Samahn a Roma: Travels Around Roma Part IX: Firenze Di Nuovo

In case you're wondering, Di Nuovo means again in Italian. So this is the continued story of my Florentine travels. I left off at the point in time when I exited the bus. I was in a general bus area and they guys pointed me in a general direction. Well it turned out that they gave me good directions because I saw some shops open and activity and people walking around. I followed the road and to my surprise I saw this...

La Basilica di Santa Croce (Basilica of the Holy Cross) is purposely designed to take you on by surprise. You see it all at once and you don't see it coming up ahead. Also it is designed so that you can't take a full picture of it or see it fully easily. It's kind of a facade because like many churches in Italy its not as tall as it appears from the front. Thus I have different pictures from different angles. But for good pictures of the full front and the inside (which I couldn't go into) go here.

The Golden Door is directly in line with the front door of the Duomo and you cant really go far enough to get a good view. But I got some good views like these. This is the front but you can't see how far wide the Duomo extends...

This is the view to the left of the door. And by the way the level of detail and decoration is not done justice by these pictures. Each of the statues was hand-carved and placed really high up, for example, and everything else was done by hand. It's a lot to think about all at once.

Here is a view of the middle portion again but magnified. The Duomo was completed in 1436 after 16 years of construction and its really amazing literally how they built a huge cathedral like this. I couldn't do it now without power equipment, especially the frescos and statues that are really high up.

And here is a view from the right side. Notice the bell tower and dome behind the main entrance. I regret not being able to go inside because it looks amazing from pictures, but then again nobody could go in. And seeing the exterior was good enough. I'm not complaining...

Firenze is a cool city because this is where the Renaissance was born, and it has almost as much history as Roma itself. The Duomo rivals Roma's best churches in sheer beauty.

If you remember I said the Golden Doors were blocking you from getting a good view. Well at the time I had no idea what the Golden Doors were. All I saw were people gathering around and taking pictures, so I did the same. As usual I got a slightly blurry picture but just squint your eyes and it's clear...

After doing some nifty research (just now) I now know that these doors are the gates of paradise.

For an actual clear picture you can see this, which I took off the internet from the website www.HawkeBackpacking.com. Pretty clear, no? This door has David beheading Goliath (after he beat him), Noah and his family emerging from the Ark after the flood, the creation of Eve, Moses recieving the 10 Comandments on Mt. Sinai, and basically the whole shabang of significant holy art. And its gold. Thats a winner in my book.

One regret I have is not having a better camera during my trip. My camera ran out of batteries if it was turned on too long. Literally all of these pictures were a struggle because the camera would shut down if it was on for like 30 seconds. It was fine during the beginning but as the trip went on it got bad and then it just stayed that way. There are some pictures of me floating around on other people's cameras but they're lost in the ether right now. I don't know where they are. And once it shut down once I had to wait a while before it would muster enough battery power to take another picture. Literally thats how EVERY picture was made. I didn't really get to take spontaneous pictures but instead I had to plan out each picture and sometimes if I screwed up (like the Golden Door above) I just couldn't take another picture and I just had to go with it. Needless to say I threw my camera in my room and I haven't used it since I got back. Damn that thing. The only good thing is that it was free.

Well after wandering around I went here. This is Palazzo Vecchio, or Old Palace.

But first I believe I actually got to Piazza San Lorenzo. I bought some souvenirs and presents for people and then I saw a certain statue. It had this inscription. As you can see it is dedicated to San Lorenzo, and it was restored in the year 1850 (look for the Roman numerals). My Italiano isnt that good but it also says that he was the leader of the black parties. If I can translate more of it I will update this post.

And after the drama here is the statue itself. Sorry but its not that great, especially for Italia. But it has history so thats cool.

This is Piazza della Signoria, or the Piazza of his Lordship as it translates out. This is really cool because its also an open air museum (more on that below) which was a surprise because you don't get those for free as nice as it was in Firenze.

Here is more of the same, but a different building. You can already see some statues and the museum is just to the left. This also has various historic coats of arms of Florentine families of the past (the same ones Jupiter's moons are named after) so thats cool. And yeah Galileo was from Florence so when he discovered Jupiter's moons he connected them to his hometown and named one of them Io, which of course is the word "I" in Italian like "yo" in Spanish.

Firenze was buzzing that night. Lots of people were on the street. Among them were protesters, specifically a pro-Palestinian protest, and a quadrilingual protest at that. The translation is the same except that va means go and distrutto means destroyed.

And here is more of the protest. The words aren't clear enough for me to translate, but its more of the same. Of course when I saw this protest I went up to this man who was holding a sign and talked to him, and he spoke enough English that we could communicate effectively. About 20 min later I really got nowhere, I got yelled at by some random woman with a sign who found out I was American and accused Obama of being corrupt and deceitful, and it was basically the same conversation that I've had in the USA; it seems that abroad some things don't change. I won't exactly get into the details of the speech though. It wasn't pretty but the guy was friendly (I called il mio amico, or my friend, to make sure there was no tension) and ultimately nothing happened, although I was careful not to tell him too much.

Finally I got to the open-air museum. Here it is. Pretty cool for a free museum. You don't get that everyday.

Here is some guy beating up a centaur. As I recently learned this is a statue of Hercules beating up the centaur Nessus, as according to mythology.

More statues. I really have nothing to add other than I like the shadows. I only really remember seeing the centaur and these images are practically new to me. Yay centaur!

Here is a replica of the David statue by Michaelangelo. When I heard there was a free replica of the statue and I didn't have to pay out 15 euro to see some statue, I got really excited at the opportunity not to spend money in another museum. Score!!!!

Here is another parade, this time of the musical variety. The music was pretty good from what I remember. As quickly as they came as left so I got a picture of them before they left.

This is a picture of the Arno River, or il fiume Arno. It apparently looks a lot better at daytime, and it would a look better if the picture wasn't blurry. I actually didn't know Florence had a river until I took this picture.