Ode to Florence (and Architecture - 2)

I spent most of the time in Florence (Firenze in Italian) somewhat dazed at the splendour of the city. To quote from the Cox & Kings brochure: "The city of Florence is a shrine to the wonders of the Renaissance ... a living breathing museum".

The site here has a picture of Florence from the air. The absolute uniformity of the architecture, red tiled roofs with plastered walls of shades of off-white is stunning. At our first stop in Austria, we ran into buildings with different colours, which is something we didn't see anywhere in Italy.

The wealth of architectural, sculptural and painting in Florence (as in several other places, notably the Vatican) is very humbling. I ran into that several times during the tour, one isn't able to respond to the scale of what's on view. If you've been awed (and perhaps confused and frustrated) by the wealth of sculpture and carving in the large Indian temples, there is a close parallel in old European cities. At the Louvre in France (we went there to basically do a dekko at the Mona Lisa), magnificient masterpieces offhandedly hung every which way.

There were two main things that we saw:
The Piazza (public square) della Signoria. Here's a short movie of it. A couple of interesting things happened here, a bonfire of the vanities instigated by Savaranola and his later execution. Michelangelo's David was also originally installed here.


Here's a view of some of the buildings around the square.
The other interesting part we saw was the huge and splendiferous domed cathedral of the city, the Duomo and the Campanile tower beside it : here's photos of the dome and here's a movie that doesn't capture the dome.







The splendid door of the cathedral.


This building was touted by the guide to be the 'birthplace of the renaissance'. I missed why this particular building is so important, but it apparently it captures some key features of Renaissance architecture -- simplicity, with the lack of adornment of earlier architectural styles, and the repetitive symmetrical elements. I like it !
Here's another building showing the same features:




The Ponte Vecchio across the Arno river is a nice-looking bridge with buildings hanging precariously off it.


Our local tour guide in Florence did not do a very good job of tuning his spiel to the group. We were most of us quite ignorant about Italian history and Renaissance and so on, and the guide would start by saying something like: "Michelangelo had a workshop here" and expect that such a statement would have significant ooh-aah effect, which didn't quite work.


Sajini's previous post and photo of Florence is a nice complement to this post. She got to visit the Uffizi museum there which is touted as one of the finest in the world.

Lots of stuff on Florence here. Its seems the city of Florence itself has been designated a UN World Heritage site.






Here's a magnificient piece of sculpture to round off