Visiting the cathedrals of Florence

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We arrived on a Sunday and learned all the museums in the city were closed on Monday. This put a kink into our sightseeing plans since we were scheduled to leave on Wednesday. The churches were still open so after breakfast we wandered through the streets until we found a small empty church and we spent some time wandering up and down the building looking at the holy relics and religious paintings. The place was deserted and we had to turn on some of the lights to see into the dark alcoves.

It was quiet and peaceful inside and I managed to unwind a little before we had to venture out into the noise and crowds. Amanda told me if I left her she was going to become a nun.

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The biggest cathedral in the city, the Duomo, had a line of tourists stretched around the block. We never visited it, but I'm not sure we missed much. Instead we toured the second and third largest cathedrals in Florence, the Santa Croce and the Santa Maria Novella. The Santa Croce cathedral was filled with the graves of famous Italians. Michaelangelo was buried there, as well as Galileo, Machiavelli, Dante, da Vinci, Rossini, Marconi, and Enrico Fermi (though those last two had plaques just because they were famous - not because their bones were resting there) along with a bunch of church bigwigs, politicians, and other people we didn't recognize.

The floors were filled with the graves of knights and priests. Most were bas-reliefs in marble which had been worn down by centuries of foot traffic into unrecognizable smears. A few were cordoned off but whether this was to keep them from getting eroded further or to keep tourists from tripping on the uneven floor was unknown.

The artwork wasn't that interesting with the exception of a painting that had been restored since the flood. In 1966 the river Arno flooded and brought 5 meters of water into the cathedral destroying or damaging everything. They were still recovering and we saw several old newspaper photos showing the destruction and debris left behind.

There were more tombs under the cathedral and while looking through the weird collection of prints in one of the back rooms we ran into a Florentine librarian who could speak a little English and was excited to tell us about the art and architecture. He told us the other cathedrals we should visit saying "The artwork is magnificent!" while kissing the tips of his fingers. Several of the pictures and relics had buzzers that would go off if you got too close. We were constantly setting these off or hearing others accidentally setting them off but they went off so frequently no one paid any attention.

The main hall was lined by elaborate tombs to famous people. Galileo rested in an ornate coffin topped by a huge statue in his likeness surrounded by weeping women and children and grave statesmen and priests. The fanciness seemed a little odd considering what the church thought about him while he was alive. After he wrote a book making fun of the churches backwards views, they arrested him, brought him to trial and convicted him, forcing him into house arrest for the remainder of his life after making him recant everything he knew to be true. Before they sent him away they promised to torture him to death him if he continued to disagree with the church's position.

Machiavelli also had a large elaborate tomb. This was the author of the prince in which:

Machiavelli described immoral behavior, such as dishonesty and killing innocents, as being normal and effective in politics. He even seemed to endorse it in some situations.

He was an influential figure in history but shouldn't we be burning him in effigy ala Guy Falkes rather than glorifying him for all time among these other creative geniuses? It's as if we decided to spend millions on a memorial to Dick Cheney.

We were about to leave the main cathedral when a bunch of musicians came in and set up a barrier in the front of Rossini's tomb. We took a seat nearby and waited for them to play. The musician were teenagers or young adults but they were excellent musicians and we had a front row seat as they played four or five of Rossini's songs.

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It felt a little strange to be listening to Rossini's light and playful music surrounded by tortured saints and monuments to guilt and despair. Guilt convinced people to build this temple with stone ceilings over a hundred feet high and guilt filled it with gloomy artwork. Rossini's music is upbeat, bright, and alive, the opposite of the dour shame the cathedral strives to inspire.

After the performance the musicians turned to the tomb and bowed.

We went out for a lunch of panini, apples, carrots, and gelato. I also took note of all the weird street decorations.

The Santa Maria Novella didn't have anyone famous buried in the floor and many of the frescos were undergoing restoration but it did contain a lot of weird history about the Franciscan Friars, holy relics like the fingers and bones of saints (including thorns from Christ's crown which I noted were treated no differently from any of the other holy relics).

In the back by the line of marble tombs there was a room filled with some weird symbolic paintings including one called "The Triumph of Christian Doctrine" and we had to go to the annotated display to discover that the bearded lady was supposed to represent Euclid, the caveman represented music, and a man with three hands represented Rhetoric. Here is a academic overview

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Afterwards we returned to our room for an hour of rest and then back out into the city for a dinner of gnocchi and calzone. On the way back to the hotel, we passed two musicians with violins playing Vivaldi and Pachelbel in the street in front of the Santa Croce. We sat on the steps and watched them play. The night was warm and the city hummed around us.