My name is Alan... I am addicted to art galleries

10.06.2015

Before I show you the results of my addiction, I have a few landscape shots I took from a hill on the other side of the river. It was only a twenty minute bus ride up the hill to the Michaelangelo Piazza where a few hundred tourists were gathered to take photos of Florence's cityscape from on high.

I have in the last two days joined two queues expecting a one or two hour wait. The infamous Ufizi art gallery queue only took me 15 minutes until I was inside ( this was about midday when a lot of tourists were scoffing a pizza or pasta or panini). It was a lovely museum and the main attraction had to be the Botticelli The birth of Venus, painted for the Medici family in the 1480's. It was slightly faded but still stunning as were many other maybe not so famous pieces I saw and took photos of. The two naked females are the same sisters that I saw in a similar painting in the Louvre Paris, and are of Gabrielle d'Estrees and her sister. Gabrielle was the mistress of Henry iv of France, and bore four children to him. When his wife eventually died he promised to marry Gabrielle and gave her his coronation ring as a token engagement ring. A few weeks later before her dreams of marrying Henry became a reality, she died giving birth to a stillborn son. The painting alludes to her being given the engagement ring. I also found a few photos I took in the Museum of modern art in Rome, so I threw them into the pot. The second queue I joined was the one to have a look around the inside of the Duomo Cathedral, and that took me all of ten minutes before I got inside. I knew what to expect so it wasn't too much of a surprise to see such an empty space, especially after seeing the excesses of the interiors of Roman churches. The dome was the main focus of artwork, but you weren't able to get too close, that was reserved for those who paid to climb the hundreds of steps to the top. The Italiaan clock above the entry is the only one in the world still running. It has only one hand and shows a 24 hour liturgical period of time from sunrise to sunset. It was a timetable used until the 18th century. Standing in the empty space, a space that has seen the great men and women and events of European history take place in and around it for the last six hundred years, is a humbling experience. You only have to realise that the building of the cathedral was halted for a couple of years while the Black Death swept through and killed up to 200 million people in the known world in about 1350 to know how old this building is....

Florence from a distant hill