Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Padlock Nuisance
We were wondering about this: a whole tangle of padlocks suddenly appears and grows near a famous site, like dozens and dozens, one attached to another. The other day on a tour (from the British Institute), my tour guide mentioned them briefly as “keepsakes”. The guide said that people attach the lock and throw the key into the river. It is suppose to symbolize love of the city or love between the lovers who attached the lock. Whatever it is, there is 50 Euro fine for doing it. It’s plain stupid. Please if you have eternal love for the city or someone else; proclaim it with your voice, or a drawing. Tangles of locks are not exactly great to look at, plus they are potentially a safety hazard (okay how old am I?). More on where this originated. The Wikipedia article seems to imply that on the Ponte Vecchio there is a shop on the bridge selling locks. I never saw this shop, will have to check.
I Medici Video
The video I Medici, Signori del Rinascimento is an interesting set of videos about the Medici and their impact on the Renaissance (not insignificant). The life and times of the Medici are dramatized, but the actors never speak, instead there is narration interspersed with experts talking. So it’s a documentary of sorts. There are different little side tangents taken up like Brunelleschi’s building of the duomo dome and Michelangelo's carving of David. On the whole, a recommend.
DVD 1: Nascita di una dinastia (birth of a dynasty) / Lorenzo il Magnifico
DVD 2: I papi medicei (the medici popes) / Il potere contro la verità (power verus truth)
By the way, I tried watching the videos with Italian spoken and English subtitles. That just didn’t work, too confusing. It is better to just listen in Italian and then rewatch again in English if you need to.
Anna Anna Bo-Banna!
Anna, Anna, bo-banna (*)
Banana-fana fo-fana
Fee-fi-mo-manna.
Anna!
Thank you Shirley Ellis and The Name Game video.
Okay, we’d be remiss to not mention what’s up with the neighbor (“vicina di casa”), Anna. Well, let me say Mark has the longest fuse of anyone I know and Anna lit it. Boy oh boy. Then I jumped in trying to swear at her and called her crazy (“pazza”) and rude (“maleducato”). (The latter insult she uses when she yells at people passing by.) The confrontation wasn’t pretty. In the heat of the moment we asked her if she stole our plants and we think she confessed to it. It was odd.
The incident that caused the blow up is so strange that I don’t even think I could describe it accurately. Our landlords (both the owner of the house and the property manager) have confirmed to us that her behavior has always been this way. What’s really sad or interesting is not that she is that way but the way we reacted. We wished we acted different and just ignored her. It would have been less energy.
Favorite Laundry Detergent
Oh why do we obsess over small things? For example, laundry detergent. Our favorite laundry detergent is this powder that leaves your clothes with little or no smell but cleans them well. We can only find it at this little store just outside of the old gate in San Niccolo (called the San Miniato Gate). We feel so guilty walking in with other groceries just to buy the soap but there really isn’t anything all that interesting to buy in this store except this soap.
“Bucato” is laundry. It sort of means holes or piercings. Not sure why this is the name but it is. “Fare il bucato” is to do the laundry. So if I did the laundry, I would say “Io ho fatto il bucato”.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Palestra Ricciardi
Funky gym. Someone (who shall remain nameless, but is another American living in Florence) said that Palestra Ricciardi was “funky”. I joined anyways because it is nearby and looks reasonable. Well, funky it is, but for a reason. It’s the smell, but not always. Let me explain. First, the gym is a conglomeration of many rooms in a maze-like structure. Second, off every room there seems to be a bathroom. This is very odd. We belonged to one of the largest gyms in the USA and there were not that many bathrooms. Well, these bathrooms are used constantly (maybe working out makes Italians go to the bathroom; it has the opposite effect for me). Finally, anybody who had lived in Italy can’t help but comment (at some time if they have a nose) that the Italians should outsource their plumbing, maybe to the Japanese, because they have not mastered keeping sewer smells at a minimum. Okay, so lots of bathrooms used a lot = funky gym. If you go early in the morning when the bathrooms haven’t been used yet, it’s better. Overall, I don’t mind because the gym is adequate for getting some cardio in and minimal weight lifting. I joined for a month, we’ll see how it goes.
Oh, how I could go on about the gym culture I’ve seen here, but I’ll wait for more observations. Okay, here’s just one: the folks wearing big ol’ scarves while working out. Fashionable, maybe, but necessary?
Oh, how I could go on about the gym culture I’ve seen here, but I’ll wait for more observations. Okay, here’s just one: the folks wearing big ol’ scarves while working out. Fashionable, maybe, but necessary?
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Some Texts I Am Using in the Renaissance History Course
So far (beside many Internet sites, okay, mostly Wikipedia), I’ve used the four books below. The first two I bought and the second two I borrowed. By the way, PaperBack Exchange is the place to go in Florence for these types of text books – forget Edison or Seeber stores.
The History of Italian Renaissance Art is a pleasure to read and is loaded with pictures. Painting, sculpture, and architecture are covered. (The front cover? Orvieto duomo facade.) The book was originally published in the 1960s and has gone through several editions, adding an author along the way. The original author, Frederick Hartt, organized the book using the biographical approach which means artists’ lives and works are discussed, more or less, individually. It’s an interesting approach that makes the reading more intimate and accessible. The book focuses mainly on Florence, Rome, Siena, and Venice. If I had to buy one book, so far it would be this one.
The biographical approach to art history had its biggest advocate in Giorgio Vasari and his influential 1550 book The Lives of the Artists. To this day this book continues to be an important source of information about and introduction to Renaissance artists (mostly Tuscan). Each chapter is based on a particular author, with chatty, sometimes humorous and sometimes inaccurate stories. For me, it’s not a particularly interesting read though everyone raves about it. Maybe it will become interesting the deeper I delve into this subject?
The book Wealth and Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600 is a recommended text for the course. On first glance, it seems dry, after all no art works are actually discussed. But on subsequent inspections, it opens up and tells you a lot about what life was like leading up to and during the Renaissance. It presents the kind of information that other art books don’t cover. For example, page 67 (1993 edition):
"The timing of the Renaissance as a consumer phenomenon was very much a function of the political situation – the emergence of strong oligarchical and despotic governments in the towns, ending the secular instability of communal factionalism; the success of the popes in establishing an independent state in central Italy and transforming Rome into a European capital; the general, if percarious, stabilization of the political scene in the mid-fiftenteenth century; and the overwhelming presence of Spain in the sixteenth century, freezing the political system throughout the peninsula into a permanent stability as well as transforming Naples into a significant new market and giving yet another infusion of wealth to Italian interests."
Interesting, huh? Seriously, I like this book.
The last book,
The Scientific Renaissance: 1450 – 1630, was not part of the recommended reading, but I was interested to know if there was a scientific renaissance (yes there was) and who were the key players. This book at times is hard to read, but if you stick with it you get a good sense of some of the scientific work in this period. In particular, the author spends a chunk of time talking about Copernicus and the Copernican Revolution: “the paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which places Earth at the center of the Universe.”[1] After reading this book I came away with the notion that Copernicus wasn’t out so much to topple the old paradigm just to do so, but more that he was really trying to solve a practical problem of the day which was that of calendar reform. (For example, the church had a hard time figuring out where to place Easter.) The Ptolemaic model of spheres within spheres was too inaccurate for keeping precise calendars and astronomical events so, another method was needed. So inaccurate was the old model that even astrologers were complaining! Copernicus’ book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium 1543 laid out the new system of the heavens and a new way to calculate astronomical events. While by far not perfect, it started the slow wheel of change and opened the door for subsequent astronomers to fine tune the model.
The History of Italian Renaissance Art is a pleasure to read and is loaded with pictures. Painting, sculpture, and architecture are covered. (The front cover? Orvieto duomo facade.) The book was originally published in the 1960s and has gone through several editions, adding an author along the way. The original author, Frederick Hartt, organized the book using the biographical approach which means artists’ lives and works are discussed, more or less, individually. It’s an interesting approach that makes the reading more intimate and accessible. The book focuses mainly on Florence, Rome, Siena, and Venice. If I had to buy one book, so far it would be this one.
The biographical approach to art history had its biggest advocate in Giorgio Vasari and his influential 1550 book The Lives of the Artists. To this day this book continues to be an important source of information about and introduction to Renaissance artists (mostly Tuscan). Each chapter is based on a particular author, with chatty, sometimes humorous and sometimes inaccurate stories. For me, it’s not a particularly interesting read though everyone raves about it. Maybe it will become interesting the deeper I delve into this subject?
The book Wealth and Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600 is a recommended text for the course. On first glance, it seems dry, after all no art works are actually discussed. But on subsequent inspections, it opens up and tells you a lot about what life was like leading up to and during the Renaissance. It presents the kind of information that other art books don’t cover. For example, page 67 (1993 edition):
"The timing of the Renaissance as a consumer phenomenon was very much a function of the political situation – the emergence of strong oligarchical and despotic governments in the towns, ending the secular instability of communal factionalism; the success of the popes in establishing an independent state in central Italy and transforming Rome into a European capital; the general, if percarious, stabilization of the political scene in the mid-fiftenteenth century; and the overwhelming presence of Spain in the sixteenth century, freezing the political system throughout the peninsula into a permanent stability as well as transforming Naples into a significant new market and giving yet another infusion of wealth to Italian interests."
Interesting, huh? Seriously, I like this book.
The last book,
The Scientific Renaissance: 1450 – 1630, was not part of the recommended reading, but I was interested to know if there was a scientific renaissance (yes there was) and who were the key players. This book at times is hard to read, but if you stick with it you get a good sense of some of the scientific work in this period. In particular, the author spends a chunk of time talking about Copernicus and the Copernican Revolution: “the paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which places Earth at the center of the Universe.”[1] After reading this book I came away with the notion that Copernicus wasn’t out so much to topple the old paradigm just to do so, but more that he was really trying to solve a practical problem of the day which was that of calendar reform. (For example, the church had a hard time figuring out where to place Easter.) The Ptolemaic model of spheres within spheres was too inaccurate for keeping precise calendars and astronomical events so, another method was needed. So inaccurate was the old model that even astrologers were complaining! Copernicus’ book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium 1543 laid out the new system of the heavens and a new way to calculate astronomical events. While by far not perfect, it started the slow wheel of change and opened the door for subsequent astronomers to fine tune the model.
British Institute Art History Course
I finished week one of a four week course on the High Renaissance at the British Institute in Florence. (That's why the posts have dwindled....sorry 3.75 readers.) So far I love the course. I’ve never taken an art history course so I do not have anything to compare it to, but the lectures and tour we had so far were great. The lectures take about 1.5 to 2 hours. The tours take about the same time or longer. There is a lecture or tour every day of the four week course.
A perk of taking any course at the Institute is membership into the library located on the south side of the Arno River. The library has a nice view out onto the Arno, looking north. The library has all the features you’d expect to be at a modern library, just at a slightly smaller scale: places to study, media (CD, DVD, and tapes), book check-outs, a small periodicals reading area, knowledgeable librarians, computers, WIFI, etc. If you are not taking courses at the Institute, then you can still join the library for a period of time for a reasonable fee.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Earthquake
I was in the kitchen around 8:45am and saw and heard the hutch glass doors moving for just a few seconds. I yelled upstairs and asked if everything was okay? Did you fall off the toilet? No. Well, then we just assumed a truck on a nearby street went by. Later we found out there was an earthquake with several aftershocks (or was there 3 earthquakes?). Earthquake is “terremoto” in Italian. The center of the earthquake(s) was about 40km north of Florence in the Apennine mountain range (Vernio). I guess this mountain range is active.
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