May 29-31, 1984

May 29-31, 1984

In the morning we got off the train in Pisa, Italy and took a bus to see the Leaning Tower. I didn’t climb it. It really leans! I mean a lot! It looked like it could fall over any minute. The tower sits next to a beautiful Cathedral and Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo. After taking the classic picture of me holding up the tower, we hopped back on the train for Florence. There we ran into the rest of our travel entourage who hadn’t made the stop in Pisa.

Florence (Firenze) is the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. It is an art lover’s paradise. My high school curriculum, surprisingly, included a Humanities course as a Senior Requirement. That class included a lot of art history. And despite being an engineer, I continued my artistic education and fulfilled my Humanities electives at U of I with two Art History courses. So I was prepared for Florence. We visited the Uffizi gallery, the premier art museum of the early Italian masters. The collection includes the very famous Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. The art highlight though was going to the Accademia. It is the current home of Michelangelo’s famous statue of David. Awesome! For school I had read the Michelangelo biography, The Agony and the Ecstasy. We walked by the Piazza della Signoria, a plaza next to the fortress-like town hall, Palazzo Vecchio. This was where the David statue originally stood.

We also walked across the Ponte Vecchio Bridge. This medieval bridge has stores along both sides.

In the center of Florence is the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (known as “the Duomo”). The dome is famous for being designed and built by Brunelleschi on the cusp of the Italian Renaissance. We climbed the Duomo for a city view. There is nothing but orange-tiled city roofs as far as you can see.

The next-door Baptistery is famous for its Gates of Paradise doors. In earlier Christian times, baptisteries were stand-alone because the unbaptized weren’t allowed inside a church. The gilded bronze doors have panels with reliefs depicting bible stories. Ghiberti won the 1401 competition to produce these decorations.