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Album: By Country | By Date Italy | January 2001 < Prev: Venice Drawing, Eating, and Visiting | Next: Doing the Tourist Thing in Florence >
Travelogue: By Country | By Date Italy | January 2001  

January 2001 - Florence

Youth Hostel and Piazza della Signoria

Outside the window of our room at Villa Camarata The front of Villa Camarata. It appears to have once been a mansion with elegant ground. It is now an inelegant hostel with uncomfortable beds. Ponte Vecchio and the Arne Another in Monica's continuing door knocker series
Palazzo Vecchio seen from the Uffizi Loggia of the Piazza della Signoria, a fancy porch next to the square, has a collection of renaissance sculputure that you can walk around and look at for free. This is Perseus by Cellini, a goldsmith, sculptor, writer of a famous autobiography, murderer, brawler, and embezzeler who hobnobbed with popes, bankers, and the nobility of Italy and France. There's a bust of him on the Ponte Vecchio where the goldsmiths had their shops. Piazza della Signoria is the plaza in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. It was he seat of the Signoria of the Florentine Republic in the 14th century and then the government centre of the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany. It is built in a style which some serious people call Tuscany Gothic. In the background is copy of Michelangelo's David. The original stood here for centuries. It was commissioned for the top of the cathedral, but the city thought the sculpture too important to be placed rather out of sight, so they put it here. In the 1800s, after the enlightened Florentines had died out, David was moved to an art gallery, Accademia. In this way, people could be charged outrageous sums to see it. We paid the outrageous sum, and felt a bit like marks paying to see a sideshow at Barnum's or Hall's Cardiff giant. The Palazzo from the Loggia
Silly children on the Loggia, just before the police woman told them not to touch the sculpture. They obeyed the policewoman and not their mother. From the Loggia Hercules and Cacus by Bandinelli Neptune using the bidet