We started out today at the Galleria dell'Accademia. With our reservations in hand we hoped to pass the long lines and feel like VIPs, but for some reason there was no line today.
This museum is famous for Michelangelo's David, although it holds a lot more. We both agreed that the David statue was very impressive - especially knowing that Michelangelo was only 26 when he sculpted it, that he was using a piece of marble that several other sculptors passed up because it was too tall, too narrow, and too flawed, and that he never made models before starting his sculptures, he just started chipping away. Along the hallway on the way to see David, we saw several other Michelangelo statues, called the "Prisoners". These statues were almost more interesting because they were unfinished and looked like they were trying to escape out of the marble.
In the Accademia we also saw a collection of old instruments and were able to play around with a model piano and harpsichord to see how they work differently. There is an art academy attached to the museum and there was a whole room full of the "finals" projects of the students over several years. When there are 15 very similar statues all lined up next to one another, it became easy to tell what the assignments were: sculpt a woman holding a bird, sculpt a woman holding up a strap of her dress, sculpt the bust of a military man wearing his uniform, etc.
The last room we saw was full of paintings featuring Mary and Jesus. We've got nothing against these two or the people who painted them, but we're sort of "Mary and Jesus"-ed out for now. It seems that that duo is all people painted for hundreds of years (understandably), but it can get difficult to appreciate the paintings when they all generally look the same.
From the Accademia, we went to the tourist info center. We have both been seeing signs about some large conference going on in Florence this weekend and wanted to find out more. We picked up a brochure full of information about the "Brainstorming" (or Le Idee Che Ci Cambiano La Vita) conference. We cleared our calendar and went to visit the booths set up all over the city featuring art, design ideas, food, etc., all intended to as Mike said, to "get people's creative juices flowing".Some of the highlights we saw include:
- student thesis exhibits from the design school in Florence (luckily I didn't see any of my ideas)
- a large room filled with tasty treats - cheese, chocolate, wine, etc. (and some not so tasty looking treats, like blocks of lard)
- a tent with a hands-on activity where people were creating a mini city made of recycled materials and blocks
- an exhibit featuring architectural design contest winners (we had some questions about this one - do architects often win work through competitions with cash prizes?)
- the Marino Marini museum (with free entry) that had some good photographs, some so-so statues, and a lot of cool steps
We effectively walked all over the city today (it was another great day) so we were beat by the time we got back to the apartment to have dinner. There are some nighttime activities going on as part of the conference (its really more like an expo), but we plan to check out some of the more interesting ones that are going on tomorrow and Sunday night.Gelato Gusti per il Giorno:
Mike - Cioccolato Bianco con Nutella e Novita (cherries with chocolate swirls)
Aviva - Menthe e Vaniglia
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