Cari Amici,
I had a good day yesterday. It is the start of free museum week (properly known as Cultural Heritage Week) in Firenze. I started off by showing up at the
Cappelle Medicee. This is one of my favorite places in all of Florence, since
Michelangelo’s hand is everywhere. And it was rather peaceful until about 9:30 when the students from local
superior (high) schools began to arrive.
In the
Cappella dei Principi (Main Chapel) there is much construction going on and one can see stones laid out on the floor and arranged in their patterns before they will be polished. It is amazing to me to consider that stone mosaics were created in the days before electricity. I mean, granite and some marbles are very hard stones. Today we used diamond blades and various power tools to cut and shape stone. With these tools, the work is still tremendous. Without them, the work seems miraculous.
The images that I include here of decorative color patterns and or “paintings” are actually stone mosaics! One is on the floor and the others are on the side of the altar. This place is so beautiful and serene. It will be even more lovely once the restoration is completed and the scaffolding removed. As I left the chapel, I was amused by the little jokes the boys made to each other as some accidentally set off the alarms during security check at the entrance. And also the way the guard tolerated them as harmless silly boys. This interchange diminished for a moment the serious reason that we need to have such controls in place.
I then walked around the building to enter the
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. I had never been inside this Basilica di San Lorenzo, in which the
biblioteca (library) resides. On the far side of the garden in the square-shaped courtyard, I overheard a mass taking place. I leaned against the wall near the barely open window to listen. I think that there were only men inside because their deep voices speaking Italian in unison reminded me of when I was a child and the Catholic mass was spoken in Latin. While I have not been a Catholic for a great many years, as I child I was fascinated and somehow comforted by the mysterious ritual in the church services. I remember being horribly disappointed when English replaced the Latin. Somehow understanding the words removed too much mystery for me and I became less aware of the beauty of many voices in a melodic speech.
But I digress – again. On my way home, I stopped by the Bargello, a beautiful sculpture
museo near my home. I will write of this tomorrow, I think. And later, I took the bus to the
zona Careggi to see my friend Hafiza in the hospital. She had knee surgery last week. During my visit we moved her to another room two flights up. I joked with her that she thinks she is getting better (and she is), but she might beware since they are moving her closer to heaven. In return she fed me some gelled sugar candies that our friend Ernesto had brought her last week. She said that I needed some sweetening up.
I went home to paint a little bit and later my friend Lisa and I went grocery shopping before meeting Anna at Lisa’s house to watch a movie. A nice day, although not much work done. Sometimes I wonder if I can keep up the 12-hour plus pace that I have had for months now.
