Yesterday we spent a day under gloriously blue Florentine skies.
Our day took in the following sights. First there was the cycle museum a little outside the city boundaries and worth taking in if such events as the tour de France or the giro d’Italia (which passed through Bagni di Lucca only a few years ago) excite you.
There was a great collection of bicycles and trophies with an especial emphasis on the local lad Gino Bartali who together with Fausto Coppi, his rival and friend, represents the golden age of cycling at a time when Italy needed all the encouragement it could get to overcome post-war depression.
(The house where the great Gino Bartali was born in Ponte a Ema)
Although friends, Gino and Fausto were very different in character: Gino was pious and dedicated his wins to saint Teresa. Fausto was a womanizer and represented a newer, less patriarchal Italy. Both sporting heroes come together in that iconic photograph which shows Bartali handing his water bottle to Coppi (or is it the other way round?).
Gino was also a resistance fighter and saved many Jewish people by hiding secret documents in the frame of his cycle while crossing Nazi-held lines on the pretence that he was just practising his sport. Bartali was awarded this certificate by Israel as one of the just:
The cycle museum is one of the city’s two major sports museums. The other is the football museum which I’ve already described in a previous post and is near the pioneering Fiorentina football stadium designed in the thirties.
Florence, the cradle of the renaissance, could also be described as the cradle of both cycling and football. Indeed, each year there’s a re-enactment of historic football in ancient costume played out in piazza Santa Croce. Needless to say, the rules are a little different and I don’t think umpires today would have a sufficient number of red cards on them to hand out in such a game!
Florence expresses its art in such other departments as ceramics – the main ceramic centre is at nearby Montelupo – and our visit happily coincided with an international ceramics fair held in the city’s most perfect square, piazza dell’Annunziata.
The variety displayed here from gres to raku was amazing!
I also spotted the original Gioconda (Mona Lisa) in one of the streets. It looked so much better than that copy Paris’ Louvre has!
Our visit took in the bustling central market which is an original late nineteenth century cast iron structure combining the then latest technology with renaissance elegance. On the ground floor are stalls selling not just exquisite food from all regions of Italy but also from other parts of the world. For example, we came across Peruvian beans and, naturally, a wide selection of suchi. The upper floor, recently refurbished, has some great eating places with hardly an empty seat. We opted for some highly characteristic street food of the city, a lampredotto sandwich with typical green sauce.
It was truly delicious even if I tell that the contents come from the lining of a bovine’s third stomach.
Eventually, our meanderings through the still crowded streets of central Florence took us to the palazzo Strozzi where an exhibition on the art of the sixteenth century in Florence – il cinquecento a Firenze – enticed us to admire the counter reformation mannerist world of such less well known artists as Pontormo, Vasari, Zucchi, Rosso Fiorentino, Alessandro Allori and Giambologna (who wasn’t from Bologna but from Boulogne).
The exhibition is the third exploring post-quattrocento pre-baroque Florence. The others were the Bronzino one of 2010 and the Pontormo one of 2014 which I described in a previous post.
The exhibition was divided into ‘divine’ and ‘lascivious’ subjects with a fair number of portraits and sculptures thrown in. For me the best thing were the seventeen paintings specially restored for the exhibition and previously rather dimly visible in several of Florence’s churches. It was a delight to see these paintings as close to their original co!ours as possible.
If nothing else this well documented exhibition, which will last until 21 January next year, helps take the major focus on Florentine art from the era of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio to the more turbulent world of the period after the council of Trent which redefined Roman Catholic ideology in the wake of the reformation.
If you’re not into vast religious paintings you will still admire the sensuous mythological scenes and enjoy the rich clothes many of those portrayed wear. Finally, you may realise that there wasn’t just one Lorenzo who was magnificent among the Medici. Francis I was, similarly, a great patron of the arts in a later century.
