Andrew and Adri go Duomo

From VeniceFlorence

Ahh back to the blog. I'll set the scene for you: We're sitting in our hotel in the centre of Florence. Its 5pm. I'm drinking a big bottle of Baveria we picked up from the supermarket. Adri's lying on the bed watching an Italian overdubbed version of Conan the Barbarian on the TV in our room. Adri lies on two beds pushed together which the hotel claims is a double bed. The 14" TV sits about 8 feet from the ground in a grey hospital-style support arm...

So its been tricky to spend some quality time with the blog. Its only right that we should bring you up to speed quickly with what's happened over the last week. I see Adri's last post covered most of our time with beautiful Cloe, so I'll continue from there. Think of the following segment as the catch-up-montage Shortland Street has at the start of each show. I've put it in italics for the hard of seeing.

Venice. The streets smell alternatively of pastries and pond-scum-dog-poo. We visited a book shop with a back door that opened onto a canal. The owner kept his books in 4 clawfoot baths, a wooden kayak, a gondola and high bookshelves. We had a Gondola ride with Mario - a short, aging Gondola driver. His English was lacking but he had memorised 12 to 13 snippets of information about the buildings we passed. He punctuated these with loud, long snorts from his dripping nose. "On-a the lefta, we ava da houseothecassanova, built in da tirteenthcentry, in the romanticstyla! SNNNOOOOOORRRRRTTTTTT." We also visited the two galleries, the Academia which specialised in Venician art from the 13th to the 19th century, and the Peggy Gugenheim where we saw some cool pieces from Picasso and his contemporaries. To sum it up, Venice was either Michael Jackson or Elizabeth Taylor. Rich, Popular and beautiful back in the day, but now needing a ton of extra cash to fund reconstructive surgery and showing signs of water damage.

Bassano Del Grapa [north of venice]. Where we spent New Years with my Uncle and Aunt Vincent and Diana. The first day of 2009 welcomed us with about 20cm of fresh snow outside their door. I went snowboarding twice at a local ski field, which was incredible. Big wide runs flowing down between pine trees. The rest of the time was spent playing pick-up-sticks and drinking espresso coffee. Adri spent a lot of time in front of the fire reading one of Diana's books, which she narrowly failed to finish before we left.

Cut to current episode: "Lets go Duomo"

Arriving from the train station into Florence we spotted the major landmark, the Duomo. We headed towards it, as we knew our hotel was to be found on a street nearby. A few turns around the tall streets of Florence and we were there! "Wow its big!" we thought. Turns out it wasn't the Duomo, but just some other smaller church on the way. When we finally got to the actual Duomo i thought there was something wrong with my eyes. It was like they got the scale all wrong on the plans. Words nor pictures can describe the scale of the building. There was scaffolding on the exterior of one section of the building. With the intricate decorations it seemed to us that they would be continually shift the scaffolding clockwise around the Duomo, cleaning and restoring, before starting again.

We made it to our hotel, after a bit of searching. Unfortunately there had been a mix up, and our room was occupied for that evening. Not to worry, they packed us off to a partner hotel and put us in a room there. It was even closer to town and nicer than our initial one!

Our first meal was at a Restaurant recommended by the Hotel operator. We arrived and there was a queue outside the door, waiting for them to open. We strolled up the road window shopping and by the time we returned, they were ready. It was a small French themed restaurant, and they packed us down the very end, next to the kitchen. There were two chefs and four waiting staff. They packed in the clientelle, we shared our six-seater table with two other couples. It seemed they specialised in hearty food with a quick turn around. We started with Minestroni soup, Adri ordered a salad and potatoes, I ordered the Tripe which for some reason i remembered as being a type of sausage. We were both pleasantly surprised with the food: Adri, the quality and quick turn around, myself, with the squiddely slimy things in sauce that appeared on my plate.

The next day we visited San Lorenzo, home of the Medici chapels. The paintings on the interior of the dome were jaw dropping. Its not possible to look at them with your mouth closed. You have to crane your neck back so far that automatically your jaw becomes slack, drool starts to form in your throat, breathing becomes difficult, you make little grunty noises a you take it all in. The marble work around the chapel was rediculous. Oh and there were little vials with golden ornate leaves which held the bones of saints (I want to say 'repositories' but it sounds too close to 'suppositories' ...hmm can't remember now). They were visually cool but kind of creepy. My favourite was the Chapel of the princes - it was a smaller domed room that Michaelangelo designed and created scupltures for. There were 6 sculpted figures in total, three on one side, three on the other. Two princes stood, facing each other across the room. At their feet were personifications of Day & Night, Dawn and Dusk. All figures were just under twice life size. It was phenominal work. I could have spend hours there taking it all in. Michaelangelo is a genius - the level of thought and content he can inject into his figures - in their twisted yet natural poses. As an example of this he even polished the figure of 'night' to high sheen compared to 'day'- It seems as if she is bathed in moonlight. All this in a medium which there is no 'undo' key. It is breathtaking.

To segway from the previous point, I wanted to also talk about the difficulty of looking at the art here. A lot of the pieces are huge in scale. Big narratives that suck you in, tell you a whole story in one image. I'd be happy to sit in front of a few of them for a few hours and really soak up the composition, the emotions and stories in the different characters. To see fifty in a day, when they're not really designed to be viewed like that is very tiring. You become a bit jaded. Adri says at the end of the day it feels as if her eyes are bleeding from so much art. She's decided for the next week we are to willingly become 'Fois Gras'. We will stuff long tubes down to our bellies and force feed painting after sculpture after painting until we are full to the brim. And if you were to delicately slice open our livers, they would taste sweet, fatty and a little like lead based paint.

To unwind from the art saturation, we've been endulging in a little retail therapy. Adri has bought some fine charcoal coloured boots and a largish green leather bag.

I tried to buy some mocassins but no go. They were sooooo cool. Made from a single piece of leather. Unfortunately they had sold out of the ones in my size. see http://www.kanekodesign.it/concept.html

Oh, and i've been doing lots of drawing. Will take some pics of my diary and upload them sooon...