Burnt to a Crisp – or not – No more traffic around the Duomo

SUNDAY (October 25, 2009) Dante was worn out after all of the “A Passo Duomo” celebration around the cathedral.

The new mayor of Florence had decreed that the entire piazza surrounding the Duomo would become a pedestrian mall instead of a busy thoroughfare where over 500 buses and thousands of taxis round the Duomo every day. To mark the renaissance of the city center, the mayor threw a party.

There were balloons and hot chestnuts and free entrance to the Baptistry.

Notable figures from history – Dante, Galileo, Leonardo Da Vinci – made an appearance and wandered the … Read More

Tuscan Traveler’s Tales – Dark Water, a story of the 1966 flood

As the November 4th anniversary of the 1966 flood that devastated Florence approaches, it’s the perfect time to read Robert Clark’s Dark Water: Art Disaster and Redemption in Florence, which was just released in paperback.

As Angela Leeper writes in her concise review in bookpage.com:History and art criticism, with a dash of memoir thrown in, Robert Clark’s Dark Water chronicles how the flood of November 4, 1966—in which four million books, 14,000 works of art and 16 miles of documents were either damaged or destroyed—came to define the Italian city of Florence. Clark begins with a … Read More

Tuscan Traveler’s Tales – The Luxury of Going Slowly

Il privilegio della lentezza” or “the luxury of going slowly” is the creed of the artisans at the Antico Setificio Fiorentino says director Sabine Pretsch. Seemingly untouched by time, workmanship characteristic of the Renaissance is central to this small Florentine silk fabric workshop.  Any visitor will linger in this unhurried, magical place tucked deep inside a historic garden in the San Frediano district of Florence, Italy, where the looms are centuries old and the detailed patterns for the silken cloth are older still.

Noble Renaissance families made their fortunes through the manufacture and trade of fine silks.  … Read More