Without a Traceroute

The next couple days were mostly rather uneventful, filled with sort of standard tourist stuff. I met up with a friend of mine who’s traveling in Europe and her mom, who took us out to a very nice lunch. Let’s hear it for traveling with real adults. Also, wonderfully, her mom was returning to the United States on Thursday (October 16), so she agreed to take my DoA laptop back with her and ship it domestically.

Stereotypical tourist shot in front of the Duomo

Ponte Vecchio

I saw the Duomo, which is the large domed church in the center of Florence. The outside of the church is actually much more spectacular than the inside. I also saw the Ponte Vecchio (‘Old Bridge’) which was the only bridge in Florence not destroyed by retreating Germans during the Second World War. At one time, there were butchers markets and normal stores along the bridge, but then the Medicis decided it should only be jewelery stores, and so it’s been ever since. The Medicis also built a second story on the bridge so they could walk across it without having to mingle with the common folk. There are also actual houses *on* the bridge, which look like they’re constantly in danger of toppling off the side into the water.

Later, I went to see the Uffizi, which has a reputation as one of the most outstanding art museums in the world, and the Academia, another art museum most famous for housing Michaelangelo’s David. I have to say, I was not all that taken with the Uffizi. It was rather expensive to visit, since you have to either pay for a €4 reservation, or wait in a 2-hour+ line. The captions for the various exhibits offered the sparsest minimum of information, because they wanted to sell you a catalog or an audio guide.

They had a nice collection of classical statuary which I enjoyed, and also a good selection of early Renaissance works, but in between was just loads and loads of 14th-century gothic stuff. I’m sorry, but that style of art has never done anything for me. I suppose it’s pretty, but if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all: Flat, perspectiveless renderings of nearly identical figures with blank stares of beatific adoration and goldleaf halos aplenty. If the goal of art is to represent something about the human condition, these artists fail miserably. There’s basically nothing close to any recognizably human emotion in these dead-eyed paintings. Also, you have scrawny stick-figure Jesus around that time. The Uffizi’s Caravaggio collection was awesome, however.

They pretty much all look like this. (Image courtesy wikimedia commons)

I liked the Academia much better. The collection is smaller, but all the permanent exhibits are accompanied by large, informative displays that frequently featured illustrations from sketches or plaster models made for the work, showing how it evolved or changed over time, or comparisons with other similar works or prior influences. Also, David is totally amazing and really overpowering. His hands are way huge, though. Like giant gorilla paws.

I also visited the Museum of the History of Science, which was pretty sweet. The top two floors were closed for renovation, in preparation for a re-opening for Galileo Year in 2009. The exhibits that were open included some of Galileo’s original, handmade telescopes. Only a single broken lens remains from the first telescope he built: “The instrument which moved the world.” They also had very detailed explanations about how Galileo made some of his discoveries, for instance calculating the height of mountains on the moon, and figuring out some of the structure of the Jovian system. They also had a very intricate and beautifully precise brass “Joviolabe” which was similar to an astrolabe, but used by Galileo to calculate the positions of Jupiter’s four largest moons.

I passed on the Serial Killer Museum.