Florence Notes

I was happy to walk through the city that gave us the phenomenon called the Florentine Miracle. Brunelleschi’s dome is undoubtedly the centerpiece of the city and no amount of awe-struck staring at the Duomo felt sufficient. I wonder if it was the contrast between the white exterior and the brownish-red dome.

The Uffizi Gallery, despite its relatively smaller size, may contain the greatest concentration of canonical masterpieces anywhere in the world. Boticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, Carravagio, Artemisia Gentileschi and others can easily be spotted here. The gallery was originally a building commissioned by Cosimo Medici and built by Vasari to accomodate the Florentine bureaucracy.

I managed to also brave the queue and visually devour Michelangelo’s David. Nothing prepares you for the real figure. While queuing up, I had a long chat with a tall, lanky, goofy American. He had been to Pune and Bangalore. On enquiring further, turned out that he was an Astrophysicist who’s lectured at the Raman Research Institute and was returning from the Vatican Observatory after a discussion with the Jesuit astrophysicists! How diverse can the world be.

A day trip from Florence took us to the Tuscan countryside. The 400 kms which we covered followed much of the Arno Valley and for the most part we got to see the rolling Tuscan hills with vineyards, olive groves, and hilltop villages, backgrounded by the Apennine ridges. The Siena cathedral has some stunning frescos by Pinturicchio, who was assisted by a young Raphael. While the Leaning Tower in Pisa is a fun place to get clicked, the real attraction should ideally be the Pisa Baptistery of St. John.

It is believed that it was Machiavelli’s desire for Florence to have the best that drove him to write ‘The Prince‘. While reading Ada Palmer’s ‘Inventing the Renaissance‘ last night, I came across this:

Do you ever play the game where you imagine sending a message back in time to tell some historical figure something you really, really wish they could have known? To tell Galileo everyone agrees he was right? To tell Schwarzschild we confirmed black holes? To tell Socrates we still have Socratic dialogs after 2,300 years? I used to struggle about what to tell Machiavelli. That he’s more famous than the popes and rulers of his day? That his name became a synonym for evil? That children in distant continents study his works to understand the minds of tyrants? That his ideas are now central to the statecraft of a hundred nations he doesn’t have names for? But now I know what I would say:

Florence is on the UNESCO international list of places so precious to all the nations of the Earth that we have agreed never to attack or harm them, and to protect them with all the resources at our command