A View from the Top

I’ll be back in Florence soon, I hope.  Twice before I’ve stayed in the storied city on the Arno.  Life is short and the world is wide, so I will make this visit a long one, to luxuriate in the history, looking for the ghosts of Boccaccio’s wayward characters around each corner, or Dante dreaming of Beatrice before his exile.  I’ll look up Lorenzo and his family, to pay my respects and tug my peasant forelocks – the Medici won’t be hard to find.  And the artists will be there, in the Uffizi, of course, but in the palaces of both the great and the fallen, in the halls of the republic, and in all the churches large and small.  And everywhere the dome of Florence Cathedral will cast its shadow, reminding me of the irascible genius who attempted the impossible and achieved it, Filippo Brunelleschi.   I must be sure to climb the dome, and say farewell properly.

I climbed it the first time I was in the city – in fact the first time I was in Italy.  Though I was traveling with my wife, I went alone up the steep and claustrophobic stairs that Filippo devised for his masons and himself nearly six centuries ago.  She, poor girl, had to stay in our poky little apartment at the Oltrarno end of the Ponte Vecchio.  On our way to Florence, we’d flown into Milan and stopped there for a week, and at midnight of our fourth day, crossing Piazza Duomo, she tripped and broke her kneecap.  At the Pronto Soccorso she was examined, x-rayed, cast from hip to ankle, told to stay off her feet for a month, and dismissed.

We made it to Florence, with help from kindly taxi drivers and Trenitalia staff.  There we found the apartment we’d previously arranged, though roomy enough, had a narrow metal spiral staircase from the kitchen level to the bedroom.  Her attempts to negotiate the steps on her bottom were good for a few laughs, but we quickly traded the bigger flat for a small one-level space on the third floor.  With lift.  I found a medical-supply shop and rented a stout wheelchair.  Una sedia a rotelle, more commonly called una carrozzella, a word that also means “pram’.  With some lightweight aluminium crutches aboard, we set out to see the city.  Every morning we disassembled the chair, put Pat and her crutches in the tiny lift for the descent to the lobby, then I would recall the lift and follow with the dismembered chair, which we would reassemble before venturing onto the cobbles.

The Stones of Florence

Ah, the cobbles.  We stayed on Costa San Giorgio, a couple of hundred metres from Piazza di Santa Felicità. From there it’s just due passi, as the Italians say when they mean nearby, (or within a mile or two), to the Ponte Vecchio.  But Costa San Giorgio is steep – it leads up to the Forte di Belvedere, with, as its name suggests, commanding and lofty views of the city.  So in the morning I slid along on my heels behind the wheelchair, trying to control its descent toward the Ponte Vecchio, and every evening I pushed it back up the hill, stopping to rest every fifty metres or so.  I can tell you that a cobblestone street dating from about the time of Galileo (who also lived on Costa San Giorgio) provides a very challenging surface for a wheelchair.  Can’t complain too much, though – we were there a month, and despite the allure of pizza and Florence’s elegantly-displayed gelato, I lost ten pounds.  It was good training for my climb up the dome.

There are 463 steps from the floor of Santa Maria del Fiore to the platform just below the lantern, high atop Brunelleschi’s dome.  Or so we’ve been told.  I intended to count them, just to see if the guidebooks really told the truth.  Somewhere along the way I lost count.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the guidebook authors did, too.  Maybe the number comes straight from old Filippo’s plans and nobody’s had the stamina to verify them.  By the time I reached the last, short, steep flight of steps, and popped like an exhausted rabbit out of the little manhole onto the marble landing, I no longer cared.  I just wanted some light, some fresh air, and a chance to stand upright.  What I got was one of the grandest city views any art-and-history fancying rabbit could dream of.

The first vista that greets you as you emerge is the long roof of the nave far below, with Giotto’s bell tower at the far left corner of the roof.  You are immediately struck by how steeply the dome recedes below you.  It’s like that dizzy moment when you reach the top of the Ferris wheel and begin your descent into the void.  Indeed, if you were foolish or clumsy enough to tumble over the railing, you would be shot off the red-orange tiles of the dome like a flat stone skipped off the surface of a still pond.  Who knows where you would land?  No doubt it would be somewhere full of history and art, because, after all, this is Florence.

There was a time, long before the dome, when a bird flying at the height of the lantern would have seen a very different, medieval cityscape.  Instead of the sea of red-tile roofs, it would have seen a forest of towers, over a hundred in the twelfth century.  They, and their attached palazzi, were the stony redoubts of prominent families and other social strivers, continually engaging in violent feuds with each other, and making everyday life a dangerous misery for common citizens who happened to get in the way.  Popular sentiment finally had its way in 1250, and the Republic limited the height of the towers.  One-upmanship lost its appeal, and gradually, over centuries, most of the towers disappeared.  The tower of the Palazzo Vecchio still stands, though, a reminder of the fractious past.

A Lesson in Physics

Despite the wheelchair, we tried to see everything.  The Uffizi, Donatello’s David at the Bargello, Michelangelo’s at the Accademia, the ersatz Davids in the Piazza Signoria and Piazzale Michelangelo, San Marco Monastery where Fra Angelico decorated the cells and Savonarola planned his bonfires of the vanities.  At most places we were waved in, free.  I wonder if that would happen nowadays.

The Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens were not far from our digs, so they were among the first sites we toured.  Giorgio Vasari, generally regarded as a mediocre painter, accomplished architect, and pioneering art historian, credited Brunelleschi as the palace’s designer.  Fact checking was a tough job in Giorgio’s day – no internet, no smart phones, who even knows if he had a library card? – so he got it wrong.  Work began in 1458, twelve years after Brunelleschi died.  His student Luca Fancelli may have designed the palace.  It was commissioned by Luca Pitti, a wealthy banker and possibly the éminence grise behind the later rule of Cosimo de’ Medici.  After Cosimo died, Luca Pitti’s fortunes declined and work on the palace stopped. 

The palace was sold to Eleanora of Toledo, wife of Grand Duke Cosimo I of Tuscany, another Medici ruler, seventy-four years after Luca Pitti died, and Giorgio Vasari himself completed and enlarged it.  He also created the “Vasari Corridor” from the Palazzo Vecchio across the Arno on the Old Bridge and on to the Pitti Palace.  When the Grand Duke finished work for the day, he could walk all the way home without bumping into any other pedestrians.  In Florence, this is certainly a royal luxury.

Even in Florence, though, pedestrians will scatter as a slightly out-of-control wheelchair is careening down the hill, so we reached the palace in record time.   We bumped along the cobbled courtyard and found an entrance for the Palatina Gallery.  It’s on the Piano Nobile, the main floor, which is not the ground floor.  Fortunately all the public floors in the Pitti are accessible either by ramp or stair lift.  Titian, Rubens, Raphael, Botticelli, Caravaggio – the paintings cover the walls just as the Medici and other, later, residents hung them.  There’s no apparent order and the canvases in their ornate frames climb the lofty walls to the very ceilings.  I can imagine over the centuries, as artists went in and out of fashion, their pictures migrating from eye-level to the barely visible top ranks, and perhaps back again.  There’s a certain antique, or perhaps just perverse, charm to the arrangement, though.

The Pitti Palace contains several other exhibits.  The Museo degli Argenti, for example, contains the Medici collection of jewels, vases, ivories and the like, and amazing frescoed trompe l’oiel walls.  If you go, see if you can tell where real space ends and fictive space begins.  But don’t bump your head!  Lorenzo the Magnificent appears in several frescoes.  In one, a young sculptor seeks Lorenzo’s approval of a marble faun’s head.  The sculptor is Michelangelo, who lived in Lorenzo’s palace as a teenager.

The Boboli Gardens climb the steep hill behind the palace, complete with grottos, nympheums, statuary, and sheltered nooks.  From the top of the hill are sweeping views over Florence.  I wish that Galileo had still been in the neighbourhood to propound a simple, multiple-choice physics quiz for me:  if you push a wheelchair to the top of the Boboli Gardens with the help of two kind-hearted Florentines, and then your helpers go on their way, can you safely get the wheelchair back down the hill?  Possible answers are (a) yes; (b) no; or (c) yes, if two lovely students from Prague rush to your rescue while you and the chair are sliding down the hill sideways.  The answer is (c).

Honouring Clumsy Tom

In the church of Santa Maria del Carmine we laboriously mounted a long flight of steps from the ticket office to the Brancacci Chapel with Masaccio’s epochal frescoes.  Poor Masolino, a fine painter – his pupil upstaged him thoroughly.  The whole cycle of frescoes is breathtaking, and finished wonderfully by Filippino Lippi long after both Masaccio and Masolino were dead.  But the heartstopper is Masaccio’s picture of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden – their anguish is almost unbearable. Masaccio’s real name was Tommaso and his nickname, Masaccio, is said to have meant Big Tom or Clumsy Tom. How a prophet is without honour in his own time!  Poor boy, he died in Rome aged 27 years.  Nowadays tourists are limited to 15 minutes or so in the chapel before they too, are expelled.  But we were nearly alone and stayed as long as we liked.  When we left, the guard took pity on us and commandeered the services of a large and good-natured Japanese tourist, and the three of us carried Pat in her chair bodily down the stairs.  She said it was a terrifying ride.

Masaccio also painted a famous and important work in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella.  The Holy Trinity is perhaps the earliest surviving painting to make accurate use of single-point perspective, so of course it was much studied by other painters.  Brunelleschi (who carved a solemn and graceful crucifix for the church) may have helped Masaccio with the composition.  Santa Maria Novella also has outstanding works by Giotto, Duccio, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi and many others, as well as a marble façade whose upper part was designed by Alberti. 

Famous Tombs and a Marching Martyr

The huge basilica of Santa Croce, despite its 19th century neo-gothic façade, dates from the 13th century.  Inside we saw the tomb of Michelangelo, designed by Giorgio Vasari.  It is widely criticized, but Vasari idolized Michelangelo, and I couldn’t help thinking that, despite its mannerist excesses, it was a labour of love.  Giorgio did his very best. The church has the tombs of many of Florence’s and Italy’s greats, including Galileo, the composer Rossini, and even Guglielmo Marconi.  Machiavelli is buried there. 

There is a cenotaph for Florence’s great poet and exiled son, Dante Alighieri, whose body is in Ravenna where he found sanctuary.  In fact, so many famous people are buried or memorialized in Santa Croce that the church is like a pantheon of unforgettable Italian heroes.  In the main cloister there is the serenely Renaissance Pazzi Chapel, designed by Brunelleschi himself.  Also in the cloister is a twentieth-century semi-abstract sculpture by Henry Moore, a rather startling sight in its ancient setting.  It’s said to represent a warrior and honours the courage of British soldiers.

There is another church, one from whose main door you get a fine view of Brunelleschi’s Dome and the rooftops of Florence.  High on a hill is San Miniato al Monte, a beautiful Romanesque church dating from 1013 AD.  It is named for St. Minas, who was martyred around 250 AD during the reign of the Emperor Decius.  After the saint was beheaded, legend has it that he picked his head up, waded across the Arno and marched up the hill to the site of the present church.  While Brunelleschi was constructing his dome, the Olivetan monks who, then as now, cared for San Miniato, no doubt watched in astonishment as the dome above Florence Cathedral took shape.  I wonder if they prayed that this miracle, too, would come to pass.

Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me

Of Brunelleschi’s masterpieces perhaps the most touching is the Ospedale degli Innocenti, a foundling hospital commissioned by the Wool Guild in 1419.  The façade is an elegant and classically simple loggia, with slender columns between rounded arches.  In the spandrels above each column are blue ceramic roundels of babies in swaddling clothes, the lovely work of Andrea della Robbia.  They were added around 1465.  Near the front portico was an opening in the wall with a horizontal turntable, upon which a mother could place a baby, rotate the wheel, and thus anonymously give the infant into the hospital’s care.  This system was in place from 1445 to 1875.  Today the window is walled up, behind iron bars.

Filippo and Michelangelo

Looking at the rough brick front of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, I wondered who could fashion a façade to properly complete the great church.  The church was designed by Brunelleschi but much altered during construction, although the Old Sacristy is said to be faithful to Filippo’s vision.  The Medici Chapels (the New Sacristy and the Princes’ Chapel), along with the Old Sacristy, contain the tombs of almost all the Medici line.  In the New Sacristy are Michelangelo’s famous sculptures for the tombs of two rather unimportant Medici dukes, complete with four reclining nudes, male and female, representing Night and Day, and Dusk and Dawn.  Michelangelo left for Rome in 1534, never to return to Florence.  He had planned tombs of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, but they were never finished.

Will there ever be a fitting marble façade for San Lorenzo?  Perhaps.  There is a wooden model, designed by Michelangelo himself, in the Casa Buonarroti, in Florence.  But, alas (and here I must attempt a wry Italian shrug), who has the money?

Filippo Brunelleschi was long dead when Michelangelo began planning the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome, but Michelangelo had great respect for his brilliant predecessor.  Of his own project compared to Filippo’s dome in Florence, he wrote: Io farò la sorella, già piu gran, ma non piu bella:  “I will make her sister – larger, yes, but not more beautiful”.  

If at First you don’t Succeed …

Yes, we tried to see everything.  We failed, but it was a glorious failure.  And we came back, just a couple of years ago, so Pat could stroll like the locals in the evening passagiata, and so that we could catch a few things we missed the first time – like Filippo’s Santo Spirito, which was always closed our first visit.  It was still closed.  So we went to the Medici-Riccardi Palace instead.  Cosimo built it, after rejecting Brunelleschi’s original design as too sumptuous, and engaging Michelozzo instead.  There, in the family chapel, we were surrounded by Benozzo Gozzoli’s brilliant “Procession of the Magi”.  (Alas, photography is forbidden.) He painted hundreds of figures and dozens of portraits in a playful fantasy landscape, and you feel you’ve stepped into an alternate world of gorgeous Renaissance costumes and richly caparisoned horses, standing next to Cosimo or Lorenzo himself.  (Lorenzo’s portrait is disputed by some, though, because he is portrayed as blond and handsome, while the real Lorenzo was dark and, well, un po’ brutto.  They say he had a great personality, though.) Benozzo included himself among the throng.  Twice, actually.  Once wearing a hat with his name on it, and once waving and smiling to welcome you.

Ah, I can’t wait.  We’ll settle in not far from Stazione Santa Maria Novella, and buy fresh vegetables and pasta and sauces at the Mercato Centrale.  We’ll drink wine at an overpriced café on the banks of the Arno and watch the young racers sculling along as light as water-bugs.  We’ll seek out all the things that delighted and surprised us before, like the little, grimy church of Santa Felicità, with Vasari’s Corridor riding the top of its façade, and Pontormo’s weirdly beautiful Mannerist evocation of grief, the Deposition, inside.  There is so much more – we’ll try and see it all, if only from atop the dome.  Perhaps I’ll see you there, at the top of the 463 steps.  You can’t miss me.  Just look for a large and winded rabbit, looking extremely pleased with himself.  

Text © 2014 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2014 by Patricia Gartman. First published in Italia! Guide to Tuscany, Spring 2014)