Message to a nephew on the road to Florence…
O quick and true, the best pieces of art in the world — Michelangelo’s PRISONERS, statues fighting their way out of the stone that creates them and same time jails them, they are as renaissance and post modern and perfect as art can be. Just stand and weep. I thought there were more than four, in my memory there’s at least a half-dozen each side — a multiplicity of my imagination, I guess, that’s the revelation of how they hit. At the Accademia***** maybe you reserve, these days, to get in. DON’T MISSSSSSSSS.
I repeat: if there’s a NOT TO MISS in Europe these are it. (o yeah, about famous David, I think my impression is always the same, his ballsamica are a bunch of grapes — pass on by, wait on the corner. There’s also quite lovely medieval paintings and at least 1 nice altarpiece in several rooms beyond David — well worth enjoying them.)
The Uffizzi is very sexy — botticelli, titian, michelangelo, caravaggio, flesh on flesh skin on skin, like (o kill me) the Kingston Trio’s version of reggae “back to back belly to belly (and I don’t give a damn coz I’ve done that already)”. It’s a great museum, FEELS GOOD too.
Best beside the Prisoners?
The three masterpiece cake buildings. You can’t miss them — the Duomo, Baptistery, and the Giotto Tower — a trio that when I first saw them, age ten or so, I was astonished at such tasty beauty. They are cream and pink and pale green outside. Inside you look up (esp in the Baptistery, lovely devilish red figures coming at ya but every where, then you sit (it’s a nice sit) and then you look some more. Also from my childish pt of view: this was a great excuse to have Christianity, these delicious buildings.
(More innocence: I tried to describe them, to somebody, it was freshman year, and only then it was I learned they were ….. famous.) You can see, a little here, how Henry James felt so familiar in some of his girl characters — and why Jimmy Merrill thought I was something of a hoot of a good kid reader!
Anyway: Florence is GREAT.
I would NOT enter any pricey restaurant: go into one of those cured meat places, they give you tastes, of proshoot, ham, salami, and all — get some bread not as good as French and some butter and picnic where you like the view. Coffee is great.
Love, Joey
PS you shd take a peek at the outside at least of Santa Croce. It’s EM Forster famously sweet.
PPS Right here right now. Talk of killing the little children of people who don’t love Trump — this rolls out demento mouths a lot, as if it’s our Great Awakening, and murderous spirits must swell and yell and kill. Same time, skip by the Washington Post’s discovery that nuclear documents shoved into a Mar-a-Lago Club closet is why the search was on: make a crime a cartoon. Maybe, hey, this Great Awakening can combine the earth burning up with a nuke finis. Let all the Dementos, SenatorTrumpists, RepperTrumpers, AK-47s held high, line dance to hell.
In Florence there are no AK-47s.