On Friday morning we had a reservation for the Uffizi gallery to fill so we left the clothes washing for the afternoon and got ourselves down town.
The way they organise the reservation system is slightly confusing… when we booked our tickets the line labelled ‘collect reservation here’ is actually the line you stand in to make a booking. Not that we stood in it for very long. Then coming from the other direction, to the same door, is another line labelled ‘collect reservation here – arrive here less than 10 minutes before your reservation time.’
Or something like that.
But they gave us tickets when we booked… so… what actually happens is that once you have your ticket, you go and enter through the same main door as everyone else waiting in the long long general admission line, except that there are lines going in each direction away from that door, one of them has a red rope around it, and people with reservations go and stand there and don’t wait very long at all.
So I’m sure that clears things up for everyone.
My only other advice is, pay for an audioguide. It’s a little plastic thing you carry around, type in the number of the room you’re standing in, and it tells you all sorts of useful information.
Anyway we got into the museum, which can only be described as exhaustingly comprehensively stunning. Asides of a small sideroom displaying 16th and 17th century sketches by various Dutch and Flemish artists ‘on tour’ in Italy, the main museum starts with Giotto and various other 14th century Florentine painters, and moves from there through Filippo Lippi to Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Tintoretto and Rubens to Titian and Caravaggio and many, many others, Italian, German and Dutch, in between.
Asides of Botticelli’s Prima Vera and Birth of Venus, Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, the vast canvasses depicting the battles of Henry II of France by Rubens, and Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Man, I particularly liked a smaller painting by Jan Brueghel called The Holy Calvary. Alice’s 2nd favourite after the main masters was the earlier works by Giotto and others, which are mainly religious devotional paintings (e.g. lots of gold) and depict what was thought of as the ‘ideal’ of Mary and Jesus, of the annunciation, and so on. Turns out there was a brief attempt by the church, at the start of the 1500s, to sponsor this style back into existence (i.e., to do away with perspective and realistic colour) but in the face of Leonardo and Michelangelo, it didn’t fly.
Now there are two main sets of rooms in the Uffizi, and in between them are long corridors, which are also decorated with countless portraits and busts of historical figures. If these statues are accurate, we can safely that Caligula and Nero were two of the ugliest Roman Emperors ever. Then downstairs, in some new rooms, they have the Titians and Caravaggio’s.
Our appointment for the gallery was at 10.30; we left the museum around 2.30 feeling more or less ‘arted out’.
On the way home we found a super market and bought bread, cheese, pesto, grapes,etc and a small bottle of chianti for dinner, and then settled into our hotel room for some good old-fashioned Florentine riposo (i.e sleeping it off). We headed down and booked our train ticket, bought a bottle opener (apparently the hotel doesn’t have one?) and ate dinner on the balcony, before watching the latest installment of the drama of the homeless people, in which we tried to work out how you can move up from sleeping over here where they have cardboard boxes, to sleeping over there where they have actual mattresses and pillows. One of them even had a mobile phone.
Greg
