Pitti Palace and the Borghese Gallery

This morning my museology class went to the Palazzo Pitti to see the Palestine Collection. The palace is incredible and elaborate and everything that would be expected from a high renaissance home of a duke and duchess. Every room was organized based on the size of the paintings, then mirrored on the other side of the wall, making everything symmetrical. There is no sense of chronological order--it is purely aesthetic.

I just thought I'd share some of my favorite pieces from the collection:

Anton Francesco Peruzzini Tempesta di mare con naufragio


Orazio Riminaldi amore vincitore



Caravaggio amore addormentato



haha, I guess I like the cupids. or the wings. I think it's the wings.

a couple other paintings I really liked (but couldn't find the exact pictures) were Filippo Napoletano's Nettuno ed Anfitrite and Giovan Francesco Susini's La Frode. Susini is a sculptor and has a whole series of these women with different emotions/characterizations. Like this one is "The Fraud". She wears a mask, but has it pulled up by one hand so you can see her face. It is really beautiful.
Yesterday I saw the Accademia Gallery and thought it was cool...David is BEAUTIFUL. OMG. But I really like the decadence of the palace.

Ok! I forgot this in my Rome post, but we went to see the Caravaggio and Bacon exhibition at the Borghese Gallery. The juxtaposition was really interesting and I dont quite know what they were trying to get out of the paintings/trying to communicate to the audience with the mesh, but I liked it. I want to research it more, and perhaps write my final paper (?) on the exhibition and what it meant. My prof hasn't studied Bacon, so it would be illuminating for both of us.
Check it out though, it was a very very interesting exhibition. Plus Caravaggio is amazing, and Bacon is amazing. Perfect duo. Except they paint for very different purposes. Perhaps. I'll have to look into it.

http://www.caravaggio-bacon.it/

ROMA and Tivoli

first espresso in Italy! So strong and so good.

for three days I was shuffled across Rome, back and forth from church to church to museum to church to fountain to stairs to piazza to church...you get the idea. Friday we saw 8 churches, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Forum, the Arch of Constantine, the Palatine and Capitoline hills, multiple piazzas with sculptures and finished with the Trevi Fountain. OH WOW. our group could hardly walk after we saw everything so we stumbled off to sit and eat a huge long dinner and go to bed.
My favorites from Friday were Rome's second great Jesuit church called Sant'Ignazio. It has the most incredible ilusionic frescoes and even a fake dome. Padre Pozzo painted the entire ceiling to look as though it were 2 stories higher, more even in some places. He also painted the fake dome which EVERYONE thought was real. It was the coolest ceiling I saw.

The other church that I really enjoyed (everything was cool of course, this just stuck out as BIZZARE) was another Jesuit church called Gesù, mother church of the Jesuit Order. It was pertinent to the counter-reformation and is insanely over-the-top tricked out in ornamentation. We all walked in and soon discovered they were in the middle of mass...but a strange mass. The priest's voice was recorded and was being played out over a speaker system. There were lights that would highlight different statures and parts of the chapel at different points in the songs and the craziest thing! At one point, the painting in the center of the chapel rolled down, like a screen, and revealed a massive gold statue of the Saint Ignatius Loyola. It was so lavish and overdone. Very very unusual for the other churches in the area that were modest and more traditional. There was an abundance of gold, lapis lazzuli and other precious stones EVERYWHERE. It was incredible. The ceiling was also painted in a way that made it difficult to tell where it stopped, the sculptures began, and what was which medium.






DAY 2: 8:20 AM meet in lobby to leave for the Farnesina, St. Peter's Basilica, and the Vatican. 5:15 PM (circa) take the subway to Piazza del Popolo (and the church), the Spanish Steps, the Bernini fountains in Piazza Barberini, and end the day with the Ecsatsy of Saint Teresa by Bernini circa 8PM.

Ok, this day rocked. Not only was the Farnesina totally cool and got me completely enveloped in the idea of greek and roman gods, but seeing the Basilica during mass and the Pietà was a truly spiritual encounter (spiritual? i am not spiritual, but this. this was spiritual). Before going into the Vatican Prof Helen had us stand in front of a picture of the sistine chapel for about an hour explaining it all because she wasn't allowed to talk while in the chapel. So we listened. Then when we got in the chapel she continued to whisper information and tidbits of knowledge into our headsets, haha. She is such a crazy lady.





The third day in Rome was great, the night before we had a great dinner and desert and wine and got lost trying to find our hotel...BUT! that led us to the trendy high school age kid spot where we had to fight our way through throngs of italian boys. It was a great night.
Helen kept calling Sunday "Dessert" for the weekend because we were seeing gardens and villas. I agree completely with her statement. It was lovely to get out of the hectic city and see Tivoli, a small, tiny, hill town about 45 minutes from Rome. We began with the Villa d'Este, a massive villa created for the cardinal. It has 400 fountains. yeah, 400! It was so beautiful and green and the fountains were all cool and aged. I always wonder when I see these places how elaborate they were at their prime. Can you imagine going to a party at a villa with 400 fountains and each room is dedicated to a different god and all have crazy ceiling paintings and there are fish ponds where you can catch your dinner and a water organ and..ahh oh my gosh. It's insane. You can have your wedding there if you want, we were joking about inviting the entire SACI program plus every acquantance we've ever had to fill up the place.
Tivoli was having a Sunday fair so there were booths and bucking broncos and a blown up slide and BAKED GOODS everywhere! All the little kids were dressed up as princesses and frogs and cowboys and pilots and were throwing confetti all over the place. Helen said they were getting ready for Carnivale and having a good time before they had to give something up for Lent.
This is also the point where my camera ran out of battery...so I'll have to put up pictures of the second half of Sunday up later when I get some from Megan.

The weekend was crazy and I have never walked so much in my life. It felt so good to get back home in Florence. It was also great to have the feeling that Florence is my home. I feel safe in this city and I know where things are and recognize people in the street and my fav chocolate pastry bakers. Rome was lovely and info-packed but it was good to come home.

PLUS! my roommies had dinner waiting :)

CHURCHES CHURCHES CHURCHES

This was the weekend of churches in both Ravenna and San Miniato. I can simply say I was fully churched out by Saturday night, but would do it again any day.
San Miniato is at the top of a huge hill of stairs, and our professoressa lead us at quite the chirpy jaunt while lecturing us about the surrounding buildings and random miracles that were performed along our route. She knows EVERYTHING. I swear she must have a photographic memory because she knows every date and every name of anyone even remotely connected to the Renaissance and Italy in general. The shortened story of San Miniato goes like this: he was a priest and had his head chopped off for doing something bad. After his beheading, he rose to his feet, picked up his head and walked away with it up the big hill we were struggling with earlier (my prof kept saying "if saint miniato could do it without his head, i think we will make it just fine!"). The top is where he laid down to rest and where they built the church. At 5:30 we stayed to hear the monks chanting in his crypt. It was incredible. Actually it was really cold and I was being lulled to sleep by thier chants, but still. Incredible.
We left for Ravenna at 7:45 in the morning and slept on the bus until we got to the Baptistry. It was the first of 4 baptistries we saw that day. And of the 3 churches.
I'm not going to go into the details of each church and baptistry because no one wants to read that. seriously. But! I'll highlight my favorite parts.
First, all of these buildings are vaulted and are coated with early 4th and 5th century Christian mosaics. They detail Christ's passion and his miracles. In the Baptistries there was always, of course, John the Baptist, the River Jordan God (just chillin, sometimes with crab legs coming out of his head), and a nude Christ up to his waist in blue wavy lines. God's hand of course was peeking out of the clouds overhead. The coolest thing about mosaics, and these especially, is their color! They are so beautiful and playful and bring a childish sense to the sometimes too serious tales. Another thing, they never put into mosaic the crucifixion or the resurrection. Awesome. This crypt was underwater and had goldfish swimmin around with the sarcophagi.


















there was even a UNICORN! jeez they are everywhere.




these mosaics were hung on a wall and were little illustrations of folk tales.

















This is the last example of Early Christian mosaics and shows the changes that the style made. It is so colorful and wonderful.

We got home at 8, showered, ate dinner, took naps and headed out to Angie's Pub to meet up with some friends and relax after the crazy day. This coming weekend we are going to Rome. My professoressa gave us our itineraries today...it is a small guidebook in itself. I cant imagine how tired we are going to be after 3 days of 6:30-9 non-stop HISTORY! I cant wait!

Everytime I go outside I get Rhianna stuck in my head

This is the view out my living room window. Pretty spectac huh? This is the Battistero di San Giovanni (straight out the window), the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, and the Duomo peeking over. The only down side is the parade of pots and pans and dishes and men singing "Macho Man" at the wee hours of the morning getting all the pastries ready for the day. They are SO LOUD. Although the Macho Man thing was pretty hilarious because they only knew the words Macho Man and would half hum half sing the rest of it. So that was fun to wake up and eat breakfast to.


Speaking of waking up and eating, this is where I sleep and eat! My bed is against the wall. There is a really oooold classic venetian dresser and wardrobe that dominate the rest of the room, but both were hard to fit into this picture. The kitchen is so awesome. I spend most of my time in the apartment at this table reading or writing in my journal (which I've never done before but rocks. I dont know how i've been missing out on the whole journal thing before).
ADVENTURE TIME. Sunday my roomies and I went out to explore the city. We had intended to get cell phones but could not for the life of us find the address for the store. So I bought a new pair of shoes instead and we were off to wander! Here are some pics of our meanderings...
(ok the first 4 are from a couple days before)




The statue of the guy is on the bridge Ponte Vecchio. What you do is find either a bf or a gf, then you buy a lock and write your names on it. Next, you lock it to the base of the statue! Voila! You will be together forever. Like Justin always says, Florence is the city of Love (although, I thought that was Paris...).




























































































So these are my housemates, from left to right is Melinda, Winnie, and Katie. We found this little park thing in the middle of the city, it is surrounded by a traffic roundabout which made it seriously hard to get to, but was worth it to walk on grass and see big trees. The rest are pictures from the "most romantic spot in Florence", random graffiti on the walls, etc. The one with the group of colorfully dressed people was actually really cool. Ok, so we followed our ears to this large piazza and there was a huge group of what we thought were mimes because all of their faces were painted white. But I think they were a performance group of some other sort because they would make noise and one woman spoke directly to the crowd, as a narrator kind of thing. They were making fun of tourists and it was really funny (in a hey.... kind of way) until they brought out a mom and two kids pretending to be beggars and all the tourists were clutching their bags and looking away all snooty. So that was a message well received.
I cant wait for what else we find. There are soccer games every two weeks on Sundays and I am DEFINITELY going to the next one.

(in explanation of the title: It rains ALL THE TIME. and everyone has umbrellas! it's not like in Portland where if you have an umbrella you are a total dork. It's like, dude, it's raining. where is your umbrella?!)

number two

BUONGIORNO!!

after 12 hours on `air `france, a completely ridiculous conversation with a classic old `french lady, and the craziest cab drive ever, `i have made it safely to `italy! `florence is beautiful and amazing and wet. quite wet. `the cabbie dropped me off in the `piazza san giovanni and said, "ok, your place is on the left". ok vague, on the left?! so i trucked all my luggage (thank god `i only have one bag) around the piazza looking for my number saying scuzi! to just about everyone i ran into on the tiny sidewalks. `my apartment shares an entry with a restaurant, which is really awesome. and you cant even imagine the view from our 3rd story living room. it looks directly out onto the Duomo! holy moley. so whenever my housemates and i get lost in the city, we just look for the dome and head home!

`i have three housemates, one of which is also my roommate. `they are all from the east coast. `winnie, my roommate goes to school at `parsons in `n`y, `katie goes to `mica in `baltimore, and `malinda goes to `skidmore (also in `n`y). `they are all really nice and i instantly knew katie and i would get along fabulously.

`my "group" of friends though are the two kids i met on our flight over from `l`a. `they are both from the west coast, `james is from la, although he goes to school at `skidmore, and `megan goes to `san `diego `state. `they are so fun to hang out with and their other housemate `justin is from `malta. `he went here last semester so he knows all of the great spots. last night we went to the "most romantic place in florence" armed with jackets, wine, and a pineapple (his name is `billy and he will be accompanying us on all of our adventures from now on). it really was the most romantic spot. we climbed tons of stairs, up up up this hill that looked over the city from the other side of the river. the lights were smoldering under a light fog that looked curiously like smog, but it was mysterious and so perfectly "european city at night".

I'll post some pictures later, i need to upload them from my camera. today we are signing up for studio class times and taking a tour of the city for places to buy supplies and books.
the previous student in our house left us a list of things we `m`u`s`t do in italy before we leave. so tonight we are going to search for the secret bakeries! italian bakers are only allowed to sell pastry during certain times in the morning, but there are bakeries that break that law and sell after time to avoid paying tax...we have to go out around 4 in the morning and follow our noses.

`ciao for now!