The Big Trip
Part II: Firenze e Roma

The constraints of museum opening hours dictated a hasty arrival and establishment of ourselves in Florence, followed by determined dash to the Uffizi.

All this effort was worth it, giving us three hours in one of the best art museums in the world. Highlights included Monaco, Botticelli, . Plus the view out the window over the Arno was pretty good:

and the outdoor cafe, though chilly, was pretty picturesque:

A couple of the rooms were closed & I felt a bit shortchanged that we'd missed out on seeing the Caravaggios. It turned out these were in the new rooms down stairs, along with some very dramatic Reni and Honthorst works,

which made for a climactic finale to our visit.

Having fulfilled one of the key art-appreciation aims in Florence, we were able to relax and enjoy wandering about the town.

Much smaller than Rome, Florence is filled with cute little streets and piazzas that make it ideal for pedestrian tourists like ourselves.

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An oversight on my part during trip-planning, meant that our only full day in Florence was a Monday, when most of the museums are closed, hence yesterday's rush to the Uffizi. This afforded us, however, a day to stroll about, free of my obsessive art-fervour. We had a look-ee at the Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore,

and adjacent Campanile Giotto,

strolled east through various neighbourhoods

and collated some lunch from the markets,

which we ate on the banks of the Arno.

South of the river, we hiked up the hill to the Fortress Belvedere and had a look at Palazzo Pitti

and several churches: Santa Spirito & Santa Maria del Carmine.

Crossed the Ponte Vecchio

and moseyed through the centre of town, enjoying the afternoon light on the beautiful buildings there.

Going north again, saw another fortress,

and wandered through a less picturesque, in the traditional sense, section of town, which nonetheless exuded its own beauty in the evening light.

Ate the remains from our lunch for dinner and drank two bottles of chianti, after which conversation with fellow hostel guests became tolerable.

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Our final morning in Florence and the last chance to see the Academia, which we did. It was good, though reaching threshold for consumption of art from 1300 to 1700. In Maarinke's words: if i see one more Virgin and Child or Annunciation or Pieta, I'm going to scream.

In my words: Do you think David killed Goliath to make up for not being quite "correctly proportioned" - you couldn't just go out and buy a big car in those days, you know.

In Maarinke's words (in front of the David): Matt, stop gesturing like that with your hands; everyone knows what you're talking about.

It's great being arty and cultured and stuff.

Haste at Academia gave us time for a final walk round before returning to Rome. The walk went a little something like this:

We walked to Piazza Santa Croce,

paid tribute to a famous Florentine,

bought some more spinach balls for the hungry vegetarian, and checked out the markets before bidding Florence farewell.

Back in Rome (managed to not miss train this time), we dumped stuff @ hostel, trying to suppress Australian accents to avoid bearing any resemblance to fellow countrymen staying there (the great irony of hostelling being that you travel half way round the world to expand your mind and/or horizons and end up sharing a room with someone who used to work with the father of someone you once tutored or, in the case of Rome, are checked in by someone who went to your high school and share a room with someone who is about to start work at the same place one of your mates does (RBA, in case you're reading Grant)).

As antidote to overdose of chiarascuros, pietas, altarpieces etc, we went to the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, stopping off to be stereotypically (and, given above rant, hypocritically) Australian by drinking a couple of longnecks in the park (the Giardin del Lago mind you, right near the Piazza di Siena, and it was Morretti we were drinking, so it was all pretty authentico derelicto behaviour).

It was more like the Art Gallery of NSW than the Uffizi or the Musei Vaticani (and if you could imagine how many people would go to the AGNSW, no disrespect intended, if it were transplanted to Rome, you would overestimate the attendance at the GNAM by a factor of 2). The collection there is big, spanning the 19th to 21st centuries, and there is a lot of good stuff, both Italian and international. The problem is, i suppose, that whilst Italy is famous for (1) Roman antiquity and (2) most famous art from 1300 to 1700, from Giotto and Cimabue through Da Vinci, Santi, Buonarotti, Tiziano, Corregio, Veronese etc. to Caravaggio, Tiepolo, Tintoretto and Canaletto etc, (blahblahblah, look at me, i'm a dancing monkey who can recite lots of artists names, give me a banana), things had gone pretty quiet from 1750 when the baton had definitely been passed to France (having been shared with Flanders & Holland admittedly from 1600 on) and then also to England, Germany, etc. That's not to say that painters weren't painting in Italy, and that Italy wasn't important in terms of art: the Prix de Rome remained a most prestigious award at the Academy in Paris throughout the 1800s and artists have continually travelled there to seek inspiration and learn technique. For various reasons, political, social, religious and artistic (and combinations thereof), the most progressive, exciting, novel art, the stuff that gets written about in art books, and initiates movements that we can label and praise, particularly in this modern age that prizes conceptual novelty over perfection of craft (Hirst shark, take a bow), was done elsewhere.

The collection at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna clearly demonstrated that there were lots of artists doing lots of good work, following roughly the progression of "The Canon": neoclassicism, romanticism, painting en plein air, realism, impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, cubism, abstraction (blahblahblah, this time i'm reciting movements, another banana please), then the multiplicity of forms, styles, media that characterise the modern and postmodern ages, but generally a few years behind the cutting edge. Coming from Australia, which wouldn't be claimed as a centre of any international art movements, but which has it's own "story of art" that is understood in the context of, but is not dictated by, the international story, i could appreciate the Italian art we saw there. It wasn't Ingres, Delacroix, Turner, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso (here I go again...; though there were a couple of them represented there), but it was good interesting stuff that reflected developments in art and society at the time. And no altarpieces.

Probably for me the most exciting pieces at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna were the works of the Futurists (Boccioni, Carra, Severini), who lamented some of these things about which I have rambled above, Italy's departure from the centre of art etc, and who captured some of the dynamism of the modern technological world in their fractured, abstractified images.

Maarinke dug the 20c abstracts too:

After all that waffling, the general moral of the story was that good art doesn't have to be famous art, and being two of the eight people in the entire museum, including staff, beats pushing through crowds at the Vatican hands down. And it was time for a couple of quiet ones.

Big dinner to farewell Italy: bruschetta & breadsticks to start, fettucini vongole & spaghetti napoletana respectively for entree, sangiovese to drink, osso bucco & zuppa di pesce resp. for mains, panetone and grappa (doubles x 2) to finish.

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Final morning in Italy: enough time for one more authentico experience, a stroll to the Campo di Fiore. Rome was bustling by the time we dragged ourselves out of bed (a special thanks to the (you guessed it) Australians sharing our hostel room for returning drunk at 4am from their swim in the Fontana di Trevi - yet another moment to make me so proud of my country) but it was cool to see the city in a different light (though in mid-winter the direction of the sun doesn't change a whole lot between 8am and 4pm).

Bought some dates at the Campo di Fiori markets (at €20/kg, we were paying for the experience as well as the dates), then returned to the hostel for breakfast and timely check-out.

Then it was off to Fiumicino for us and, after some complications involving my flight on El Cheapo (or more linguistically appropriately, Das Cheapen) Air being cancelled and me only finding out about it after I'd asked four different officials, we boarded a Lufthansa (woohoo, an upgrade for me - definitely landing on my feet with regards to transport, Birmingham train fiasco notwithstanding) flight to Munich.

It was a pretty clear day so we could see Venice (only just!)

and the alps, which were spectacular.

Next stop: Bayern.

The Big Trip
Part 1: Roma

Thursday Jan 5 saw my departure from Stansted to Roma Ciampino to meet Maarinke for two weeks of continental travels, the culmination of months of intensive preparations. After an inauspicious start to the trip, involving me boarding a train to Birmingham (only realized after departure from Cambridge station), i managed to check-in with 165 seconds to spare and made it to Rome. Found the hostel and went for a reconnaisance trek about town, past Colloseo,

and the monument to Vittorio Emmanuel II,

all the way to the Vatican.

Trained the following morning to Leonardo Da Vinci aeroporto in time for Maarinke's arrival from Vietnam, via Singapore and Frankfurt. She was in high spirits, on her inaugural trip to Europe, and of course pleased to see me (particularly so as I, uncharacteristically and some might suggest miraculously, wasn't late to meet her at the airport).

We found our hotel, noting the campanile vista from the window of our room,

then, wasting no time, we hit the streets, stopping first at the Coliseum,

which turned out to be far more infested with hawkers during the daylight hours, then on to Foro Romano,

where the clear skies and sunlight, both relatively foreign concepts to me now, allowed for full appreciation of the splendours of the great empire.

Up the Capitoline hill (one of the seven famed hills of Rome),

to see Romulus and Remus (famed founders upon aforementioned hills),

and the north side of the Campidoglio.

Jumping ahead to the 19th century, the Vittorio Emmanuel II monument, built after the unification of the nation of Italy, whilst in keeping with the monumentality of the ancient empire, expresses its splendour in a radically different style, more redolent of similar nationalist- neoclassical works in Germany from the same period.

It appears to be a great cliche to criticise this monument in comparison with the graceful ruins of antiquity that surround it, or with the renaissance and baroque palazzos and chiesas that constitute much of the city. It is representative of Italy's move into nationhood after more than 1200 years: in this day of pan-Europeanism, as distinctions between states become more blurred, such commemorative pieces give reminders of the relative modernity of the concept of nationhood. It was good to enjoy this perspective over history, whilst also appreciating the view over the city.

Back down the hill, past the Foro Imperiali,

and into the city, where the piazzas were teeming with crowds enjoying the Epiphany Day public holiday. Purchase of trendy new sunglasses from a street vendor provided opportunity for Blue Steel posing in nearby alley.

Maarinke was putting in a sturdy performance for someone who hadn't been to bed for 54 hours, but a rejuvanatory hot chocolate was in order, enjoyed amongst the throngs outside the Pantheon.

7pm saw Maarinke, understandably, collapse into bed and, after a couple of slices of pizza con funghi e salsiccia, I hit the hay also, in preparation for another big day tomorrow.

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A relatively early start saw us make it to the Vatican when the queue was only 1200 metres long. That was a pretty exciting and stimulating couple of hours,

but worth it once inside. The Capella Sistina, crammed as it was with 2000 tourists snapping away, most of whom wouldn't know a Bernini from a Botticelli or a Lippi from a Lotto, was good without being great: obviously one shouldn't pass up the opportunity to see one of the most famous places/artworks, but that doesn't mean you can't make snide, jaded remarks about the experience.

What were really good were the rooms through which one dutifully troops on the way to and from the main event:

Filled with ornate decoration, great big maps of different parts of Italy, lavish frescos, there was plenty to look at whilst attempting to distract oneself from the mindless banter purveyed by fellow tourists. The modern religious art collection, of which we saw a subset, was an welcome contrast to the masses of High Renaissance on offer.

The Pinacoteca was also cool (though we were to later discover that the bulk of the Baroque pieces were being exhibited in Bonn at the time). Lunch and a bottle of paint stripper was followed by a quick visit to St Peters piazza,

where Maarinke looked suitably pious reverent in front of the Basilica.

Strolled then past Castel Sant Angelo,

back across the Tiber,

up the Spanish steps,

to the Pincio, from where we viewed the city,

and Piazza Popolo.

Wandered south then through a really cool swisho part of the city filled with art galleries, antique stores, cafes and trendy boutiques. Paid obligatory visit to Fontana de Trevi

where a kind street hawker offered to steal my camera (admittedly in exchange for a lovely red rose), but declined my reciprocal offer to jam his rose in, thorny end first. Having ticked most of the touristy boxes, we celebrated with a couple of Morettis and a lasagne and called it a day.

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Squeezing the last drops of cultural value out of Roma before our departure to Firenze, we assembled in front of Villa Borghese at 8:30am.

That was unanimously judged the best thing we saw in Rome: a mansion in acres of parkland, filled with topnotch painting and sculpture, predominantly Baroque. Highlights: Bernini, Titian, Caravaggio, Veronese and the incredible entrance hall. As a pleasant contrast to the knuckle-dragging throngs with which we were forced to share our Musei Vaticani experience, many of the rooms in Villa Borghese could be enjoyed in complete solitude. Sustained ourselves with a ciambella,

then off to the stazione,

where we missed our train thanks to a combination of faulty departures boards and our (my) own ignorance and apathy. Thanks to my faultless performance as "Stupid Australian tourist" in the station information office, we were then upgraded to a Eurostar: woohoo - sitting in the aisle was a small price to pay for the 1.5 hours carved from our travel time.

Next stop: Toscano.