TOWERING ABOVE THEM ALL

San Gimignano is a small walled medieval town in Tuscany known as “The Town of Fine Towers”, and I have to agree.  The town, with its tower houses and hilltop setting makes a pretty unforgettable skyline.

I took a bus here, on my own, for 14 euros versus around 45 euros for the cheapest tour.  The bus dropped us at this entrance to the town.  

The main street is lined with shops selling beautiful Tuscan wares.  

This torture museum just didn’t seem to fit the setting.  (And no, I didn’t pay good euros to see the methods used to torture people in the Middle Ages.)

There was an interesting display of contemporary sculpture in an art gallery.  These wire sculptures were really fine.

I wandered around town for an hour or so just taking in the beauty of the Romanesque and Gothic architecture and tasting some wonderful gelato from a world award winning gelateria in the main piazza.  You don’t often see raspberry with rosemary as a flavor selection.  

This town is incredibly well preserved.  The Italians have a real reverence for the past.

The photo ops here are endless.

There were arches all around the town and some were decorated with frescoes.

I took a tour through the Palazzo Comunale, where I saw frescoes from the 14^th and 15^th centuries.  I think about half of them were of Madonna and Child.  

I could have climbed the 200 plus steps of the tower above the Palazzo, but it took me all of about 5 seconds to decide that I really wasn’t up for it (pun intended).  

Since I was already on a hilltop, I was satisfied with the views I had from the second floor balcony.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and frankly, I wasn’t in the mood to see the inside of yet another church.  So after a lunch of pici (a Tuscan pasta that’s like fat spaghetti) in a delicious sauce of garlic, olive oil, and pecorino, I wandered down a gravel road into the countryside.  There, I sat in the high grass of the roadside bank and called my mother, who I knew would love to be sitting beside me enjoying the incredible beauty of these rolling Tuscan hills.  

This was my view of the town, Mom, while we were talking.  

And the surrounding countryside.  I love being in the Tuscan hills.  I can understand how France Mayes of Under the Tuscan Sun fame fell in love with these beautiful scapes.

If you’ve seen Tea with Mussolini, this is the town where American and English expatriate women saved the frescoes in the Duomo from being destroyed by the retreating Germans.  

Una bella giornata!

PALAZZO VECCHIO (OLD PALACE)

You'd probably be feeling old, too, if you served the City of Florence for as long and faithfully as this building has since it was completed in 1302.  The palace has had many roles:  the historical seat of government of Florence in the Middle Ages, a Medici palace in the mid-16th century, the administrative center of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and later the same role when Florence was the capital of Italy, and and finally the town hall of the commune of Florence.  It became known as the "old palace" when the Medicis moved their headquarters to the Pitti Palace.

Now its role is just to show off all its history.  

It's an impressively large building with a fairly plain exterior.

But as soon as you enter the interior, you begin to see the sumptuousness of the interior. 

After visiting a small museum, this is the first room I entered.  Pretty impressive, eh?  It's a great hall that seats about 500.  The frescoes lining the walls on the left and right are all battle scenes.  There's a great deal of statuary standing below those frescoes.

Including this little piece by Michelangelo, Genius of Victory.

I proceeded to tour the rooms on the first floor, all of which are dedicated to one of the famous Medicis, and they're all appropriately frescoed to reflect their personalities and events in their lives.  This lunette depicts Lorenzo Medici at the center, of course.

And this is Leo X receiving his Papal crown.

The frescoes all in these rooms are amazing, and I could share many photos of them, but seeing these rooms in their entirety is really an unforgettable experience.  Getting the sense of "the whole" personality of these Medicis is what's memorable.

I can't remember where this fresco was.  It's about the life of Furius, a Roman solider and statesman.

Above these rooms on the first floor are the "Apartments of the Elements".  These rooms are similarly frescoed, with the honorees being the gods above.  The intention of the design was to have the Medicis, the powerful rulers of the earth, on the level below the gods who, of course, favored them by bestowing power and riches to the family.

There are several notable works of art in this palace, another of which is a statue by Donatello, Judith and Holofernes.

And this one by Andrea del Verrocchio, Putto with Dolphin.

One of the most interesting room is kept for last.   The Map Room has a wonderful collection of globes and 57 maps painted on leather, showing the world as it was known in 1563.

There is so much more to this palace than I've shown here.  I could share photo after photo of beautiful frescoes and art works housed in this place.  But I can only whet your appetite; there are lots of photos on the internet if you want to see more!

TOO BEAUTIFUL FOR WORDS

Some places are just too beautiful for words.  Cinque Terre, in the region of Liguria, is one of those places.  I'm sure some of you have been there and will agree that these 5 villages, tucked into the cliffs of the Mediterranean Sea, are downright charming.

I took a tour that went to four of the "five lands"--one of the five is not on the sea.  It's at the top of a rocky tor, and you have to climb 300 steps to get to it.  I was really happy to skip that one.

I have over 70 pictures of the villages we visited, but a few are sufficient to show the beauty and charm of these gems by the sea.  The villages were originally fishing villages, and the homes were painted in different bright colors to help the fishermen find their way home.

The day I was there it was raining, so the colors were less vibrant, but I doubt that they ever looked quite as vibrant as this photo I borrowed from the internet. I think someone touched it up a little.  But before time weathered the bright paint, I imagine the town might have looked closer to this from the sea.

The green hills around the villages are terraced, and the villagers once grew enough grapes, olives and other crops to be fairly self-sustaining.  But farming these terraces is grueling work; and since the towns became more accessible by road and train, tourism has sustained the economy of this area.  There were extensive landslides in 2011, which caused a great deal of damage to this area, and the deterioration of these terraces is blamed for the severity of the damage.

The tour was supposed to include a boat trip from one of the towns to another, but the sea was storming a bit, so we didn't get a chance to enjoy the view of the coast from the water.  But we certainly enjoyed the wonderful seascapes from fairly dry ground.  The forecast that I checked promised a sunny day, but it rained all morning and part of the afternoon.

The vendor that sold these rain slickers and umbrellas must have made a fortune on this day.  This is my new friend Bernadette, who I met in language school.  We look like we're decorated for Christmas.  Bernadette is a Palestinian woman from Israel.  She is a teacher, and her husband is a nurse, and besides that, they run a restaurant in a hotel in their village.

It seems like I'm always climbing up and down steps, and today was no exception.  In all four of the villages we visited, I climbed steps to get to the points where I could take some of these beautiful photos.

Like this one, for instance.

Bernadette and I met a lovely family from Mexico--a mother and her two daughters who were traveling around Spain and Italy together.  The mother and daughter in the foreground are both named Almarosa.  The younger Almarosa is an endodontist.  Liliana on the far right is working on a Master's Degree in Political Science in Madrid.  They were lovely women, and we enjoyed being in their company.

This is a fresco that was by one of the train stations.

And this mosaic was at the center of the main piazza in one of the town.

There aren't any more words, just beauty.

SOAKING IN THE FLORENTINE CULTURE

I stayed in town this weekend.  I had tickets on Saturday to hear a chamber music concert at Teatro delle Pergola.  I got a little lost, so was a little late, and forgot to pick up a program, so I can't tell you the name of the ensemble or what I heard.  What I can say is that there were 4 violins and two cellos, and the music was beautiful, and so was the theater.

  

 I was wishing I could sit in one of those boxes because they just look so elegant.

Today I spent close to five hours wandering through several museums in the enormous Palazzo Pitti.  The palace is the former residence of the Medici family.  Before they bought it, Luca Pitti, a Florentine banker, owned it.

It doesn't look that beautiful on the outside, but the inside is unbelievable.  In addition to the several museums housed in the palace, there's a huge beautiful garden behind it, which is loaded with statuary.  It's the largest museum complex in Florence.  I bought a ticket that got me into three of the museums.  The first was the Palatine Gallery, which exhibits more than 500 Renaissance art works and many of the palaces furnishings and frescoes from the 16th century through the 19th century.  

  

You couldn't take photographs, of course, but these borrowed ones will give you an idea of the elegance of the several rooms in the Palatine Gallery.

Besides being chock full of Renaissance art, every ceiling was a masterpiece; most had a central fresco and several lunettes.  Roman gods conveying power to the Medicis were the subject of some.  Hercules was also featured in several. 

This is a relatively simple example of a ceiling fresco.

Raphael's La Donna Velata (Woman with a Veil) is among the more valuable pieces in this collection of art.

Caravaggi's Sleeping Cupid is another.

My ticket also got me entry to the Costume Museum.  The display is 98% women's clothing, mostly evening gowns from the 16th through the 20th century.

I spent at least two hours in the Gallery of Modern Art, and I must say I was pretty excited to see some secular art.  There were 30 rooms of paintings, statuary, clocks, and some furniture, all displayed in beautifully appointed surroundings.  

Besides the Boboli Gardens behind the palace, you can also tour the Royal Apartments, a Silver Museum, and a Porcelain Museum.  Palazzo Pitti is quite a grand place.  

After 5 hours, I felt a deserved a gelato--strawberry and pistachio isn't such a great pairing tastewise, but it sure looked pretty.

I CLUMB AND CLUMB SOME MORE

I've always used "climbed" as the past tense of climb, but today I clumb.  It's a grammatically acceptable alternative, and it just seems to more aptly fit my experience of ascending to the Piazzale Michelangelo (as in, my legs felt heavy from all the steps I clumb).  The piazzale is perched above Firenze on the south side of the Arno (my side of town). 

Some of the 163 steps up to the Piazzale were these wide ones that reminded me of scaling similar steps to the language school in Sorrento.

And close to 100 of them were just regular steps.  I clumb them all and immediately treated myself to a gelato from a stand that was strategically located very close to the top of the stairs.  I'd like to own that little business.

The view of Firenze from the Piazzale was spectacular and definitely worth the physical effort to climb those stairs.  

There's a reproduction of David standing in the center of the Piazzale.  The sun went under the clouds, which made a really clear picture impossible, but I love this shadowy silouette-like photo of this famous fella.

I couldn't take enough pictures of these juicy tulips and daffodils that sang the platitudes of spring.  There were several beds of them in the Piazzale.

Perched even higher, above the Piazzale, is the Basilica di San Miniato al Monte.  There were more steps that led to the top, but I chose to ascend more gradually on a road that wound its way up to this church.

There were some nice frescoes inside.

And a nice altar.  There was organ music playing all the while I was inside.

I could have sat on the stone wall surrounding the church courtyard all afternoon enjoying this even more expansive view of the city.  It was a warm, beautiful April day, perfect for climbing a Tuscan hill.  And I clumb it!