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One of my favourite places. I could go on about Renaissance art and le mal de Stendhal, but that's what all those stacks of tourist guidebooks in your bookshop are for.

Firenze

Gaby
2004-01-25 13:26:36

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One of my favourite places. I could go on about Renaissance art and le mal de Stendhal, but that's what all those stacks of tourist guidebooks in your bookshop are for.

Alright, just a few basics then:

Florence is the Renaissance city.
It used to be home to the infamous Medici family.
The huge building in the middle of Florence in green, pink and white marble is the Duomo.
The beautiful old bridge with all the jeweller's shops across the Arno is the Ponte Vecchio.

The largest museum, conveniently situated near the Ponte Vecchio is the Uffizi, literally "the offices" because that is what they used to be in the days of the Medici.
The art collection is breathtaking.
Leonardo da Vinci lived in the area too.
The statue of Michelangelo's David in the Piazza della Signoria is not the real thing, it is a copy; the real thing is inside in the museum, sheltered from wind and rain.
The most famous Renaissance architect in Florence was Brunelleschi.
Le Mal de Stendhal" is a sort of depressive state which people get into when they have seen too much beauty in too short a timespan, a condition sometimes seen in visitors of Florence.My first visit to Firenze was with my friends Ann and Dominique. We stayed in a guesthouse called "Orchidea" in the centre of the city, where the wife of Dante Alighieri is supposed to have lived. The rooms facing the garden seem to be the most wanted, as the street side is rather noisy. We tried both sides.

We spent our money on ice-cream (the best is to be found in the Via delle Stinche) and leather gloves. We went to see "Room with a View", in a cinema that had a sign outside saying "churchy cool inside".

We spent a day in the Uffizi and still didn't see everything. I would gladly have spent the whole afternoon just looking at Botticelli's Birth of Venus.

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