Still Going With the Flo'

Visiting Florence with kids?  Definitely take a time out in Piazza della Repubblica, which has been considered the center of Florence since Roman times. There's an old-fashioned carousel, old-school street performers (i.e. not gigantic Disney characters or the amazing metallic statue guy), and lots of outdoor cafés.

This street performer plucked RS from the crowd, and my little guy hung in there for almost forty-five minutes. He said he was feeling shy at first, but then was fine when he saw how funny it all was. He made us proud (for just being his regular funny, genuine self), and he made this street performer a lot of extra tips because RS had the crowd in stitches.

Oh, sweet, sweet boy.

Fine and fine. Fine means finished in Italian.

 In 1883, Italian author and Florentine resident, Carlo Collodi, wrote The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Ahem. Lots of Pinocchio souvenirs available.

Only in Italy--a mozzarella bar.  Yum.

The ever-iconic Ponte Vecchio and Arno River.

Okay, more food porn--ravioli in pear sauce with broccoli.  Double yum.

A carriage ride to the Piazza della Signoria and The Uffizi:

Here's the scoop.  The Uffizi is a world-class museum, but it's a challenge to enjoy because of the layout and the crowds. My kids are pretty engaged with this sort of excursion, but this tested their patience. My advice, let the kids go on their own when they study abroad as college students.

The boy's in love with one fine Italian car, the Ferrari.

Santa Croce.  Lots of famous people buried here, from Michelangelo to Da Vinci.

Here we are at the leather and wool market.

They say if you rub the pig that you will return to Florence one day. I hope we do.

Doing The Duomo

We spent our second day in Florence entirely in one square: Piazza del Duomo.

This is not hard to do. There's the actual cathedral (duomo), plus the bell tower and baptistery. By the time one climbs to the top of the first two, and then adds in lunch and some wine to gear up for the last, it's easily one full day.

View from our hotel:

Of course I'm dazzled by all the history and art and engineering behind these monuments. I did my due diligence, and before arriving in Italy knew a whole lot about the bricks and the mortar (literally) of how this dome was accomplished.

Ross King's book is sooooo good. It gives such a flavor of the politics, personalities, and cultural influences at play in 15th-cenutry Florence while the dome was under construction.

Brunelleschi's dome truly is an engineering marvel, and to this day, it's a total mystery how he accomplished it. Read this excerpt from a PBS special about the dome that aired last year:

The dome that crowns Florence’s great cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore—the Duomo—is a towering masterpiece of Renaissance ingenuity and an enduring source of mystery. Still the largest masonry dome on earth after more than six centuries, it is taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighs as much as an average cruise ship. Historians and engineers have long debated how its secretive architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, managed to keep the dome perfectly aligned and symmetrical as the sides rose and converged toward the center, 40 stories above the cathedral floor. His laborers toiled without safety nets, applying novel, untried methods. Over 4 million bricks might collapse at any moment—and we still don’t understand how Brunelleschi prevented it. To test the latest theories, a team of U.S. master bricklayers will help build a unique experimental model Duomo using period techniques. Will it stay intact during the final precarious stages of closing over the top of the dome?

Anyhoo, we're happy it stayed intact while we were up there.  What a view, inside and out, down and up.

Believe it or not, Brunelleschi won the right to design and construct the dome in a contest, after decades of everyone scratching their heads and looking at a topless cathedral.

Note on paintings in photo below: on the left = no perspective; on the right = perspective. They were learning so much in Renaissance Italy, now weren't they?

Did I mention we climbed 877 stairs total to get to top of dome and bell tower.  Apparently, by the looks of kid trip journals, it was rather noteworthy.

And apparently we need to work on our 7's!

Baptistery mosaic ceiling and Islamic-inpsired tile flooring (much different than Northern European Gothic churches):

And finally, the famous bronze doors of the baptistery. They were made by Brunelleschi's arch rival, Lorenzo Ghiberti.  He's the guy that co-won the dome contest, but was out-shined by Brunelleschi from the get-go. Nonetheless, he was star in his own right, as these doors make clear.

Till tomorrow, Flo'.

It's the Day Before Halloween . . .

It's the day before Halloween, and we all know what that means . . . .

Yep, it's AKS's half birthday!

I know one little girl who is all a twitter to have turned 7-1/2 years old today. It's so much fun getting older.

Happy Half Birthday, Ladybug.

We had one other milestone while we've been in Italy. 

See if you can keep all of this math straight. We started with a total of three loose teeth between the two kids, and we're down to two loose teeth. 

Congrats R-Pie on losing tooth #4! It was a close one, but tooth fairy found us.

Now, we've got wagers on which of the remaining two will go next!

Renaissance Retreat

After two and a half years of living in Europe, I'm still awed that I can take a two hour flight from Amsterdam and arrive in any one of many distinct cultures. Between breakfast and lunch, we can step into an entirely different country and its rich history.

These are the types of trips and vacations I only dreamed of taking while living in U.S., and that I only took after a great deal of saving and planning. Now, we can easily go to Barcelona or Budapest for a weekend a get-away. It's weird!

This October, we're in Tuscany for the kids' two-week school break. First stop was Florence. Like I said, by lunchtime, we'd time traveled from the Dutch Golden Age into the Renaissance, visiting with one of its usual suspects: Michelangelo's David, at the Galleria dell'Accademia.

Gross! Body parts!

The Gallery is not huge (although the line is), so it was a pretty good first-day activity.  The kids liked the room of heads, which is actually called the Nineteenth Century Room and used to house all of Bartolini's plaster casts. The room pays homage to the nineteenth century origins of the museum, even though most people come to see the David from four hundred years before.

We stayed right next to the Santa Maria Novella, so we stopped here before then eating like kings at a local tratorria (De Sostanza is a must) and then relaxing at hotel.  Go to Santa Maria Novella.  It's not as well-known, less crowded and, by gazing up at Masaccio's fresco, it's a nice, baby-step introduction to the Renaissance's discovery of perspective in art.

Tomorrow's adventure is sneaking a peek at us . . .