Today we did a one day tour of Florence. It was a long day!! We had been used to sleeping in and getting up late as this is Barcelona time (very laid back). Our tour started at 9:15am and we were really struggling to stay awake.
The first part of the tour was a walking tour. The meeting point was at Ponte Vecchio. The bridge is filled with gold jewelery stores. Apparently in the 2nd World War, everything around the bridge was destroyed but the bridge remained intact. The Ponte Vecchio used to be the meat and butcher market of Florence but when the de Medici's came to power, they converted it to jewelery stores. This was because they built two palaces on either end of the bridge and had visitors often and the visitors would have to cross the bridge to go from palace to palace. The meat market would have smelled bad in the days of no refridgeration. It was nicer for the wealthy guests of the de Medicis to cross and admire gold on the way.
There were also secret passages built between the palaces and the place where you see windows on an upper storey of the Ponte Vecchio is the only place where the passage becomes visible to the public.
We walked to the Plaza della Signora and looked at the big replica statue of Michaelangelo's David outside the Palazzo Vecchio and a whole heap of other sculptures in the square. To the right of the Palazzo there is a statue of 'Neptune' except the face looks a little like the face of one of the de Medicis. So the locals don't call the statue 'Neptune' but they call it something Italian that means 'the white giant'.
Nearby, there is a little outdoor market that is famous for the 'porchetta'. It is a bronze pig that is a replica of a sculpture in the Uffizi gallery. There is also a similar pig in the Sydney Hospital that was a gift from the city of Florence to Sydney. The superstition is this... you pat the pig's snout for luck and then put a coin in the pig's mouth. You let go of the coin and if it drops into the grate below then it means you will be back in Florence soon (some legends say it is luck).
After that we walked to the Duomo (the dome). We were able to go inside the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. The inside is surprisingly plain compared to the elaborate gothic appearance of the outside of the church. But the dome is an amazing feat of architecture. I had seen some of the background to the building of the dome on Kevin McCloud's European Grand Tour DVD.
The morning part of the tour ended with a trip to the Accademia Gallery. Our guide showed us some of the sculptures and told us what to look out for. There was one which was "The Rape of the Sabine Women" (n.b. rape is the literal translation of contextual abduction). It depicted a Sabine woman being carried off by two Roman men. The statue is designed to be looked at from all angles (not just from the front). The bodies of the three figures are intertwined in a spiral like pattern so that you walk around the sculpture and see it from different angles.
The other famous sculpture at the Accademia Gallery is Michaelangelo's David. Our guide explained to us how Michaelangelo studied human form to get perfection and precision in his sculpture. The David is obviously nude to represent strength as Greek gods and athletes were always portrayed nude. But she said the stance of David is one of a thinker or philosopher.
After lunch, the tour continued at the Uffizi Gallery. Our guide was great and gave us an insight into the artwork displayed there. She explained some history of the artist as well as the things to notice in each piece of art and how to interpret it.
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