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the boot

Sunday, November 25, 2001 10:45 AM
so from switzerland we hopped on an overnight train to florence. italy for the first time and it seemed to me to be more distinctively different than alot of the other countries we've visited so far. Here are some stream-of-consciousness impressions: plaster walls, chipped and peeling, history exposed, shuttered windows, metal bars and grates, carved door frames, sculpted door knockers, tall three to four story buildings crowding and close, up to the river, into the street, arches, olive trees, sun-speckled clouds, winding, twisted streets, coloured marble, undulating cobblestone.

we walked along the streets, meandering, taking in the warm air and eclectic collection of buildings along the river and into the streetss - some medieval/renaissance towers and fortifications, and the old town hall with a beautifully decorated courtyard dominated by a tall tower. outside was a replica of michelangelo's david but it was so 'crowded' by the surrounding courtyard and fortress we didn't stop too long. the major art gallery (galleria degli uffizi) had an enormous collection of sculptures and busts and paintings that exhausted the legs as well as the mind by the end of it.

we visited a few of the churches and cathedrals. the duomo (13th-mid 15th century) was the most impressive architecturally which is about all we could see in an hour. it was made of coloured marble - white, beige, rose, green - arranged to a vaulted ceiling an enormous dome (the largest in existance until this century). from a distance we thought it was painted. next door, the baptisery is from the 6th-7th century, done up in the same coloured marble and decorated with gilded, bronze doors which michelangelo described as being "so beautiful they are worthy to be the gates of Paradise". an overstatement no doubt but despite the hyperbole you'll get the idea they were quite nice. all these decorated churches and cathedrals make me wonder just what the temple would have looked like and then i think, but that's gone now too, what will the new jerusalem look like? that's about enough from florence except for michelangelo's original sculptures in another art gallery. the original david - enormous at 516cm tall - and sculptured and proportioned in amazingly life-like detail. wow. the replica in the courtyard didn't do half of what the original did. also some unfinished works that had half-carved people coming from the stone and appropriately entitled as a collection "prisoners". some real, undeniably, amazing talent for taking raw hunks of stone and turning them into 'something'.

rome
more living ruins. we walked to the colesseum-area straight away and it was quite enormous but fairly delapitated. lots of ruins of palaces and the like on the palatial hill which we walked through in the twilight. we visited more churches, art galleries and fountains the next day including the churchified pantheon from roman times, a baroque fountain from several centuries ago and the oldest sculpture museum in the world with ancient and relatively modern statues.

walking around you get a definite impression of how big and enormous ancient rome must have been and the power that must have been here before. and the persecution. we didn't tour the coloseum because of time and money and the catacombs closed too early but the remains of what was and is no more were everywhere. the vatican museums are enormous and filled with a wide variety of things which would be mostly meaningless to describe. the classics: the sistene chapel and st. peter's had varying impressions. the sistene chapel was not too impressive in relation to the many other ceiling frescoes in other churches i thought. st. peter's, on the other hand, was very impressive managing to be enormously huge, yet not loaded with decorations art and tourist signs as to be too much and light and airy rather than too dark.

pompei
we weren't sure what to expect of pompei since we knew it was ruins and some of the other ruins we've seen, while interesting, are relatively scarce on visual material - mostly ruined walls a foot or two high, or grassy knolls with signs on top saying what was there. however, being an entire city and buried in ash, it had enough to be worth several days visit. we walked through the public areas (forum, theatres, etc.), some small temples, narrow side streets and broader main streets, small peasant huts and street shops, a few wealthy middle class homes and a larger palatial home on the outskirts of pompei. there was a fair amount of damaged decorations - frescos, mosaic floors, sculptures - left on the original buildings although most of the best preserved pieces were taken to a museum.

it seems to me that roman society was quite similar to our own today in many ways but i won't elaborate now. from pompei we tried to catch an overnight train to bari but we had to wait for 6+ hours and catch a few connections first so we didn't get too much sleep. in the first station, we pulled up some luggage carts, read and watched the locals. a fist-fight started just behind me as i came up an escalator and i turned around to see two older, forty-fiftish year old men railing into each other quite hard. there were cops right there so i didn't intervene but the cops took their time breaking up the fight and by then a crowd of spectators had gathered.

i can imagine what it is like at a soccer game when it gets out of control. uneventful journey from there.

that's all for now. take care. patrick and laryn

ps. if you have some time check out this site: "The First Human Cloned Embryo" http://www.scientificamerican.com/explorations/2001/112401ezzell/ its not too technical and its the start (and continuation) of some very interesting trends in medicine.