Friday 16 June 2023
For our fourth day in Florence we decided to cast ourselves out of the dense tourist-washed streets of the central area. We walked for 45 mins, often in the blazing sun (did I mention we’re in a heatwave and Florence is hitting 30C most days?), to a far-flung museum called the Stibbert Museum. The buildings gradually became more like those of any typical Mediterranean city and the number of people fell to a handful of locals.
Stibbert was a 19th century gent and a collector of weapons and armour. So his whole magnificent and over-decorated house is packed to the rafters with this collection. There are cases and walls with rack upon rack of infinite variations on rapiers… or crossbows… or spears… or gauntlet-blades… and on and on. One room had an entire troop of mounted knights, showing off the horse armour as well as the men’s. Although the horse armour was much more fun in the Japanese room, where they gave their horses scary demon masks to terrify the enemy (as though a ton of horse galloping at you isn’t terrifying enough). The Japanese were just fanciful. Everyone in films and books is fixated on razor sharp katanas, but I’m here for the war helmets with gilded dragonflies, pretty chrysanthemums or giant golden octopuses on them!
Back in the city we had an ill-fated lunch at Antico Noe, where we ordered too many deep fried things and they were horribly drenched in oil (“ill-fated” is a retrospective update, because I think we’ve had indigestion and sore throats from it for a couple of days since).
I think we were pretty much done with art and museums by now, but it seemed wrong not to visit the Pitti Palace. This is an absolute monumental slab of a building, Renaissance Brutalism, with a facade that is literally acres of uniform rusticated stone. It’s a facade that says “sod off, peasants, we’re having cake and champagne in here and you’re not invited.”
Now all those huge cake and champagne salons are given over to a rambling and eclectic collection of paintings where you can play “spot the Raphael” (or “spot the Titian” or whatever) for hours among the hundreds of more forgettable daubs. We kinda drifted through, only momentarily arrested by the incongruous nude double-portrait of the Medici lord’s favourite dwarf. Somehow I get the feeling his lordship found the whole idea more hilarious than his jester.
After that lunch we needed a simple pasta at home and that’s what we did. It’s proving to be a terrible dilemma: we’re in Italy, we should enjoy the food… but a whole month of eating out for lunch and dinner just feels a tiny bit appalling at the same time. I think that’s the deep-fried lunch talking.
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