Un weekend a Firenze

"Oh My God its the David!" - Overheard in Florence.
Not quite. But close.

When in Italy, Florence is a necessity. It is the birthplace of the Renaissance, a city that represents arguably the most important artistic and cultural movement in the history of the western world. And its just excellent. This past week seemed the time to go and see what the place was all about; John and Sam were off causing problems for British people in London, so Ethan and I elected to make the obligatory Florence trek.

[And yes - this is the second post in the span of three days, which is a significant accomplishment for me. It was critical because I was behind and Spring break--which will no doubt require substantial space--begins tomorrow.] Poi, andiamo. Firenze:

The story begins about three weeks ago when we met Lizzie, Morgan, and Christina, three American students studying abroad in Florence and visiting Rome for the weekend. We met in a bar in Trastevere and got to talking, and after a while, an offer came to the table proposing a visit to Florence and a place to stay for Ethan and me at their apartment. While it was the nicest of offers, it seemed a bit far fetched at the time. Nonetheless, the offer went down in the books and when it came time to head to Florence, we gave them a call. It was a long shot, but we figured we’d roll the dice. To our surprise, they were going to be around that Friday night and insisted that we come and stay with them. While yes, it was a bit unusual to go and stay in completely uncharted territory, something about them seemed a bit of alright, so we took the plunge and packed the bags.

Ethan and I hopped on an express train from Roma at about 10:30 on Friday morning—a definite smart move. Although its about 15 euro more expensive, its more than half as long and so much comfortable. It was a great ride and I snuck in an absolutely critical nap.

Santa Maria Novella, architect Leon Battista Alberti

Right off the train, Ethan and I were confronted with one of my personal Florentine favorites—the church of Santa Maria Novella. Designed by Leon Battista Alberti in the mid 15^th century, the church represented a critical architectural step for Christian churches. The medieval era was plagued with the need to get away from the architectural style of antiquity. As a result, the pre-Renaissance churches seem to go best with a rainy, grey day. With Santa Maria Novella, we see an entirely new approach to the façade and an interior that reassesses the harmony of antiquity. On a completely unrelated note, the church was mentioned in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron as the place where the brigata first met and decided to pursue their 10 day journey outside of Florence to escape the plague. I took a course on this book last semester at Columbia, and it has since been a goal to get to place and see it for myself. Excellent. Professor Barolini, I will send pictures.

Unfortunately, our stay at S.M. Novella was short-lived as the church was closed at the time, so we made our way towards the city center. Florence, in a word, is tiny. Compared to Rome, it’s a village. Before we knew it, we had reached the River Arno and were on the first bridge west of the Ponte Vecchio. The weather was absolutely spectacular at that point, making for a classic storybook moment. We paused and briefly absorbed.

After due time for absorption, we made our way onwards through the south side of the Arno, winding our way towards the entrance to the Ponte Vecchio. We crossed, paused, looked again, and finished at the other side where we found the Piazza del Pesce, shouldered by a really nice portico of columns and crossvaults that went along the river. We walked along that until we met the Uffizi gallery, where we had the brains to stop and reserve tickets for the following morning. Great idea by us. The gentleman at the ticket office seemed shocked to hear Italian from us. English is rampant in Florence, which is pretty sad, because they certainly weren’t speaking English in 1475 and at points, it feels like that’s what year it is when you are walking around.

Obligatory

We called the girls and got directions to their apartment. After a little bit of embarrassing backtracking, we finally made it there and were greeted with relieving hospitality. I cannot lie. Ethan and I were pretty concerned that we were being way too ridiculous trying to stay at the house of people we had known for under two hours. Luckily, Lizzie and Christina (and Morgan, who was not there when arrived) belong to the small contingent the human race that thinks nothing of it.

Gilberti's Gates of Paradise

We had seen a lot on our high speed walk from Santa Maria Novella to the apartment on the other side of Florence, and we were anxious to start really exploring, but luckily Lizzie and Christina were there to remind us that we had time. It became immediately clear that we were going to have to stay Saturday night as well in order to give us enough time so see all that we wanted to see, so we eased off the throttle on Friday afternoon and did some less touristy Florentine things.

After an excellent panino at Gustopanino, a favorite Florentine spot by the Church of S. Spirito designed by Filippo Brunelleschi (he’s kind of an important dude), we made our way to the spectacular Boboli gardens accessed through Piazza Pitti. They are situated on the south side of the Arno perched a top a hill that offers some amazing views of Florence and its surrounding Tuscan landscape. We took our time weaving through the different paths and soaked in as much we could before descending back towards the city.

View from the Boboli

On the way back to the apartment, Ethan and I sampled Florence’s famous Vivoli gelato. I went with cioccolato—which, being a staple flavor, is critical for the initial taste test—and fragola. The strawberry, to my surprise, was the greatest thing to tingle the taste buds in a long time. Top notch sugary cold greatness.

Florence dusk. Nice.

We had come to Florence planning on going to dinner at Acqua al 2, which was recommended to us by friends. Lizzie and Christina admitted that it was good, but guarded against its touristy, rushed atmosphere. They suggested a place called La Giostra instead, so we made the necessary arrangements for dinner at 8.30. More on that later.With the weather being so good, we decided to hike up to the Piazza Michelangelo with some wine for the sunset before heading to dinner. That was excellent. See below.

Ethan and Christina, La Giostra

Dinner was brilliant. I hadn’t thrown down the big bucks for a top notch Italian restaurant at that point, and I got to do that at La Giostra. It required the big bucks, but it was top notch. Once seated, a welcoming waiter comes to your table truly interested in providing you with a stellar eating experience. That was great, because he helped us design our dinner and pick the best wine pairings. After the complimentary glass of prosecco and huge appetizer plate that was outstanding and filled with all kinds of fun stuff, for il primo I had an apple ravioli followed by the ossa bucco for il secondo. Pardon the language, but they were both fucking fantastic. Were talking about erious serious food here. We had a great bottle of white to go with the appetizers and the pasta ravioli, and we opted for a reserve bottle of 2001 Chianti to go with the meat. Great decision by Ethan and me; we were at that point not concerned about the price because we were going to get destroyed by the bill no matter what.

Lots of fun, lots of food, lots of wine, and lots of euros later, we all left La Giostra absolutely content with our existence on this planet. We fiddled around Florence for a bit before heading back to crash. Funnily enough, Lizzie and Christina were leaving in the middle of the night to go to a Citizen Cope concert, so they disappeared to a different country while Ethan and I recharged the batteries for the upcoming day of grand touring.

Florence night

In a classic example of male idiocy, we set the alarm for 8:30 and woke up at 10:15 in a complete panic. The Uffizi reservation was in 15 minutes and we had to execute morning preparations in the empty house of strangers with absolute, seamless efficiency. Somehow we were able to do this and get out the door with pastries in hand that I bought while Ethan was in the shower. We moved at full walking speed to the Uffizi and just snuck in past the guard with some well timed use of Italian, which enabled us to get past the line of Americans yacking at the guy in English. Absolutely clutch, because it would have been horrible to start off our huge list of Florence sites with a big screw up.

The collection at the Uffizi was great. We hit all of the highlights: the Botticelli room with “The Birth of Venus” and “La Primavera” among others, DaVinci’s “Annunciation”, tons of Raffaello, all of the Caravaggio, and a bunch of other wild stuff. I know its wrong to write the least about the artwork, but it’s the only thing that is useless to attempt to describe. You just have to go see them.

We hightailed over to the Galleria Accademica, which houses Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of David. I guess you could say it deserves all of the hype that it gets. I nabbed one of the few seats in the room and spent about 2 hours in there drawing. David is not easy to draw, but I was able to get a good one of his face and a good one of his torso. There are also a bunch of neat unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo in the hall leading up to the David.

From David, we made our way to S. Lorenzo, the excellent church that is now attached to the Medici Chapel. S. Lorenzo is full of important stuff. Here’s a review. It was first consecrated in 393, making it the first Florentine cathedral. It underwent an 11^th century reconstruction before being renovated by Brunelleschi in 1418. Inside you find works by Donatello, Lippi, Settigiano, and Bronzino. Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy is inside the church, decorated by Donatello, and off of the right trancept you find the incredible New Sacristy of S. Lorenzo built by Michelangelo, which houses his four sculptures of Night, Day, Dusk, and Dawn. Above the apse is the Medici Chapel, and on the left is the cloister. AND I saved the best part for last—yes, there is something better than all of that awesome stuff. To the left of the apse we find the spectacular Laurentian Library, which was built by the Medici to house their collection of manuscripts. You enter the library through Michelangelo’s absolutely ridiculous and deservedly famous staircase room only to find an almost as awesome reading room. We didn’t see the Laurentian Library, the Medici Chapel, or the New Sacristy until Sunday, but everything else was great.

Santa Maria del Fiore + Duomo, Brunelleschi

Sight seeing ended, and with Christina and Lizzie gone, it was up to Morgan to take care of us back at the apartment. Believe it or not, the girls had insisted that we stay there for the extra night despite them not being there. Not wanting to turn down such a gracious offer and still hurting from the bill at La Giostra, we had to accept. We got back to the apartment and took a critical nap. When we woke up, Morgan was back from a couple of days in Rome, and assured us that it was fine that we stay.

All was good until about 10 pm, when another one of their roommates had a freak out session and spun out of control, demanding that we leave. In all honesty, she was pretty damn scary, not gonna lie about it. And the worst part was, she didn’t even have the decency to just ask us to go because it made her uncomfortable, which is completely understandable. Instead, we had to listen to her purposely yelling at the top of her lungs in the other room, which she was clearly doing so we would get the picture without her having to stomach the awkward confrontation. The girls had been so nice and I knew that anything we said would just be held against them, so I resisted the urge to something akin to Larry David and got the hell out of there asap. We got a hotel for cheap and left the bags there in search of dinner. Saturday night was pretty depressing, so we just crashed early with hopes of a Sunday revival.

The good thing about the late night relocation was the hotel’s proximity to the sites we wanted to see on Sunday. We went first to the Laurentian Library with Michelangelo’s staircase. The staircase was the best thing I saw in Florence. I spent about 2 hours in there and the adjacent library, during which maybe 5 other people came and went. I guess its somewhat of a lost treasure in Florence which is absolutely ridiculous because it is so so so good. We followed up the library with more Mike at the New Sacristy, where we spent due time soaking in Night, Dawn, Dusk, and Day. I was bad and snuck a picture…no flash of course, but I had to risk it. Obviously its useless in conveying the greatness, but here it is anyway:

Incredible.

From there we moved onto Santa Maria Novella where we were finally able to get inside. That trip was our fourth attempt to see the interior. Also great. After a refueling at Gusto, we headed back to the apartment where we met the girls, who had returned from Paris absolutely exhausted. In our weak attempt to repay them for their amazing hospitality, Ethan and I offered to cook them dinner, which we ended up doing. It was only three at that point, and we wanted to climb something before eating again, so we rallied Morgan and Christina and headed to Giotto’s tower for a trip up to the top.

The views from up there were spectacular. Here are some pics.

Winded on the windy tower. Ethan, Christina, Morgan, me

With duomo

After Giotto’s tower we made a pitstop at Standa for groceries and proceeded to put on our chef hats. Ethan and I took the kitchen by storm and kicked the women out. Nice move by us. The dish of choice: our special Via dei Genovesi brand of carbonara, which my roommate Scott helped perfect in meals past. We also did a plate of cheese, salami, and bread, which we clearly served outside the kitchen. The carbonara was obviously a surprise.

The semi-stressful pasta dish turned out perfectly—we were able to execute the necessary timing to cook everything just right. Dinner was great and was certainly the best way to cap off a great weekend in Florence with out new friends. It made us look way better than we are in real life and we got to eat too. The best kind of win-win situation.

After a pledge do something fun together in the near future, we left the apartment and headed back to the train station by Santa Maria Novella. Another relaxing express train and before we knew it, we were back where it all started. Great weekend, great architecture, great sightseeing job by Ethan and me, great great hosts, and great food—all in all, plenty of greatness.

E anche a Christina, Lizzie, e Morgan: se per bel ragione lo leggete, grazie mille a voi! Ci vediamo!

Ciaociao.

Le Cose Romane

So far, Roman Holiday hasn’t devoted much time to Rome. We’ve been talking about highlights and big events, but there has been an absence of the excellent filling in between all of that, which is Rome, of course, the temporary hometown.

The task at hand is daunting because everyday resembles a routine but manages to always be different. Over simplifaction--le cose italiane che faccio spesso—Italian things that I’ve been doing regularly: walking extensively, visiting physical architectural history on a daily basis, saying hello to strangers, jaywalking, managing brutally small breakfasts consisting of caffeine and the smallest pastry in the world, tramezzini, panini, pizza a portare via (to go), street markets, drawing buildings, churches, ruins and scenes that I find interesting, cooking four dinners a week with my Italian roommate Antonio and fellow American abroad student Scott, enjoying a beer everyday—preferably in front of an ancient monument, playing soccer, and finally, trying to speak as much Italian as possible.

American things that I have not been doing: useless snacking, watching television, eating unhealthy food, being lazy, actually studying, wasting time, taking things for granted, spending time online (save travel planning), worrying about my future, enjoying myself only on the weekends, applying for internships, concerning myself about summer jobs, facebook, sleeping in.

I’m so dumb to have left until now all of the information I now feel obliged to convey. There is a great deal of very excellent things occurring constantly that deserve recording. So it would be best to divide into categories: epic architectural/art sites visited, academia, food, and daily routine.

Remains of the Temple of Saturn, Roman Forum

---Epic Architectural Sites Visited:

There are a few of these places in Rome. From the period of antiquity, I’ve visited and spent significant time observing the Pantheon, Roman Forum, Via Saccra, Forum Boarium, and Imperial Fora. The Roman Forum and Imperial Fora, along with the Forum Boarium, offer the most extensive glimpse into ancient Roman civic life. Ruins ranging from rubble to complete columns provide the archaeological evidence that allows for accurate reconstruction drawings that we can use now to speculate about the ancient Roman architectural environment. The Forum is especially great for this, because it has always been a sacred place in Rome—and always is a long time, because Rome is old. The forum was the center for civic life in the city’s early development and continued to thrive during the height of Rome’s imperial dominance. It contains the critical political, civic, religious, and honorary buildings of early Rome, and was recognized during its use as a sacred place in general, a hub for Roman culture, and the physical embodiment of the center of an empire. There is a point in the forum that is still there which marks the official center of ancient Rome. All distances were calculated from this point. When you consider how far the empire grew to be in the centuries after Christ, that point is really a remarkable place.

Part of an Architrave, somewhere on the ground in the Forum. This thing could have rested 75 ft in the air, but it still had to perfect.

From the Forum grew the Imperial Fora, or additional forums added on by emperors Caesar, Augustus, Nerva, and Trajan. These new areas expanded the public space in the valley between the Capitoline and Palatine hills to include the area approaching the Quirinale hill, northeast of the original forum. For one of my classes we were able to visit the forum of Trajan, whose ruins now lie along the Viale dei Fori Imperiali, to see the remains of one of these imperial fora. Excellent.

Trajan's Market, next to Trajan's forum. The columns in the lower left are the remains of the semicircular exedra of Trajan's Forum. The market echoed that shape.

This is a pretty ugly rendering of Trajan's forum, but its useful to locate the last picture. The exedra, whose ruins you can see in the photo, is the semicircular room to the extreme right of the trees.

In present day Rome it is hard to imagine what this area looked like because many of the basilicas were three stories high, with colonnades and porticos containing over 20 columns spaced 10 feet apart. When Trajan added the final imperial forum in 106 AD the area of the Imperial Fora was a tightly woven and spectacular collection of public buildings that provided the infrastructure for critical daily civic functions.

Bored yet? Brutal.

There is a lot more to recount about the Rome of antiquity that I’ve been able to enjoy, but I need to move on. Suffice to say that I’ve been able to spend a lot of time at some great ancient sites with my sketchbook and I’m beginning to develop an understanding of the type of built space that characterized the ancient city.

The second category, I suppose, has to include all churches of the Christian era, from medieval to Renaissance to Baroque. There is one Gothic cathedral in Rome, but I have yet to go. I’ve been to a lot of churches and I haven’t even scratched the surface of Rome’s collection. It seems that for every three square blocks there is one church. There’s no point in going into any detail about them, but there is one facet that is really interesting and generally applicable to most of the architectural sites in Rome. Because Rome, unlike any other city in the world, really, has always had something going on inside of its walls for basically 2300 years, give or take a few hundred, a great deal of the architecture is layered on top of something that preceded it. In other words, it is common to find a church that was originally built in the early Middle Ages on top of the foundation of a pagan temple or basilica from antiquity. That church was then renovated in the 11^th century, redesigned or renovated again in the 15^th Century Renaissance, and then renovated again in the baroque. Columns, pilasters, and capitals from ancient Rome, removed from their original site, are placed oddly in the colonnade of a medieval church that has a Baroque ceiling fresco. This is simply a reality of a building that has survived for 1500 years, and in many cases the architects that followed with renovations were very successful in combining the old with the new. [Borromini’s baroque renovation of San Giovanni in Laterno comes to mind as a particularly successful example.]

Renovated nave of S. Giovanni in Laterno, Borromini architect. E' bello.

That, I suppose, is the theme of the city—for architecture and everything else, because Rome is in a constant civic struggle to be a global capital in 2008 and a physical representation of 2000 years ago all at the same time. Its great to observe this phenomenon because preservation/innovation is a big part of architecture anywhere and the relationship is constantly being stretched to its maximum limits here in Rome. Probably more than any other place in the world.

The next highlight has to be our recent trip to the Musei Vaticani, which houss a small percentage of the amazing and unfair collection of art owned by the Catholic Church. The majority of it, I’m assuming, is in some secret lair in a tunnel. The part we do get to see is excellent, though, and this past Wednesday, Antonio, Scott and I spent the better part of the day perusing the collection.

Sculpture at Musei Vaticani, sculptor unknown

Despite the presence of the Sisteen Chapel, which is obviously immaculate and incredible, my favorite part of the Vatican Museums was the Stanza della Segnatura, the Raffaello room that houses the amazing “Scuola di Atene” and “La Disputa del Sacramento” frescoes. Not gonna go into it because they are way too good for words. Each painting has an incredible story behind it and there is so much to enjoy. Google them. And visit them.

I also made it to the Borghese Gallery a while back to see its famous collection of Bernini sculpture and Caravaggio chiaroscuro. The Borghese is probably my favorite museum that I’ve ever visited. The building itself is absolutely incredible. The Borghese family was rich, and their gallery is about as ostentatious as you can get. The ceiling fresco itself in the entrance hall is expansive and worthy of at least 2 hours of your time. Unfortunately you only get 2 hours in the museum before they shuffle the next group in, so you have to move on and bring your eyes down to street level.

The Bernini sculptures are amazing. I’m seeing a lot of things here in Italy that I’ve already seen on slide presentations, so that feels nice. The Bernini sculptures at the Borghese feel the best. MAN they are good. I get excited thinking about them here at the keyboard. Go to Rome immediately and indulge in this brilliance. The Rape of Persephone. David. Apollo and Daphne. Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius. They are all in one place, they are all waiting for you, and they are all the best thing you have ever seen.

I’ve been to many other churches on my own and for some of my classes at IES, but I think it best to move onto “Academia”.

---Academia:

Classes at IES are unfortunately not that great. They are not demanding but still manage to take up time, and they are not providing information that I could not find on my own. On the up side, they do employ Rome’s incredible urban landscape on a weekly basis—site visits occur for 2 of the 3 hours of class time each week. So, at least for most of my class time in my architecture and archaeology classes, I am out in the field observing important sites in the city.

S. Clemente: Medieval church, built on top of a Roman house of antiquity, then renovated in the baroque with a 19th century ceiling. Thats what happens in Rome.

The more exciting class is my drawing and painting class at RUFA—Roman University of Fine Arts—where I go every Wednesday from 6-9 pm for a great studio art class. The teacher is excellent and my desire to improve my ability to observe/record/render has increased 100 fold. The RUFA class coupled with my own desire to fill my sketchbook should result in a good collection of drawings and renderings by the end of the semester.

Enough about school. Moving on to Food.

Food in general is outrageous. The quality of ingredients is top notch and the markets are great. We’ve been cooking as much as possible, which has been great because it is much less expensive and the result is 95% of the time much better. My roommate Scott is a much more accomplished in the kitchen than I am, but we make a lot of our meals together and I’ve been learning a bit from him as well as from our Italian roommate, Antonio. The kitchen is always stocked and we’ve been eating like champions. The diet is carb/protein heavy, but we get our good share of fruit and vegetables in from the markets to even everything out. Cheese and cured meats are unbeatable, so well conceived snacking is a regular occurrence.

A beer everyday, as demonstrated by the boys. If we use the size of the beer as a judge, I think that must have been a Tuesday.

The food section wouldn’t be complete without describing the almost daily lunch routine exercised by Ethan and me + whoever else is interested on that given day. We frequently make the 10 minute walk from IES to Campo dei Fiori where we get some of the best pizza in Rome at Forno de’ Campo, a great forno with always fresh pizza and pastries. Its cheap and excellent. My favorites are the pizza pomodorini, which is a plain thin crust with small sweet tomatoes, oil and spices, along with the pizza melanzane, which has eggplant and a bunch of other tasty things on top. From time to time ill get a rice pastry for dessert. Excellent. We always finish lunch off at the market in Campo that has great fresh fruit. The blood oranges are my personal favorite—so good.

Gelato, cappuccino, and cornetti in the morning round out general consumption. I really like the Italian morning routine. Everyone makes time for a pit stop at a favorite caffe, which gives you time to enjoy the necessary morning fuel and meet people that are on the same schedule. I have a place right outside my door that makes every morning a good one.

Jam Session at Charity Cafe, tutti giovedi

More about food in later posts, hopefully. The next item in the list is daily routine. One paragraph about that will do. Wake up, shower, cappuccino and cornetto at Nero Café, field study on site or trip to IES, class, lunch out and about, Italian, back home, a beer or glass of wine with a friend, dinner effort in the kitchen back home, half hour of homework, and something fun at night. That is the template, always open for change. Wednesday night adds my class at RUFA—Tuesday night adds soccer in Bologna at 10, and Thursday night is my favorite jam session at Charity Café. Not bad.

That’s an unfortunate recapitulation of what really has been an amazing first five weeks in Rome. The highlights have been so high and the daily life has been spectacular. I am enjoying every moment—anything “bad” isn’t really that bad and everything “good” is extra good. I live the good life here, there’s no doubt about it. The only fear is that I’m not doing a good enough job at soaking it all in.