Florence Italy and car hire
The best way to get around Florence, Italy is by hire car, which can be pre-booked directly from the airport.
Florence is one of history's phenomena. Few nations, let alone cities, can boast such an overpowering array of talent literary, artistic, political concentrated over so short a period of time. The names of some of Florence's greatest sonsDante, Boccaccio, Giotto, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Cellini, Machiavelliare known the world over. Not a bad achievement for a city whose great period spanned less than 300 years.
At every turn of this amazing city, historic churches and museums unfold for you all the treasures of the flowering of the Renaissance. And in the narrow streets loom the stony masses of the palazzo from medieval fortress dwellings and Renaissance mansions to ornate 17thcentury buildings with names like Strozzi, Pazzi, Salviati, Medici, straight out of history.
Florence is much more than a museum of stone, marble and bronze. Its historic palaces, its great churches, its innumerable works of art are not dry as dust relics. They're very much lived-in, worked in, prayed in and prized by today's Florentines.
Only an hour's drive from Florence lie the marvels of Pisa, where the 800yearold Leaning Tower, delicate as carved ivory, continues to defy gravity alongside the exquisite marble cathedral and baptistery. It’s hard to believe today, but Pisa was once the River Arno's estuary (now at Marina di Pisa, 62 miles away). A flourishing seaport colonized by the Greeks, settled by the Etruscans, then the Romans, it had become a rich, powerful naval republic by the 12th century, battling the Saracens throughout the Mediterranean and building fine churches to celebrate its victories. But with the silting up of the Arno, Leghorn (Livorno) supplanted Pisa as a port and the burgeoning Republic of Florence soon dominated both.
Earlier, the city of Lucca surpassed even Florence and Pisa in prestige. Its arms still proudly bear the one word Liberty. Its ancient walls enclose a plethora of marble churches, chapels and palaces. At different epochs, the names of each of these great Tuscan cities Florence, Pisa, Lucca spelt power and wealth. They will open for you a window onto a golden era of European civilization.
What to do in Florence Italy
Florence is a city to be savoured, its finest monuments and works of art to be lingered over. The city can be divided into six geographical areas to facilitate sightseeing. Each district can be covered on foot (cars, anyway, are banned from the historic centre).
From the Duomo to the Uffizi A good place to start your tour is in the twin squares around the Duomo (Cathedral), undoubtedly Florence's religious hub for tourists. Officially known as Santa Maria del Fiore (Our Lady of the Flower), the green, white and pink marble-faced Duomo was intended by city proud Florentines as a cathedral to end all cathedrals (it can hold over 20,000 people !).
The cathedral itself, flanked by its freestanding Campanile (bell tower) was designed by the great architect Arnolfo di Cambio in the 13th century, and the mighty cupola is a contribution from the Renaissance. First and unquestionably greatest of his talented peers, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (13771446) had marvelled at the dome on Rome's Pantheon, rebuilt for Emperor Hadrian about A.D. 125. No one had subsequently achieved such an engineering feat.
The cupola's 138foot (42metre) diameter surpasses the domes of the Pantheon, St. Peter's in Rome, and St. Paul's in London.Battistero (Baptistery), a precious gem of Romanesque architecture, was built in the early 12th century on the site of a Roman templc of Mars. Salvaged Roman columns were used in its construction. The Baptistery's tourist popularity rests on its three sets of bronze doors: those on the south side arc by a 14thcentury artist, Andrea Pisano; those on the east side, made by Ghiberti, were called the Doors of Paradise by an admiring Michelangelo.
If the Piazza del Duomo is Florence's religious heart, then the civic heart lies in the Piazza delia Signori a, domina ted by the fortress walls of the Palazzo Vecchio or Palazzo delia Signoria. Designed by Arnolfo di Cambio, the Duomo's architect, this future seat of the city's government (it's still Florence's city hall) was completed in.
Flanking the square, the Loggia delia Signoria, or Loggia dei Lanzi, shelters celebrated statuary, incl uding Cellini's fine bronze Perseus; two Giambologna works (Rape of the Sabines and Hercules and the Centaur) and some Roman statues. Michelangelo's David outside the palazzo was moved to the Accademia in 1873 and replaced by a copy.
Highlights of the Palazzo Vecchio include the massive first floor Salone dei Cinquecento. Built in 1496 for Savonarola's shortlived republican Council of 500, it was turned into a grand throne room by Cosimo I, adorned with giant Vasari frescoes of Florentine victories and Michelangelo's Victory statue in a niche. Three centuries later, the first Italian national parliament sat here.
On the second floor are the apartments of Eleonora of Toledo (Cosimo I's wife), a riot of gilt, painted ceilings and rich furnishings. Visit the nearby 15thcentury Sala dei Gigli (Hall of the Lilies), all blues and golds, lavishly decorated with Florentine heraldry, fine gilt panelled ceiling, bright Ghirlandaio frescoes and doors superbly inlaid with figures of Dante and Petrarch.
Don't miss the splendid Guardaroba, a cupboard lined room whose panels were painted in the 1570s with 53 maps of Tuscany and the four continents by two learned and artistic Dominican friars. Medici treasures were once stored here. Climb up to the gallery below the battlements and, a little higher, to the top of the tower 300 feet (90 metres) above the ground, for one of the most sensational panoramas in all Florence. See also the cell where Savonarola was locked up awaiting his execution in the piazza below.
To the palazzo's right, the Uffizi Museum stretches in a long U-shape right up to the Arno. Built as headquarters for government offices (hence the name), it's now one of the world's most famous art museums. Paintings, in chronological order, cover the cream of Italian and European art from the 13th to the 18th century.
Start with the altarpieces of those early Tuscan greats, Cimabue and Giotto. Enjoy Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, full of light and music; and Paolo Uccello's Bailie of San Romano, an astounding exercise in perspective and volume. Best loved and most reproduced among Renaissance paintings are Botticelli's haunting Primavera (spring) and the renowned Birth of Venus. Outstanding among the 15thcentury Flemish paintings is Hugo van der Goes' huge Adoration of the Shepherds triptych. One room belongs to Leonardo da Vinci. See the Baptism of Christ, painted with his great teacher, Verrocchio. The exquisite Annunciation, painted around the same time, is entirely Leonardo's work.
Among German masterpieces in the Uffizi, don't miss Durer's Portrait of His Father and Adoration of the Magi,' and Cranach's lifelike little portraits of Luther, his renegadenun wife and a solidly Germanic Adam and Eve.There is only one work by the great Michelangelo in the Uffizi: a round panel, the Holy Family, firmly but humanly treated, his earliest knowrt painting (1503).
Equally notable are Raphael's placid, maternal Madonna of the Goldfinch and Titian's voluptuous Venus of Urbino. Not to be missed is Rubens' Portrait of his Wife. She is so glowingly alive it's sad to think she died a year after it was painted.
From San Lorenzo to San Marco
With its rough, unfaced stone facade, San Lorenzo looks for all the world like a Tuscan barn. Florence's first entirely Renaissance church and one of Filippo Brunelleschi's earliest architectural triumphs, the building was begun in 1419 on the site of a 4thcentury church.The Medici are buried here in force. Cosimo the Elder himself is in the crypt, his father and mother in the Old Sacristy; Cosimo's two sons Piero the Gouty and Giovanni lie here, too, in a sumptuous bronze and porphyry tomb by Verrocchio.
The adjacent New Sacristy (Sagrestia Nuova) is an amazing one-man show by Michelangelo, who designed the interior and most of the sculptures; it took him more than 14 years. Two undistinguished Medicis are immortalized by Michelangelo in two of the most famous funeral monuments of all time, their elegantly curved sarcophagi surmounted by splendid figures symbolizing Night and Day, Dawn and Dusk.
The old monastery and museum of San Marco offer one of Florence's most evocative attractions .Fra Angelico (1387-1455) lived here as a monk, and most of his finest paintings and frescoes can be seen in this museum. Off the graceful, columned cloister you'll find Angelico's luminous paintings; and, in the small refectory, a vivid Ghirlandaio mural of the Last Supper.
Upstairs, visit the simple monks' cells, each one frescoed for religious inspiration by Fra Angelico and his pupils. His famous Annunciation fresco IS located III cell no. 3. At one end of the row of cells see the suite reserved for Cosimo de' Medici's meditations and, at the opposite end, that of the monastery's fiery prior and enemy of the Medici. Girolamo Savonarola.
Set in the most Renaissance of Florence's squares, the church of Santissima Annunziata deserves to be savoured in the context of its surroundings. Giambologna's bronze equestrian statue of Grand Duke Ferdinando I (1608) and the two 17th-century fountains add to the unity of the square and the feeling of spaciousness. The Galleria dell' Accademia is second in importance only to the Uffizi. It boasts seven major Michelangelo sculptures, including the original David.
Mercato Nuovo to Santa Maria Novella
The main attraction of Mercato Nuovo (the Straw Market) are the stalls selling leather goods and straw baskets. But don't overlook the 17thcentury bronze statue of a boar, known as Il Porcellino (the piglet). Tradition has it that if you stroke his nose and throw a coin into the fountain, you will be sure to return to Florence. In the centre of the market is a marble circle, the Batticulo (buttock smacker), where, in the 16th century, welchers and swindlers were soundly beaten.
The 15th-century Palazzo Strozzi, one of the most beautiful private residences in the whole of Florence, is nearby on Via de' Tornabuoni. One of Florence's greatest monastic churches, Santa Maria Novella was designed by Dominican architects in the mid13th century. An unlikely setting for the beginning and end of Boccaccio's Decameron! Walk through the mystic gloom of the nave to a cluster of richly frescoed family chapels around the altar. The chancel behind the altar features Scenes from the Lives of the Virgin and St. John frescoes by Ghirlandaio and his pupils.
Most striking of all is Masaccio's Trinity (c. 1427) on the wall of the left aisle. Amazing for its uncanny spatial depth, the fresco sets the crucifixion, with kneeling husband and wife donors, in a purely
Renaissance architectural setting.
To the left of the church the great 14th-century cloister with its three giant cypresses is a haven of tranquillity after the noisy piazza.
From the Bargello to Santa Croce
The forbidding fortress of the Bargello in Via del Proconsolo contains the National Museum and represents for sculpture what the Uffizi is to painting. Florence's first city hall and one of its earliest public buildings, it served as the seat of magistrates (podesta) responsible for law and order and later housed the Captain of Justice (bargello), 16thcentury equivalent of a police commissioner.
Men were imprisoned, tortured and executed here. Its outer walls were decorated with lifelike effigies of traitors and criminals hung by the neck or by one foot. Just off the courtyard lies the Hall of Michelangelo and 16th-century Florentine sculptors. Michelangelo was 21 when he finished his early masterpiece The Drunken Bacchus. He sculpted the marble Virgin and Child ( Pitti Tondo) eight years later, while working on his famous David.
The Great Hall contains the spirit of Early Renaissance Florence. Donatello's sturdily human St. George (1416), embedded in a huge expanse of blank wall, dominates the high-vaulted room. It's generally held to be the first great sculptural breakthrough of the Renaissance.With its vast expanse of open piazza, Santa Croce became one of the city's social and political hubs.
Within the church are buried some of the most illustrious figures in Italian history. Biographer Vasari designed Michelangelo's tomb (first on the righthand wall). Smuggled out of Rome in a packing case, his body was given the finest funeral in Florentine memory. The next tomb, Dante's, has no body, much to the Florentine's dismay. His real grave sin Ravenna where he died. Further along you'll spot Machiavelli's (14691527) tomb. Opposite Michelangelo is the Pisan genius Galileo (1564 1642) who perfected the earliest astronomical telescope. On the same side lies Lorenzo Ghiberti, creator of the Baptistery doors.
Immediately to the right of the altar in the Bardi Chapel, you'll find Giotto's finest, most moving paintings: scenes from the life and death of St. Francis, done around 1320. The Santa Croce museum contains frescoes and statues removed from the church, but its proudest treasure is Cimabue's massive 13thcentury painted cross, almost destroyed in the 1966 flood. Pitti Palace to Santa Maria del Carmine Cross over the Arno on the oldest bridge in Florence, Ponte Vecchio, the only one spared in the last war. The present construction, complete with overhanging boutiques, dates back to 1345. Vasari built the covered passageway above the shops so that Grand Duke Cosimo de' Medici could go from the Pitti to the Uffizi without getting wet.
From the double terrace in the middle, admire the elegant, softly curved arches of Ponte Santa Trinita. Destroyed in 1944, the bridge was carefully reconstructed, exactly as Ammannati had built it in the 16th century. Official Medici and grandducal residence since 1549, royal palace of united Italy from 1865 to 1871, the Pitti Palace comprises museums and galleries, plus some ten acres of ornate Italian gardens. In the sumptuous Galleria Palatina, you'll feel more like a collector's guest than a tourist. Priceless paintings hang four high against a lavish gilt, stuccoed and frescoed decor.
There are splendid works here by Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Velazquez and Murillo. In the 16 sumptuously decorated rooms of the Museo degli Argenti (Museum of Gems), admire some of the Medici's most cherished jewels, cameos, gold, silver, crystal and ivory objects, furniture and porcelain. The Giardino di Boboli is an Italian pleasure garden of cypress and hedge-lined alleys and arbours filled with unusual statuary, lodges, grottoes and fountains.
Mecca of artistic pilgrimage, the unpretentious church of Santa Maria del Carmine shelters some of the most momentous frescoes ever painted. Commissioned by the Brancacci family, Masaccio and his teacher Masolino worked from 1423 to 1427 on fresco decorations for their chapel here. Masaccio's Tribute Money and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden lift painting to a completely new plane. His feeling for light and space, his dramatically stage set figures, the concreteness of their forms are little short of an inspired miracle. Nothing of the kind had been painted before; the Renaissance had come to stay. Masaccio died at 27 before completing his commission.
Piazza Ie Michelangelo
For a panoramic view over the city, drive up to the Piazzale Michelangelo (yet another David statue!) and to the church of San Miniato nearby.St. Miniato, an early Christian martyred in the 3rd century A.D., is said to have carried his severed head up here from Florence and set it down where the church was later built.
Rebuilt in the early 11th century, it's a remarkable example of Florentinestyle Romanesque architecture.
Florence is a fascinating city which is best explored by hire car from the airport. Make the most of the good road networks and take your time to discover the very best of Italy at your own pace.
Florence is one of history's phenomena. Few nations, let alone cities, can boast such an overpowering array of talent literary, artistic, political concentrated over so short a period of time. The names of some of Florence's greatest sonsDante, Boccaccio, Giotto, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Cellini, Machiavelliare known the world over. Not a bad achievement for a city whose great period spanned less than 300 years.
At every turn of this amazing city, historic churches and museums unfold for you all the treasures of the flowering of the Renaissance. And in the narrow streets loom the stony masses of the palazzo from medieval fortress dwellings and Renaissance mansions to ornate 17thcentury buildings with names like Strozzi, Pazzi, Salviati, Medici, straight out of history.
Florence is much more than a museum of stone, marble and bronze. Its historic palaces, its great churches, its innumerable works of art are not dry as dust relics. They're very much lived-in, worked in, prayed in and prized by today's Florentines.
Only an hour's drive from Florence lie the marvels of Pisa, where the 800yearold Leaning Tower, delicate as carved ivory, continues to defy gravity alongside the exquisite marble cathedral and baptistery. It’s hard to believe today, but Pisa was once the River Arno's estuary (now at Marina di Pisa, 62 miles away). A flourishing seaport colonized by the Greeks, settled by the Etruscans, then the Romans, it had become a rich, powerful naval republic by the 12th century, battling the Saracens throughout the Mediterranean and building fine churches to celebrate its victories. But with the silting up of the Arno, Leghorn (Livorno) supplanted Pisa as a port and the burgeoning Republic of Florence soon dominated both.
Earlier, the city of Lucca surpassed even Florence and Pisa in prestige. Its arms still proudly bear the one word Liberty. Its ancient walls enclose a plethora of marble churches, chapels and palaces. At different epochs, the names of each of these great Tuscan cities Florence, Pisa, Lucca spelt power and wealth. They will open for you a window onto a golden era of European civilization.
What to do in Florence Italy
Florence is a city to be savoured, its finest monuments and works of art to be lingered over. The city can be divided into six geographical areas to facilitate sightseeing. Each district can be covered on foot (cars, anyway, are banned from the historic centre).
From the Duomo to the Uffizi A good place to start your tour is in the twin squares around the Duomo (Cathedral), undoubtedly Florence's religious hub for tourists. Officially known as Santa Maria del Fiore (Our Lady of the Flower), the green, white and pink marble-faced Duomo was intended by city proud Florentines as a cathedral to end all cathedrals (it can hold over 20,000 people !).
The cathedral itself, flanked by its freestanding Campanile (bell tower) was designed by the great architect Arnolfo di Cambio in the 13th century, and the mighty cupola is a contribution from the Renaissance. First and unquestionably greatest of his talented peers, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (13771446) had marvelled at the dome on Rome's Pantheon, rebuilt for Emperor Hadrian about A.D. 125. No one had subsequently achieved such an engineering feat.
The cupola's 138foot (42metre) diameter surpasses the domes of the Pantheon, St. Peter's in Rome, and St. Paul's in London.Battistero (Baptistery), a precious gem of Romanesque architecture, was built in the early 12th century on the site of a Roman templc of Mars. Salvaged Roman columns were used in its construction. The Baptistery's tourist popularity rests on its three sets of bronze doors: those on the south side arc by a 14thcentury artist, Andrea Pisano; those on the east side, made by Ghiberti, were called the Doors of Paradise by an admiring Michelangelo.
If the Piazza del Duomo is Florence's religious heart, then the civic heart lies in the Piazza delia Signori a, domina ted by the fortress walls of the Palazzo Vecchio or Palazzo delia Signoria. Designed by Arnolfo di Cambio, the Duomo's architect, this future seat of the city's government (it's still Florence's city hall) was completed in.
Flanking the square, the Loggia delia Signoria, or Loggia dei Lanzi, shelters celebrated statuary, incl uding Cellini's fine bronze Perseus; two Giambologna works (Rape of the Sabines and Hercules and the Centaur) and some Roman statues. Michelangelo's David outside the palazzo was moved to the Accademia in 1873 and replaced by a copy.
Highlights of the Palazzo Vecchio include the massive first floor Salone dei Cinquecento. Built in 1496 for Savonarola's shortlived republican Council of 500, it was turned into a grand throne room by Cosimo I, adorned with giant Vasari frescoes of Florentine victories and Michelangelo's Victory statue in a niche. Three centuries later, the first Italian national parliament sat here.
On the second floor are the apartments of Eleonora of Toledo (Cosimo I's wife), a riot of gilt, painted ceilings and rich furnishings. Visit the nearby 15thcentury Sala dei Gigli (Hall of the Lilies), all blues and golds, lavishly decorated with Florentine heraldry, fine gilt panelled ceiling, bright Ghirlandaio frescoes and doors superbly inlaid with figures of Dante and Petrarch.
Don't miss the splendid Guardaroba, a cupboard lined room whose panels were painted in the 1570s with 53 maps of Tuscany and the four continents by two learned and artistic Dominican friars. Medici treasures were once stored here. Climb up to the gallery below the battlements and, a little higher, to the top of the tower 300 feet (90 metres) above the ground, for one of the most sensational panoramas in all Florence. See also the cell where Savonarola was locked up awaiting his execution in the piazza below.
To the palazzo's right, the Uffizi Museum stretches in a long U-shape right up to the Arno. Built as headquarters for government offices (hence the name), it's now one of the world's most famous art museums. Paintings, in chronological order, cover the cream of Italian and European art from the 13th to the 18th century.
Start with the altarpieces of those early Tuscan greats, Cimabue and Giotto. Enjoy Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, full of light and music; and Paolo Uccello's Bailie of San Romano, an astounding exercise in perspective and volume. Best loved and most reproduced among Renaissance paintings are Botticelli's haunting Primavera (spring) and the renowned Birth of Venus. Outstanding among the 15thcentury Flemish paintings is Hugo van der Goes' huge Adoration of the Shepherds triptych. One room belongs to Leonardo da Vinci. See the Baptism of Christ, painted with his great teacher, Verrocchio. The exquisite Annunciation, painted around the same time, is entirely Leonardo's work.
Among German masterpieces in the Uffizi, don't miss Durer's Portrait of His Father and Adoration of the Magi,' and Cranach's lifelike little portraits of Luther, his renegadenun wife and a solidly Germanic Adam and Eve.There is only one work by the great Michelangelo in the Uffizi: a round panel, the Holy Family, firmly but humanly treated, his earliest knowrt painting (1503).
Equally notable are Raphael's placid, maternal Madonna of the Goldfinch and Titian's voluptuous Venus of Urbino. Not to be missed is Rubens' Portrait of his Wife. She is so glowingly alive it's sad to think she died a year after it was painted.
From San Lorenzo to San Marco
With its rough, unfaced stone facade, San Lorenzo looks for all the world like a Tuscan barn. Florence's first entirely Renaissance church and one of Filippo Brunelleschi's earliest architectural triumphs, the building was begun in 1419 on the site of a 4thcentury church.The Medici are buried here in force. Cosimo the Elder himself is in the crypt, his father and mother in the Old Sacristy; Cosimo's two sons Piero the Gouty and Giovanni lie here, too, in a sumptuous bronze and porphyry tomb by Verrocchio.
The adjacent New Sacristy (Sagrestia Nuova) is an amazing one-man show by Michelangelo, who designed the interior and most of the sculptures; it took him more than 14 years. Two undistinguished Medicis are immortalized by Michelangelo in two of the most famous funeral monuments of all time, their elegantly curved sarcophagi surmounted by splendid figures symbolizing Night and Day, Dawn and Dusk.
The old monastery and museum of San Marco offer one of Florence's most evocative attractions .Fra Angelico (1387-1455) lived here as a monk, and most of his finest paintings and frescoes can be seen in this museum. Off the graceful, columned cloister you'll find Angelico's luminous paintings; and, in the small refectory, a vivid Ghirlandaio mural of the Last Supper.
Upstairs, visit the simple monks' cells, each one frescoed for religious inspiration by Fra Angelico and his pupils. His famous Annunciation fresco IS located III cell no. 3. At one end of the row of cells see the suite reserved for Cosimo de' Medici's meditations and, at the opposite end, that of the monastery's fiery prior and enemy of the Medici. Girolamo Savonarola.
Set in the most Renaissance of Florence's squares, the church of Santissima Annunziata deserves to be savoured in the context of its surroundings. Giambologna's bronze equestrian statue of Grand Duke Ferdinando I (1608) and the two 17th-century fountains add to the unity of the square and the feeling of spaciousness. The Galleria dell' Accademia is second in importance only to the Uffizi. It boasts seven major Michelangelo sculptures, including the original David.
Mercato Nuovo to Santa Maria Novella
The main attraction of Mercato Nuovo (the Straw Market) are the stalls selling leather goods and straw baskets. But don't overlook the 17thcentury bronze statue of a boar, known as Il Porcellino (the piglet). Tradition has it that if you stroke his nose and throw a coin into the fountain, you will be sure to return to Florence. In the centre of the market is a marble circle, the Batticulo (buttock smacker), where, in the 16th century, welchers and swindlers were soundly beaten.
The 15th-century Palazzo Strozzi, one of the most beautiful private residences in the whole of Florence, is nearby on Via de' Tornabuoni. One of Florence's greatest monastic churches, Santa Maria Novella was designed by Dominican architects in the mid13th century. An unlikely setting for the beginning and end of Boccaccio's Decameron! Walk through the mystic gloom of the nave to a cluster of richly frescoed family chapels around the altar. The chancel behind the altar features Scenes from the Lives of the Virgin and St. John frescoes by Ghirlandaio and his pupils.
Most striking of all is Masaccio's Trinity (c. 1427) on the wall of the left aisle. Amazing for its uncanny spatial depth, the fresco sets the crucifixion, with kneeling husband and wife donors, in a purely
Renaissance architectural setting.
To the left of the church the great 14th-century cloister with its three giant cypresses is a haven of tranquillity after the noisy piazza.
From the Bargello to Santa Croce
The forbidding fortress of the Bargello in Via del Proconsolo contains the National Museum and represents for sculpture what the Uffizi is to painting. Florence's first city hall and one of its earliest public buildings, it served as the seat of magistrates (podesta) responsible for law and order and later housed the Captain of Justice (bargello), 16thcentury equivalent of a police commissioner.
Men were imprisoned, tortured and executed here. Its outer walls were decorated with lifelike effigies of traitors and criminals hung by the neck or by one foot. Just off the courtyard lies the Hall of Michelangelo and 16th-century Florentine sculptors. Michelangelo was 21 when he finished his early masterpiece The Drunken Bacchus. He sculpted the marble Virgin and Child ( Pitti Tondo) eight years later, while working on his famous David.
The Great Hall contains the spirit of Early Renaissance Florence. Donatello's sturdily human St. George (1416), embedded in a huge expanse of blank wall, dominates the high-vaulted room. It's generally held to be the first great sculptural breakthrough of the Renaissance.With its vast expanse of open piazza, Santa Croce became one of the city's social and political hubs.
Within the church are buried some of the most illustrious figures in Italian history. Biographer Vasari designed Michelangelo's tomb (first on the righthand wall). Smuggled out of Rome in a packing case, his body was given the finest funeral in Florentine memory. The next tomb, Dante's, has no body, much to the Florentine's dismay. His real grave sin Ravenna where he died. Further along you'll spot Machiavelli's (14691527) tomb. Opposite Michelangelo is the Pisan genius Galileo (1564 1642) who perfected the earliest astronomical telescope. On the same side lies Lorenzo Ghiberti, creator of the Baptistery doors.
Immediately to the right of the altar in the Bardi Chapel, you'll find Giotto's finest, most moving paintings: scenes from the life and death of St. Francis, done around 1320. The Santa Croce museum contains frescoes and statues removed from the church, but its proudest treasure is Cimabue's massive 13thcentury painted cross, almost destroyed in the 1966 flood. Pitti Palace to Santa Maria del Carmine Cross over the Arno on the oldest bridge in Florence, Ponte Vecchio, the only one spared in the last war. The present construction, complete with overhanging boutiques, dates back to 1345. Vasari built the covered passageway above the shops so that Grand Duke Cosimo de' Medici could go from the Pitti to the Uffizi without getting wet.
From the double terrace in the middle, admire the elegant, softly curved arches of Ponte Santa Trinita. Destroyed in 1944, the bridge was carefully reconstructed, exactly as Ammannati had built it in the 16th century. Official Medici and grandducal residence since 1549, royal palace of united Italy from 1865 to 1871, the Pitti Palace comprises museums and galleries, plus some ten acres of ornate Italian gardens. In the sumptuous Galleria Palatina, you'll feel more like a collector's guest than a tourist. Priceless paintings hang four high against a lavish gilt, stuccoed and frescoed decor.
There are splendid works here by Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Velazquez and Murillo. In the 16 sumptuously decorated rooms of the Museo degli Argenti (Museum of Gems), admire some of the Medici's most cherished jewels, cameos, gold, silver, crystal and ivory objects, furniture and porcelain. The Giardino di Boboli is an Italian pleasure garden of cypress and hedge-lined alleys and arbours filled with unusual statuary, lodges, grottoes and fountains.
Mecca of artistic pilgrimage, the unpretentious church of Santa Maria del Carmine shelters some of the most momentous frescoes ever painted. Commissioned by the Brancacci family, Masaccio and his teacher Masolino worked from 1423 to 1427 on fresco decorations for their chapel here. Masaccio's Tribute Money and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden lift painting to a completely new plane. His feeling for light and space, his dramatically stage set figures, the concreteness of their forms are little short of an inspired miracle. Nothing of the kind had been painted before; the Renaissance had come to stay. Masaccio died at 27 before completing his commission.
Piazza Ie Michelangelo
For a panoramic view over the city, drive up to the Piazzale Michelangelo (yet another David statue!) and to the church of San Miniato nearby.St. Miniato, an early Christian martyred in the 3rd century A.D., is said to have carried his severed head up here from Florence and set it down where the church was later built.
Rebuilt in the early 11th century, it's a remarkable example of Florentinestyle Romanesque architecture.
Florence is a fascinating city which is best explored by hire car from the airport. Make the most of the good road networks and take your time to discover the very best of Italy at your own pace.
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