject avidly in college after a formative experience with a Western civ class in high school, and for as long as we've known each other we've been planning a trip to Greece without ever pulling it off.

Winding Up In Florence

Wow. Were'd the 2 1/2 weeks go? We're packing up this afternoon to leave Florence by train tomorrow to overnight at the Rome airport hotel before moving on to the last leg in Athens.

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.