Uffizi; (I may not go to another art gallery for about a year)
This morning we had an Uffizi highlights/ Vasari corridor tour. The Uffizi highlights were great – our guide was a young woman with a great personality (what a shocker! – I was beginning to think all Italians who dealt with the public were chosen in some sort of nastiness tourniment) and she occasionally made some great English slip-ups like “hair brushes” for eyebrows and the “holy team” for the trinity (go team!). She was very knowledgable, and was able to tell us a lot about the best works in the Uffizi, which included the birth of venus, primavera, one of 3 Michaelangelo paintings, and some early Rennaisance works as perspective was reintroduced to painting and the subjects became secularized. The Vasari corridor itself was interesting – it has some lesser works of art and connects the Uffizi with the Boboli gardens in the Pitti palace. They had the fragments of one of the paintings blown up in the 1993 Mafia attack on the gallery. Then we had lunch (pumpkin and duck ravioli), and went back to the Uffizi, where mom lied through her teeth to get us back in. Turns out we had seen most of the highlights, but we saw an El Greco, some more Botticelli, Raphaels, Tintorettos (including one of a maid offering Leda various types of poultry), Titians, and some seriously fugly baby Jesus’. It astounds me how many seriously bad bambinos there are, that really could have been burned as sacrilige (how on earth do you spell that – it isn’t a word I need often). Errands tonight – internet (reconfirm my air mauritius flights, book a room in mauritius, check that the volcano going off on Reunion isn’t disrupting air traffic), laundry, and more cheese and girl scout cookies for dinner, and the packing. Naples tomorrow! Yay! Bones and dead people!
Tags: Travel
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