Tag Archives: Baptistry

Intermission (Impossible): Siena

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Monday 19 May 2025 – Warning! Long Post Alert! Really long!!

I have to try to sum up Siena as we’ve seen it for the last couple of days, which is pretty much an impossible task. Actually, for a tourist only here for two days (for that’s what we are, before going back to becoming travellers tomorrow), there are relatively few highlights to hit: the Duomo, of course; the Campo (the main square); some notable churches; and the general scenery. Once you actually visit any of these tick-box items, though, you are deluged with all sorts of astonishing images. I’ve taken literally hundreds of photos, and obviously can’t bore you with all of them. I’ll try to summarise.

Our hotel, the Chiusarelli, is in a decent location, a few minutes walk from the centre of the old city.  I’ve mentioned its eccentricities, which also extend to decor.

Our room, while not particularly large, is comfortable enough. Unlike most hotel rooms we’ve come across so far (and not, I may add, just in Italy), it has a sufficiency of charging points for the various devices we use – camera, phones, activity monitor, backup drive, tablet – and some of these are usb-c, which is outrageously modern and very welcome. The breakfasts

are ample and feature Twining’s finest Earl Grey, so it has been a happy base from which to ramble. We’ve had a guided tour with the somewhat theatrical Serena, and also been for our own walks. Obviously. Here, in no particular order, are some of the things we’ve learned and some of the things we’ve seen.

Siena is built upon three hills. The practical upshot of this for us tourists is that to get anywhere involves toiling up really quite steep slopes. But for the original medieval settlers, it had a more significant problem – lack of water. Being on the top of hills meant that, unlike its dreaded rival Florence, a river didn’t run through it. It took some significant medieval engineering to create a series of underground aqueducts, 25km in length, called bottini. These tapped into underground springs and rainwater run-off, and were Siena’s principal source of water until the 20th century. There’s a fountain in the Campo, the Fonte Gaia, built to express gratitude for the water. It’s not impressive, like the Trevi jobbie in Rome, there are just a couple of she-wolves dribbling water,

but it represents something terrifically important for the locals.

The Campo itself, yesterday, was not the unencumbered place whose photo I shared the other day, oh no. All over the centre of Siena, barricades were being set up

and equipment rolled out

in preparation for the arrival, yesterday afternoon, of the Giro d’Italia, the Italian equivalent of the Tour de France.  As the day progressed, crowds began to build up

and, at around 5pm the circus arrived, unwatched by me, since I was

making myself useful. Jane watched on TV as the cyclists made their way into town and round the Campo to the finish. Apparently it was quite exciting.

The Campo has been used for racing of quite a different sort – horse racing, believe it or not. Twice a year, the outer edge of the Campo is covered in sand and 10 horses are raced for three laps, a process that takes just over a minute. But it’s a terrifically important minute, and the running of these races continues a tradition started, in Siena at least, in 1633 (apparently, this kind of lunacy has been going on in various other places since the middle ages, would you believe). The race, and the parades and other pageantry that precede it, is called “Il Palio“. Is it popular with the locals? You bet! This is a photo I got from a pamphlet on the Palio, showing the Campo as the race is running.

Why is it so important to the locals? This comes down to the way the city is divided into “contrade” – neighbourhoods. There are 17 in total and each horse represents a “neigh”bourhood. Only ten horses run each time; in the next Palio, the seven neighbourhoods which didn’t participate get a place as of right, and the other three places are allocated by lot. Horses are allocated by a draw, and to be the winning jockey is very important for the inter-neighbourhood rivalries.

Each neighbourhood has its own flag on which is represented its animal. The choice of animal is non-intuitive. One might expect lions, or tigers, but what you get is the rhino, the owl, the silkworm, the snail and other unlikely candidates.  Every contrada has its own museum, church, fountain and baptismal font, and if you look carefully, you can see the badges of different contrade on either side of a boundary.

Eagle on the left, Forest (featuring a rhino!) on the right

The flags are sold everywhere for tourists to buy;

one can buy individual flags or one with all of the insignia on it.

If I understand it correctly, the distinction between neighbourhoods extends even to the way the street lamps are mounted, on “braceletti”

though it would appear that there are also special braceletti, too.

Siena was an important city in medieval Europe, and its historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which contains several buildings from the 13th and 14th centuries. The city is famous for its cuisine, art, museums, medieval cityscape and, of course, the Palio. According to local legend, Siena was founded by Senius and Aschius, two sons of Remus and thus nephews of Romulus, after whom Rome was named. Supposedly after their father’s murder by Romulus, they fled Rome, taking with them the statue of the she-wolf suckling the infants (Capitoline Wolf), thus appropriating that symbol for the town. You can see it all over the place; for example on the wall of the courtyard inside the Palazzo Pubblico, the town hall – the building with the tall tower (the Mangia Tower) on the Campo.

You can also see the she-wolf represented on the floor of the Duomo, so now that I’ve exhausted you with talk of history and such, let me show you some images from our tour of the cathedral. It took us a little time to work out how to get in, and in fact our guide, Serena, gave us the best info. We bought the inclusive ticket, for €16 apiece, which got us into the four main bits of this vast complex – the cathedral itself, the baptistry, an area called the crypt even though it isn’t one, and the “panorama”. Fixated as I am with aerial shots of places, we started with the panorama, which you can get to via (loads of bloody steps and) a beautiful arch.

This takes you into a courtyard of which one wall overlooks the Duomo from the eastern side.

This courtyard immediately made me think that it was once a church; in fact it was going to be a church, to expand the Duomo to be bigger than that thing the bastard Florentines have. It was never completed as the pillars you can see to left and right wouldn’t have been able to bear the weight of any roof. So now it’s a car park. But it’s a car park overlooked by a very tall wall, which one can climb; entry is via the museum, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.  An internal staircase and a couple of very narrow spiral staircases take you up to the lower

and then the upper level, officially called the Facciatone, from which vantage point the view of the Duomo is spectacular.

Because of the narrowness of the spiral staircases, the traffic up and down is closely monitored and carefully controlled; but, amazingly, we were virtually the only people there at the time we climbed it – it was more crowded later. You also get great views over the city and surrounding areas.

Coming down, you’re led through the museum, which has several museumish rooms with examples of embroidery

and paintings an’ that.

As you can tell, I’m not particularly moved by this kind of art. But awaiting me was a room with material in it which I did find engaging.

In the central display cases were books of ancient music – gregorian chants, written out on vellum and gloriously illuminated.

Around the walls were pictures on what appeared to be paper. We asked an attendant, who told us that they were drawings of the pictures made in marble on the floor of the Duomo. Indeed, there was one of the entire floor plan

with each marble picture carefully drawn.

Elsewhere, there were individual pictures of each of the tableaux.

This is a representation of the she-wolf, and it’s surrounded by the representations of other cities – Pisa, Lucca, Viterbo and so on. Remember this for later.

The way out takes you past a gallery of statues with a lovely representation of the rose window from the Duomo

and the exit is via the church of St. Nicholas,

which is also the gift shop – with possibly the ritziest gift shop ceiling on the planet.

Ritzy ceilings are a key feature in the baptistry, which is back through that arch and down a whole load of steps. Going inside made me catch my breath.

There are all sorts of beautiful details, but the fresco-painted ceilings are, for me, the most amazing aspect.

 

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that I have many more photos, but I hope these give you the basic idea. The bottom right-hand photo there is painted on the inside of a dome. Hold that thought….

Before going into the Duomo itself, we visited something inaccurately called the Crypt.  It’s not a crypt, it has no corpses in it. It was once a church, or perhaps the entry into the cathedral of the time, or maybe a meeting place – whatever, it was built on a level below the current Duomo, which was simply piled on top of it. No-one knew about this earlier space until in 1999 during renovations, workmen accidentally broke through a wall and found something painted blue. Careful research revealed this room, dating from the 1200s, whose walls were completely covered in frescoes which have been preserved by it being filled with debris in the 1300s, buried and forgotten. The interior was excavated – carefully, because of the not inconsierable bulk of the Duomo above, which necessitated special reinforcing to be put in place. And the result is a phenomenal display of frescoes telling biblical and Christian stories.

You can see the steel frame used to support the Duomo above,

and, on one wall,

lo! the outside of the dome of the baptistry. This has to be one of the most atmospheric places we have ever visited.

The final piece was, of course, a visit inside the Duomo itself.

This is the rose window reproduced in the statue gallery in the museum

 

As I said earlier, the floor is covered in tableaux made in marble. They are marblous!

and, of course, there’s the she-wolf.

There was nothing for it after all of this visual overload but to go for a Nice Lunch.  Heading back to the hotel afterwards for a Nice Lie-Down, we managed to do a key piece of shopping

which should stand us in good stead for the remainder of our walking.

Which restarts tomorrow.  We have some 21km to walk to Lucignano d’Arbia. We’ve had a fabulous time in Siena, and it’s been wonderful having the chance to draw breath and do the laundry – these things are important, y’know – but it will equally be nice to get underway again as we head to Rome. I hope you’ll accompany us through the medium of these pages.

Aiming for Pisa mind

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Friday 9 May 2025 – Our target today was to get to Pisa, meet our friend Caroline, who will be joining us for some of our walk on the Via Francigena, and meet a guide at 3pm in order to have a guided tour. We weren’t quite sure of what; of course there’s the famous leaning tower*, but the guide was due to meet us at the hotel, which was some 15 minutes walk from the site of the tower. Was there anything else worth seeing in the town of Pisa apart from the tower? In the end, it didn’t matter, as you’ll find out of you stay with me, here.

To get to Pisa, we took the train, buying tickets online from TrenItalia for a very reasonable €9.30, and finding that one could add them to Google wallet – overall a very neat way of handling the ticket. Then we hefted our cases down the really rather awkward steps leading from the hotel to the ground floor and trundled them, a ten minute walk, to the station.

Inside, it was what a supercilious Brit might call a typical Italian scene – mobs of people all trying to get somewhere else through the press surrounding the departure info board.

Apart from people getting in my fucking way all the time, getting to the train was fine and the rest of the journey proceeded uneventfully for an hour, until we detrained at Pisa. The platform was black with people, but we eventually found our way out to the station forecourt and trundled our bags a further ten minutes to the Hotel Bologna, where, delightfully, both Caroline and our room were waiting for us.

We spent a few minutes sorting ourselves out and then joined Caroline on an expedition to seek coffee. Since we were due to see the tower that afternoon, we didn’t see much point in heading that way, but somehow seemed inexorably to be approaching it. We passed a small but delightfully gothic church, of Santa Maria della Spina,

before crossing the river (the Arno, which also flows through Florence) which offers quite a nice vista,

looking for somewhere to serve us coffee. Having got on one side of the botanical gardens, we couldn’t deviate from the path that was leading us towards the site of the tower, but eventually managed to make a right turn, which led us to a street with lots of restaurants and bars.

We stopped at the first place that looked like it might serve us coffee. By this stage, as I say, we were quite near the campus where the leaning tower is located. The tower is not the only building there; I vaguely remembered from a previous visit, some 23 years ago, that there was a church there, too. From a distance, it looked like there was a decent amount of restoration work going on

and I hoped that  this wouldn’t detract from our visit later.

After coffee and a couple of drinks, we decided that it must be lunchtime, and so went in search of somewhere appealing to eat. The street we were on was wall-to-wall restaurants, but they all seemed to have pictures of food outside them, and we are followers of the A A Gill gospel that says any restaurant displaying pictures of their food is best avoided. On a side road, we eventually stumbled across Grano Libero Ristorante senza Glutine, which just seemed to emit the right sort of vibes, so we settled in for some lunch.

And a very fine lunch it was (even though they didn’t have gin). The gluten-free bread they served was really excellent, and vastly superior to any GF bread I’ve ever sampled. We had a plentiful lunch of excellent meats, cheeses and vegetable-based dishes. It would have been nonsensical to walk back to the hotel to meet our guide, so Jane contacted her and arranged that we should meet by the tower.

During my last visit, the tower was closed to visitors because the Powers That Be were worried that the leaningness might imminently turn into falling downness. So I was really hoping that the restorative work that had been carried out over the last quarter century would allow us to climb the tower. As we approached, the auguries were hopeful.

We arrived at the site

and, prompt at 3pm, met the delightful Ilaria, who was to be our guide. It was immediately clear that she knew a vast amount about the history of Pisa. She showed us a map, similar to the one below, which highlighted the historic walls of Pisa.

I hadn’t known about the walls, or indeed much of the history of the place at all.  On the map above, our hotel was just south the the river, and the site of the tower, the Piazza del Duomo, is some 15 minutes brisk walk from the hotel. So you can see that this historic Piazza is really very small, and formed only a tiny part of the original city. But, tiny as it is, Ilaria was able to spend three hours giving us an engaging, intensive and educational tour round it.

The site has basically five buildings: the cathedral (consecrated 1118), the baptistry (1363), the tower (started 1173, finished 1372 – long story), a cemetery (1277 – late 15th century) and a hospital (founded 1257, modified at times up to 20th century and now largely used for administrative purposes so we didn’t venture inside). Because it was due to close first, we started in the baptistry.

In contrast to the one in Florence, this is round, rather than octogonal, which was the conventional shape for a baptistry. But the republic of Pisa decided that they wanted a building that was larger than Florence’s – part of a pretty intense rivalry between the two cities. At one stage, Pisa was far richer and more powerful than Florence, but Florence eventually grew to the point where it usurped the power and the position as the principal city.

It has twin domes, actually – an open, conical one and, outside it, a more conventionally-shaped one. This is illustrated in drawings inside.

It’s a wonderful ambience inside the building, and one that can’t really be conveyed photographically.

The conical inner dome gives the place an amazing accoustic, which we were lucky enough to hear demonstrated by a singer,

Ilaria gave us a huge amount of information about details that can be seen in the building. I won’t bore you with too many of them (OK, I can’t remember them that well, either) but there are carvings of exquisite detail, such as these in the central font.

Some of the stained glass represents significant people, typically donors, but one stood out;

Pope John Paul II, of course.

After the baptistry, we went into the church. From my previous visit, I knew there was a church there, but I hadn’t realised what a wonderful facade it has.

Again, Ilaria provided huge amounts of information about the history and details that can be seen both on the outside and

the inside, which is very opulently appointed. The wooden ceiling was destroyed by fire, but was restored in gilded wood, largely with the help of money from the Medicis…

hence the Medici symbol on the coat of arms at the centre of the ceiling. There are many fine things to look at

and again Ilaria provided bewlidering amounts of detail on the history of the place and the provenance of the decor.

Our next visit was to the cemetery.

Along each side are galleries with what were once fine frescoes

but which have been badly affected by a fire caused by an accidental bombing by US forces during the second world war. The fire melted the lead in the roof, which destroyed much of the fresco work and scarred the marble floors; the ongoing restoration is a full time job for 30 people.

Above, you can see an example of the damaged fresco work as well as sarcophagi by the walls and tombs with identifying coats of arms on the floor.

Finally, Ilaria took us to the famous tower and gave us a short history of its construction. It was built in three phases. Even after the first phase, it was clear that the tower was leaning, and the developers of the second and third phases took this into account as they added storeys to it.  The result is that the tower is not actually straight – it has a very subtle bend in it away from the direction it leans.

 

Again, it’s difficult to convey this photogaphically, but you might just be able to discern the bend in the photo above.

Ilaria also gave great detail about how the famous lean developed, shifted from left to right, became dangerous and was eventually tamed thanks to a proposed solution from an Englishman, John Burland, who suggested that the lean could be controlled by (carefully!) excavating the ground from underneath the tower. This was the solution which meant that the tower could be re-opened for people to visit it. So we did, of course. Caroline and I climbed the 251 steps, which run up the inside of the tower in a staircase just wide enough to accommodate two-way traffic. I have to say that it was quite a weird experience, as sometimes the steps tip you one way, sometimes the other; and the very final steps to the top are up a very much narrower spiral staircase, and are potentially quite trappy.

The tower is a bell tower, and there are still bells at the top, though it’s clear that there is no mechanism for ringing them.

There’s a decent view over the city of Pisa from the top,

but to view the church from the top required some awkward squinting into the sun

(Jane had decided not to climb the tower, and, sitting in the museum cafe, was able to take that photo of me trying to get this photo).

Since the tower is hollow, one can look up the central column, where a plumbline has been installed, to emphasis how much the tower leans.

Ilaria’s command of the details of the history and religious significance of the intricacies around the site was truly impressive; our time with her was very concentrated and I haven’t done it any kind of justice above; but I hope you get a flavour of the site.

We had only today in Pisa; tomorrow we travel on to Lucca, which has a reputation of being a very fine place to visit. I hope to be able to demonstrate that in these pages, so stay tuned to find out, eh?

* I couldn’t let this opportunity pass without reviving an old joke about a famous painting of a three-legged dog relieving himself against a lamppost. It was called “The Leaning Pee of Towser”. I’ll get my coat.

Florence in more depth

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Wednesday 7 May 2025 – Long Post Alert!

In what I suspect will be a relatively rare occurrence during this junket, we were allowed a lie-in to 7am before having to get under way for the day. The hotel offers a decent breakfast (meaning mainly that they have Earl Grey available) but in somewhat cramped conditions. No matter; at 0900 we were ready to meet our guide for the morning, Bianca.

She is clearly very knowledegable about Florence, its history and culture, and Jane very much enjoyed learning about Florence in more depth. Me, not so much; I had enormous difficulty penetrating Bianca’s very Italian delivery and accent, particularly as it was often set against the backdrop of traffic, roadworks and many, many large tour groups.

The city was crowded today – there were plenty of tourists and schoolkids in large groups, making me suspect that at least one large cruise liner had berthed at Livorno, and that this was the time of year that schools favoured for an attempt to inject kulcher into the little ones. The practical upshot was that I didn’t get a great deal of extra information from our tour. However, Jane did, so collectively we learned a lot and got some photos of wonderful places that we might not have otherwise found.

I’m not a habitual, practised or skillful street photographer, but Florence offers some nice vignettes, if you’re not careful. I managed to get told off several times during the day: taking photos of art sellers, who clearly didn’t appreciate  being photographed;

and photos from some angles which caused people in uniform in key locations to tell me to move away from where I was.

Standing on the wrong side of a piece of rope to avoid too many TV aerials interfering with a nice view of the cathedral cupola

Standing on a bench to capture a better angle of the Pieta in the Cathedral museum

I also captured a couple of vignettes of interesting people who may or may not have been couples;

OK, back to the mainstream of the day. We visited lots of very attractive and photogenic places:

The Academy of Fine Arts (this is the exit – we didn’t go in)

The local equivalent of the UK’s Ordnance Survey…

…with its fetching observatory on the roof

The Piazza della Santissima Annunziata – the Annunziata Church is on the left; on the right a hospital for foundlings

Annunziata Square (2)

The Annunziata Square was recommended by the driver who picked us up at the airport yesterday; he described it as “cute”, which is not, I think, the right word.  It’s a handsome square all right, featuring a particular Florentine architectural characteristic – the pillars and arches. The pillars form a cube which is of a consistent dimension wherever it’s used; and the arches form a hemisphere above the cube. The cube’s exact dimensions are based on an exact number of standard “forearm” measurements, documented elsewhere in the city;

 

each “forearm” is 56.83cm in length. This, by the way, is longer than my forearm by quite some margin, so I have no idea how they arrived at 56.83cm as “normal”.

One can see from the square to the Duomo, which makes the scene a favourite for wedding photographs.

A less appealing feature of the Annunziata Square is this:

The cloths hanging there are are a reminder of the prevalence of domestic violence in Italy. Each cloth represents the death, through domestic violence, of one woman – this year!

Inside the entrance of the Annunziata Church is a splendid cloister.

around the walls of which are some lovely artworks.

Outside the church is an arch

which contains a corridor, built for a lady of the Medici family who was severely disabled so that she could get to services in the church without having to negotiate stairs or other difficulties.

The buildings in the environs of the cathedral featured wine cellars, which were somewhat below street level. It was A Thing to greet cellar workers and ask for a glass of wine, which could be delivered once money had changed hands. This practice gave rise to “wine windows”

whereby one knocked on the door to gain attention, and a glass of wine could be served directly. A little further along was a similar-looking niche

but one too small to accommodate a wine bottle. This one originally had a wire and a pulley to allow the lowering of a lamp so it could be lit before being hauled back into place.

We were by this time adjacent to the cathedral, and Bianca took us round the building, telling us about some of the background to the details. One of the world’s largest churches, with the dome still the largest masonry dome ever constructed, all but the dome was complete by 1380, with the dome itself completed in 1436.

The extraordinary external decoration, in polychrome marble, was begun in the 14th century but not completed until 1887!

In the triangle, the Virgin Mary is depicted in an almond shape called a “mandorla” which is a symbol of the intersection between the divine and the human

 

Shields in the facade representing the families who gave funds towards its creation

Panels on the campanile (bell tower) tell the story of the creation: God creating Adam and Eve, here

More campanile panels showing the development of civilisation – science, construction, medicine and so forth

The amount of symbolism among the detail of the decor of the cathedral and campanile is utterly extraordinary. It’s clear that it takes a lot of work to maintain it; a gang was at work with a specially-developed cherry-picker

examining every single piece of marble by tapping it to make sure it is secure.

Our next major stop was the Palazzo Vecchio – the old palace – but en route we passed a vendor of street food

Tripe sandwiches a speciality!

and a modern Florentine craftsman – not a worker in wood of stone, but in metal.

Penko is one of the world’s most skillful goldsmiths – his work in gold and silver is exquisite.

Jane and I had passed the Palazzo Vecchio yesterday, noting it as an impressive slab of masonry; but Bianca took us inside, to an astonishing interior:

The coat of arms you can see in the above is the Medici coat of arms, demonstrating the power and influence they had in the development of the city.

Near the Palazzo Vecchio is the Accademia Gallery, which famously houses Michaelangelo’s statue of David. We weren’t about to join the long queue to see the real thing, but luckily there’s a copy outside the Palazzo Vechio. Jane took a photo of his bum, but I preferred a less prurient view

The David was originally intended to be mounted high on the cathedral for people to gaze up at

yes, on the stone just peeking above the screening; getting the perspective right for this location is said to be why the proportions of David are not quite “right” (although his bum appears to be perfectly well-formed, I’m told). Nearby is the Loggia dei Lanzi, a sort of open air sculpture gallery;  the Perseus with the Medusa head by Benvenuto Cellini is a notable example.

Bianca then led us down towards the Ponte Vecchio, via another “Tree of Life” sculpture by Roggi

which was commissioned to commemorate those killed in a Mafia car-bombing outrage on this spot in 1993. Nearby, on the outside of a neighbouring building, is another sculpture in tribute to heroism as a reaction to the bombing.

You’ll have seen yesterday’s photos of Ponte Vecchio, of course you have, but Bianca pointed out something that actually in theory I knew about but which I hadn’t noticed: the Medici Corridor. This is an extraordinary construction which allowed Grand Duke Cosimo I de Medici  to make his way from Palazzo Vecchio to Pitti Palace (south of the river, remember) – without touching the ground or, perish the thought, being seen in public. It runs right through the upper floor of the Uffizi Gallery, crosses over the road via the arch you see here,

goes along the upper storey of the Ponte Vecchio

and round corners as necessary

to get to its destination – a distance of just under a kilometre. Interestingly, the construction of this corridor led to a major change in the usage of Ponte Vecchio, which was originally the site for butchers and tanners shops (using the river as a handy waste disposal) but this was too smelly for the Grand Duke, and so a law was passed – in force still today – to ensure that only jewellers may trade on Ponte Vecchio.

The Ponte Vecchio was the only bridge over the Arno to be spared by the wartime German bombing campaign. No-one knows exactly why; although they didn’t destroy the bridge itself they blocked access to it by bombing at each end, which explains the modern and ugly buildings to be seen close to either end of the bridge.

Bianca’s final offering was to take us to another church, still south of the river – Santa Felicita

which features in it an artwork depicting Christ being taken down from the cross.

It’s by Jacopo Pontormo, entitled The Deposition, an example of 16th century “Mannerist” style, which I invite you to look up for yourselves, By this stage, whilst being grateful for all the great things we’d seen and photographed, I found that my brain was full and my stomach was empty. So I for one was grateful when she left us at a recommended pizzeria, Casella 18, where we had a Nice Lunch. I recommend the Pizza Diavola (note the correct gendering here – British Diavolo pizzas have been misgendered for years).

Refreshed, we decided that we should attempt to get inside various parts of the cathedral complex, as we are gluttons for punishment as well as pizza. Amazingly, we managed to get tickets to go into the cathedral, the baptistry and the museum. We got them in a rather random fashion; looking for the ticket office, we stumbled across a helpful young lady who said that things were mainly sold out but the her colleague over there could sort us out a ticket for only 20 Euros each. Her colleague could indeed, but only for cash (which, remarkably, I had to hand). I thought at first that we were being conned, but no, it appeared to be legit.

Several astonishing moments then transpired: the enormous queues we had seen earlier evaporated; the fact that we were dressed in sandals was not, after all, a Dress Code Problem, and they didn’t mind me toting my penknife around with me inside any of these things. So we had a full house of cathedralness. First the main cathedral building, which is not, frankly, as awe-inspiring as one might have thought, given the outside, but it has some photogenic corners,

some nice marble flooring

with overtones of the almond shape,

some decent stained glass

and a wonderfully painted ceiling, a depiction of the Last Judgement, commissioned by Grand Duke Cosimo, on the inside of the cupola.

Actually, there was far more of a “wow” factor in the next-door Baptistry of Saint John. The origins of this building lie in the 11th or 12th centuries, although the remains of a large structure dating from Roman times lie beneath it.

The outside, principally white marble and green-black serpentinite, is not as exciting as the cathedral; but the inside is very eye-catching. Regrettably, the mosaic ceiling was under maintentance, so one couldn’t see the whole thing, which apparently looks like this;

Completed between towards the end of the 12th century, the ten million tesserae form Byzantine-style depictions of the lives of Joseph, Mary, Christ and John the Baptist, and the Last Judgement. We could see portions of it

outside the scaffolding

and other details of the building were simply wonderful,

and the marble floor tiling was lovely.

Our final stop was in the museum, which Jane particularly wanted to visit in order to see the “Florentine Pieta”, the scupture of Christ being taken down from the cross originally made by Michelangelo to decorate his own tomb. But first we had to find it, which involved bumbling around all three floors of a very museum-like building,

a

occasionally taking note of details such as replicas of the Adam and Eve panels from the campanile

and various important doors,

and, in my case, being shouted at for crossing a rope to take a photo. In the end, all that climbing stairs was wasted, as the sculpture of Christ being taken from the cross by Nicodemus (whose face is considered to be a self-portrait), Mary and Mary Magdalene, was in a separate room on the ground floor, where I was admonished for standing on a bench to get a better angle. But here it is again

to round off a longish, satisfying and content-rich day. I apologise for the profusion of photos, but hope that, even if you got bored and skipped a few, you got an impression of the richness of art and architecture throughout the city. Since the plan is to visit the Uffizi Gallery tomorrow, there wil be even more, so brace yourselves!