Tag Archives: art

Ready, Aim, Firenze!

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Tuesday 6 May 2025 – And so the adventure begins!

As is normal with us, we can tell that we’re travelling because we have to get up at an obscure hour of the day. In today’s case, it was an 0500 alarm in order to catch a flight to Florence, so that we could have a few days’ kulcher in advance of starting the long walk to Rome, which peregrination is the main reason for being in The Foreign.

We had treated ourselves to a night in the Sofitel by Heathrow Terminal 5 to mitigate the early start by as much as possible. Upon reflection, we could quite easily have simply started from home on the same schedule, but never mind; it started to get us into the rhythm of living out of suitcase, as we will be doing for the next month.

Courtesy of last year’s extravagant travel schedule, I find myself at the Silver level in BA’s club, which gave us priority check-in and access to the club lounge and an opportunity to snarf some free fruit and yoghurt rather than paying £28 per head for the same service at the Softel. Lots has been written about BA’s service, much of it uncomplimentary, but in their defence I have to point out that Marmite is available in their lounge; a lot may thus be forgiven. And actually everything went pretty smoothly on the flight, despite the fact that the aeroplane was parked up at Terminal 3, which necessitated a bus journey long enough to make us wonder whether the driver actually knew the way. But she found us a plane and we piled on board, Jane by the window and me on a middle seat.

Which was OK until it became clear that the aisle seat next to me had been reserved by a very overweight person, who I felt should either have paid for two seats, or possibly reimbursed me the proportion of my space that she occupied. I dealt with this is the only way a British chap can; by saying nothing and pretending not to be aggrieved whilst hoping that my seething indignation somehow conveyed itself to my right.

And I was unable to finish the Super Fiendish Sudoku! Still, it was nice to see the tips of the Alps poking through the clouds as we flew over them.

Our luggage arrived into the baggage hall very shortly after we did, which was nice, and there was a very affable chap awaiting us to whisk us to our hotel in Florence, the Hotel Camilla. At reception, we were greeted by the very affable and capable Jessica, but only after we’d puffed our way up two storeys of really quite chunky steps. Also, it’s a listed building, so no lift is ever going to be possible. The room we have is perfectly nice, has a decent view out of the window,

and, importantly, a kettle, which held the prospect of combining nicely with the bags of Twining’s finest Earl Grey we’d brought with us. But first, we had A Mission with some important objectives: lunch; a pharmacy to buy the sunscreen we’d forgotten to pack; and some kind of bag to carry stuff around when sightseeing. We haven’t travelled since October, and we’re a bit out of practice, it would seem.

Jessica recommended a pharmacy and a fruitful area for lunch prospecting and so off we set, into the narrow, crowded streets of Florence.

The hotel’s location is pretty good – well done to WalkThe Camino.com for its choice. We are very near many of the major sights of Florence, such as the humble San Lorenzo Basilica

built when Florence  took a dose of its own Medici. It’s actually larger than the cathedral, which was built by the Medicis from their own money, so I suppose they deserved this cute little chapel. We popped inside to take a look.

Without being overwheming it’s quite spectactular, with a marvellous ceiling,

some major artworks,

St. Lawrence being griddled

The Annunciation

some major carvery by Donatello,

Originally a pulpit – careful examination reveals a door

and a lovely cloister courtyard

featuring some very eye-catching statuary.

Further works by the sculptor, Andrea Roggi, are outside the Basilica, but many were draped in unattractive punters, and so were photographically unrewarding. This one – Tree of Life – is very impressive.

Next stop was for some lunch, taken pleasantly al fresco outside Trattoria Antellesi, to fortify ourselves for some more wandering about. For it is given that when Jane and Steve visit a place, they go for a walk. Obviously.

Jane suggested a route which led past the astonishingly large central market, which is both outdoor (hugely redolent of Italian leather)

and indoors.

Our path then took us to the Duomo, the main cathedral of Florence. Having only seen this photo

and not really appreciated any of the detail in it, I was unprepared for the impact it had on me. It is simply staggering.

The colour, the detail, the scope – amazing.

and it really annoys me that people, faced with such majestic beauty, want nothing more than to interpose themselves as foreground interest.

Walking round it reveals that the brightness and colour has been the result of some considerable work; other areas are awaiting attention

but will, I’m sure, display the signature white and green colours in due course. One can see some progress has been made elsewhere.

Another obvious Thing To Do in Florence is to visit the Ponte Vecchio, so we headed off in that direction, past various slabs of Florentine masonry,

eventually arriving at the crowded bridge

before finding our way along the river so that we could look back at it to appreciate it better.

Others, of course, were less taken with the view.

We passed a couple of interesting sights. This rendering of the Mona Lisa

was worth a closer look.

and we caught a glimpse of the Bacchus Fountain in the Pitti Palace

 

as I searched for a possible place for launching a drone for an aerial shot. I think I’m going to be unlucky in that; drones are, unsurprisingly, not allowed in the city, but I remain hopeful that I can find somewhere legit to launch for a quick photo.

There were, unsurprisingly, many artistic touches to be seen across our short walk, including coats of arms on the sides of buildings, such as this one of the Medici family,

and a couple of statues as enigmatic as they were large.

No, it’s not clear what these figures represent. That’s Art for you, innit?

We returned to the hotel to find that the sainted Jessica had provided some milk, which meant that we could induge in a restorative cup or two of Twinings finest Earl Grey.

We have a proper formal guided tour to look forward to tomorrow, so that we may learn a little more of the history and culture of this remarkable city, and so that I might be able to make better informed comment about what we’ve seen. Do please come back to find out if this actually is the case, won’t you?

 

Spring Surprise in Canberra

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Wednesday 18 September 2024 – Given that we had the day all to ourselves and that the weather outlook was decent, I doubt that many of my loyal fans, such as you, dear reader, will be surprised to learn that we went for a walk. Of course we did.

Jane had, of course, done her preparation, and so we had a general sense of which direction we would head out in without actually having any real knowledge of what we’d see. I’d read and heard that Canberra is an odd place because of its provenance – a city custom-built between Sydney and Melbourne, to shut down the late 19th-century arguments the two cities were having about which should the capital of a newly-federated Australia. Canberra was formally declared as the capital on March 12, 1913. This is going to be a long enough post without my going into its location – where aboriginals had lived for 21,000 years – or how it got its name; its Wikipedia entry is a good source for those seeking details.

I have to say that in the initial stages of our walkabout, the place did feel weird. Looking at the street layout, it’s quite clearly a confected city.

City Centre streets
Government Area streets

It has many architectural flourishes and artistic touches which don’t quite gel into a place with a soul. It’s interesting to walk round, though.

The first place we explored was City Hill (centre of left map above). It’s not much of a hill, but it’s been planted with conifers and a sodding great flagpole, flying the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) flag.

On the hill’s periphery, there’s the Canberra Centenary Column

which contains a time capsule containing 100 representative items of Canberra’s history. A lot of thought has been put into alignment of things.

Wanting to walk around the city, we found our way to City Walk in the hope that it would be helpful in shaping our strolling. To get there we passed the Melbourne Building

which, completely unsurprisingly, given Canberra’s provenance, is opposite a mirror image of itself called the Sydney Building. Both buildings have a nice cloister along the sides

and the Sydney Building even has a Tardis halfway along one side,

though quite why I’m not sure; a couple of locals walking past it were puzzled – clearly not Whovians.

Although most of the people we saw seemed perfectly affluent, it’d clear that not everyone is comfortably off.

Generally speaking, the buildings in that area are functional, rather than photogenic

but we passed many artistic installations of various sorts as we walked along.

Pavement mosaic
Road crossing

We found murals in a couple of places

though there were many unofficial additions to the originals.

There were also many floral touches.

OK, I’ll confess: we did have a specific objective to include in our walk, as the hotel receptionists had told us about it when we checked in. We were lucky enough to be visiting Canberra when Floriade, the biggest celebration of spring in Australia, was on. There were pointers to it all over the place

and so we made our way to Commonwealth Park to see what it was like. It was lovely. If you like tulips, it was positively orgiastic.

There were some non-floral artistic touches on display

An entry into the Gnome Knoll competition

There were various stages (yes, there was a Tulip Stage among them); on one of them, a bunch of kids were singing

to an audience, who were sometimes joining in

each in their own key, of course.

There were many retail opportunities

the most striking of which, for us as UK residents, was

Christmas items. Perfectly normal here, of course, but I don’t associate celebrating spring with celebrating Christmas, so I was a bit startled.

One retail opportunity was, however, right up our street.

so we popped in to try a few samples.

After Floriade, we turned our steps towards what is pretty much the city’s raison d’être – the government centre. We could see bits of it across the lake from Floriade.

Our route there took us past the Cook Memorial Globe

beyond which we could see that, sadly, the Cook Memorial Jet (i.e. fountain) was not operational today. The globe is a detailed piece of work, showing the routes that Cook sailed in his explorations from Plymouth

and around Australia.

The Government Zone has many imposing buildings,

National Library
Treasury

and, of course, the Parliament Building on Capitol Hill (which is not much of a hill either, to be honest)

with its very dramatic, though somewhat leaky roof.

OK, it’s not really the roof, it’s just a, erm, well, how would you describe it? [ An over-the-top flag holder? – Ed ]

We did go up on to the real roof, from where we could see the old Parliament Building

with a bloody flagpole in the middle of the bloody view (grrr!). A further piece of designed city alignment here – as you can see, the route from old to new Parliament buildings aligns exactly with the peak of Mount Ainslie.

The inside of the new Parliament Building is quite impressive,

(I sneaked a look through an open door and saw that there was a massive piss-up on the cards in the near future)

and, outside, the alignment and symmetry continue.

We had passed by the Old Parliament Building on the way to the New One, but its rather lovely garden was full of schoolkids on an outing. In fact, I think that Wednesday must be National Schoolkids Visit Government day, because there were several parties of schoolkids all over the government estate. However, they’d left the gardens by the time we passed by going back, so we could see (and smell) the fantastic wisteria that was blooming there.

We saw some birdlife in and around these gardens.  One bird I saw walked like a pigeon, but Jane thought it couldn’t be one because of its crest.

Google Lens showed us that there is, after all, a (rather alien-looking) bird called a crested pigeon. Sulphur-crested cockatoos were in abundance – probably loathed by the locals, but for us a lovely sight. We spent several happy moments stamping around after them to try to get one to show us its crest.

Hurrah!

And so, some 11km later, we arrived back at the hotel, having had a very engaging walk around Canberra.  Yes, the bits we saw felt a bit odd, because it’s a confected city, but it was very interesting to see it; and Floriade was lovely.

We only have the one full day here. Tomorrow we travel to Sydney.

Well, we might.

Virgin Australia, who have managed, in ways both large and small, to bugger us about for every flight we’ve taken with them so far, have warned us that high winds are expected and this might affect our travel.  Listening to the wind whistling round us on the sixth floor of the hotel, I wonder indeed what outrages outages we might expect tomorrow.

Diversion: The Henry Jones Art Hotel, Hobart

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Sunday 8 September 2024 – I promised earlier (and earlier) that I would write about the hotel we stayed at in Hobart, the Henry Jones Art Hotel, because it made such an impression on us as we arrived a couple of days ago. For a first impression, the only place to have exceeded it was the Singular Hotel in Patagonia, and for a similar reason – the elegant reuse of a historic space as a hotel. The Singular saw the transformation of an old lamb canning factory; the Henry Jones was a redevelopment of a waterfront warehouse that was once used in the whaling industry and then repurposed for making jam. Henry’s story is a remarkable one; he started in the jam factory, sticking labels on tins, rose through becoming foreman to buying a controlling interest in the business and reconstructing it in his own name, with the “IXL” (“I Excel”) brand name.

Like so many waterfront properties the jam factory fell into disrepair and was practically on the point of collapse when the current owners rescued it a quarter of a century ago and reimagined it as the hotel it is today. The construction of the hotel preserved as much of the surviving jam factory as possible, with only four beams being replaced for safety.  So the fabric of the building exudes the history of its links to its jam-making past.

And the connection with the art world? From the 1970s through to the 1990s, art students from the adjacent Tasmanian School of Creative Arts partied (and maybe lived) in the dilapidated building – and photos we saw of that time show that it looked more like a multi-storey carpark that had been destroyed by fire than anything else. The once-students were subsequently invited to walk through the new building and create art based on what they saw. This art became the first art displayed in the hallways upon opening. Ever since then, the hotel has been a living, breathing art gallery. So its charisma comes from the combination of its historic fabric and its unique art displays.

Its fabric: the corridors are redolent of its warehouse origins.

Its walls betray some of its origins: in the mortar, one can see traces of possum hair (compare the use of horsehair in old European buildings)

and fragments of shells, originally taken from an indigenous midden and ground up to use the calcium in the mortar.

There is a great open area, under a uniquely-designed roof, available for conventions and other gatherings

and the hotel’s other spaces have wonderful decor.

Some of the original equipment is used for decor touches

or just pictured

and some places betray its history, such as this leakage of ancient jam down a wall as it was released when the room was warmed up.

What adds to the impact of this fabric is the art on display. We went on an official Art Tour of the hotel (led, it has to be said, by a very irritating lady, but revealing some great stories). Everything in the hotel is available for sale, which means that the pieces around the place do change over time; and there are specific areas which are dedicated as galleries.

I’m not a great one for spending time wringing the meaning or significance out of artworks, but some were very impressive pieces of work.  This one, for example, a photo-realistic depiction of an indigenous woven basket

is not, as you might think, a photograph; it is done in, of all things, crayon on sheets of black paper.

This picture of woodland after a forest fire

was created from its actual ashes, individually selected, mixed and dropped in specific patterns – nine months’ work.

Many of the other pieces have political or historical significance; some are winners of the John Glover Art Prize, a competition sponsored by the hotel.

As well as all that intellectual and historical stuff, it does other good hotel things. There is a good bar

where chief cocktail wrangler Jenn will give some good cocktail theatre;

and, in the room, some good attention to detail in little extras provided: a trawl through the historical records to see if there were family connections to the convicts who were transported here; and I draw your attention to the bottom left of this drawer, which was next to the thoughtfully-provided kettle and fridge.

We enjoyed our time in Hobart immensely, and the unique nature of the Henry Jones Art Hotel added unique memories for our time in the city.

OK, then.

Back to the mainstream of our Australian travels in the next post, as we travel across Tasmania to the west coast. Do come back and read about that, won’t you?