Saturday
Oct, 13, 2001
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Saturday Oct, 13, 2001 |
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Uffizi |
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It is cooler outside today and feels good. We are meeting in the lobby of the other hotel and I'm there early. My friends go back and forth, go to pick up quickly developed film, get ready to go. One wants to taxi to the museum and 'save her feet for the museum.' My buddy David (not the big tall statue but my work buddy) and I walk. We wandered toward the Piazza della Signoria and found the right entrance. Our buddy's husband came out and gave us tickets to get in. We mounted the stairs (and stairs and stairs) to the top floor where the art is held. We wandered about, in and out of the rooms and with heads jerked up in the corridor to see the grostesques painted there. Seeing The Birth of Venus in person and all those famous paintings one after another. We immersed ourselves, we looked from afar and at details. Then we had a break for water and soft drinks and snacks. And we dove into paintings again. About three hours slipped away. One could have stayed longer for sure. My friend who has an art degree said that she'd read that every single work was significant in this place. I believe it. But at some point you have to go to the book shop and pick up postcards with the famous paintings on them as souvenirs. I did that and bought a few other gifts to take home. We split up and one of my buddies and I shopped our way back to the hotels. We tarried in a Murano glass store, reminding me of going to Murano itself a few years back.
We split up and I rested up some and then walked and shopped and had a beer. They have lovely paper things, extraordinary leather and jewelry and fashions and cloth. And amazingly tasteful displays. It's enough to make me want to wear high heels, be fashionable, carry a purse. Well, OK, almost.
In the noisy streets, buzzing with cabs, scooters, motor bikes, buses and a few private cars including really tiny cute ones like Smart cars, I encountered a procession led by clerics bearing flags and (silent) loud speakeres with (apparently) lay people following with robes over their street clothes and some priests and nuns pulling up the rear. They were quiet and the street turned quiet with them. I wandered to an area near the train station with more prosaic hotels and a neighborhood of blacks and other foreigners. Everywhere there are street vendors with souvenirs and cheap leather things.
I meet my buddies for dinner and we go to a rather nice place to send off my work buddy and my friend's step daughter...who go home tomorrow. Food and wine and talk of the wonders of Florence.
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shop window Firenze
the original is in the Uffizi..so famous that even the Simpsons have parodied it
cycles everywhere
"Imagine there's
no countries
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???
JUST
TYPING