Amici e giardini

Two Wednesdays ago, my cohorts and I had our first presentation in Context and Audience.  None was perfect, but all in all, they went smoothly.  Caitlin and I drank heavily afterwards.

The next afternoon, as I made my way to deliver Gatorade and Lemonsoda to Caitlin,  I ran into Meredith, a friend from Columbia who was visiting her sister.  We had a long lunch and caught up before my restoration class.  That evening, the teaching assistants and Masters students gathered for Mexican food and margaritas.  Susanne, another friend from Columbia, was in town for the night, and she met us out.  I hadn't seen her since eighth grade, and we discussed the courses our lives had taken since then.  It's amazing what can happen in a decade, and it's even funnier to think back on who you once were but no longer are.  The essence of identity is one hell of a question.

After dinner, a few of us went local and drank a bottle of vodka on the stairs of Santa Croce.  By about midnight Silvia, Tom, Tom's girlfriend, Teresiana, and I were left.  We left the deserted piazza for Tom's apartment and threw a late night 80's dance party, which woke up his Tawainese neighborhoods, who joined us and began speaking Chinese with Teresiana, who, besides studying literary theory and Proust, speaks Chinese.  It was good to hang out with Tom.  We are rare beings: straight males studying art history without a political, sexual, or religious axe to grind.  We decided a Hemmingway day is in order.  Hemmingway day = one inconspicuous bottle of bourbon + walking tour of Florence and its museums.

I didn't do much the next day.  I read slowly in the morning, ate tripe for lunch, and hit some museums during the afternoon.  Museums, Mozart, and tripe can put you back on the rails after a long night.  I met an art historian for drinks that evening, and she asked me if I would be willing to help her put together a Bronzino conference over the course of the year.  We are organizing the conference in collaboration with the Bronzino show that opens this fall at Palazzo Strozzi.  Scholarship in action!

I spent that weekend hitting museums and gardens with friends and cohorts before they left for Spring Break.  I visited Herbert Horne's palazzo on Via de' Benci.  Like Davanzati, many of the items there are arranged as the would have been positioned in a 15th century Florentine home.  Some very interesting and odd objects, like a birth tray with a putti playing the bagpipes on one side and a scene of the last judgement on the other.  I wonder what were the connections between Florence and Scotland in the 15th century, and given the theory that scenes on birth trays inspire positive qualities in a gestating child, why depict the Last Judgement with the wrathfulness of Christ and the malbolgie of Hell?  Afterwards, Silvia, Caitlin, and I saw the Bardini and Boboli Gardens, and then walked through the hills south of Florence to San Minato al Monte.  That evening, we saw Alice in Wonderland in Italian, which made it no less stupid.

That Sunday, I attended church at St. Mark's, changed clothes, and then toured the gardens at Castello and La Petraia.  Much of the garden flora in this area of Italy is similar as those in South Carolina: boxwoods, hydrangea, loquats, pines, etc.  I am writing my Master's thesis about Renaissance and 19th gardens around Florence, and I love visiting them, especially with spring approaching.