Sarah searches for a shot from above the Hall of 500.
The palazzo has a porch on the southeast corner near the top of the building. It affords some nice views of town plus you can see the rooftops around our apartment. This shot looks southeast towards the hills across the Arno.
This is looking directly east (I guess) towards our apartment and the top of Santa Croce beyond. If you look a Santa Croce's tower and follow a line straight down to the greenery between apartments, that is directly across a little alley from our perilous terrace. Little Cat somehow manages to get back and forth from the rooftops on either side of the alley. Sarah thought about calling Kellin and telling her to pop her head out of her rooftop window to see if we could see her. We'll have to try that experiment next time.
This shot looks east along our street, Via dei Neri (called Via della Ninna at this point) towards Via dei Leoni. Somewhere among the bikes below is Kellin's bike Alessandro.
And this is the view west from the same vantage point looking down on the Loggia dei Lanzi. The columns on the left travel south to form the eastern part of the U-shaped Uffizi Gallery. The loggia (with all the statues in it) is on the north end of the Uffizi's U-shape. There is always a really annoying bottleneck of people here when you are going from the Piazza Signoria toward our place because the gap between the loggia and the Palazzo Vecchio is small. The bottleneck becomes pretty bad because there are always 500 tourists standing there either gawking at the copy of David, Perseus, and the other sculptures, or marvelling at the annoying mimes that are usually there. I don't trust mimes. They have small hands and they smell like cabbage. Every last one of them.
Upon exiting, I made Sarah pose for her now famous "laughing at the sculpture's naked butt" pose. Classic. We left the Palazzo Vecchio and headed south across the Arno to our next location, the Brancacci Chapel.
The most convenient bridge from one location to the other was the Ponte Vecchio. It is possible to get good pictures of this always crowded bridge, but I did not succeed. But you can get an idea of what it looks like. There is construction on it and there are always people in the way (usually more than this), but you can see how there are little shops on both sides of the bridge. Most of the shops were closed when we crossed, but I like theway the shops looked when they're closed better than when they're open. It looks just like a regular street, but it is actually a bridge that was built in 1345. There had been a bridge at this spot since at least Roman times, but they were destroyed and rebuilt many times over the years. As the Germans were retreating from Florence towards the end of WWII they left the Ponte Vecchio intact even though they destroyed every other bridge in Florence.
On the way to the chapel we went into Santo Spirito, a basilica with a very boring exterior, south of the Arno. It was begun by Brunelleschi in 1444.
I really don't remember much about it, except that a friar came around and asked us to leave in five minutes because they had to prepare for mass. Also, there are copies of one of Sarah's favorite and one of Sarah's least favorite Michelangelo sculptures in it. They have a copy of his Pieta from St. Peter's in Rome and his Christ the Redeemer from Santa Maria sopra Minerva (remember my picture from the Rome postings? Of course you do.), also in Rome.
Anyway, on to the chapel.
The Brancacci Chapel is a side chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine. Even though I've seen about 5000 chapels paid for by rich families inside of churches here in Italy, for some reason I was expecting a stand-alone building for the chapel. I was wrong. We got there as mass was ending, so we waited outside for them to close the church and open the side entrance that allowed access to the chapel only. We weren't allowed to explore the rest of the church while it was closed. I really didn't know what to expect because I had never heard of it before. It's a small room on the right of the main altar that was paid for by Pietro Brancacci. The patron of the decoration of the chapel was Felice Brancacci, a descendant of Pietro. It has been called the Sistine Chapel of the early Renaissace for its very influential painting cycle. The painting were mainly done by Masaccio and some were finished by Filippino Lippi. Sarah said that it is a continuous narrative. It influenced many Renaissance artists, including Michelangelo.
I hope I got all that information right. Sarah's usually not around when I post these things and I am trying to remember what she told me.
I really liked the head of the snake that is watching Adam and Eve.
1 comment:
Fig leaves - Where are the fig leaves?
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