Florence's museums

After realizing a little while ago I'd never done an entry about Florence, I've finally found a nice lazy Sunday to play catch-up and at least post some pictures of and thoughts about the city (even though it's now over a month after...). I'm going to try and break up my long-winded approach to blogging by posting multiple shorter entries rather than one huge novel, and this one's dedicated to the museums we saw in Florence.

So, with no further delay:

Having only three days in the city, we wanted to make the most of our time and hit the ground running as soon as we arrived. First up was the Galleria degli Uffizi, said to house one of the best collections of Renaissance art in the world, including Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, da Vinci's Annunciation, and a bunch of other works that made me ever so grateful I'd taken that Art History course my first year of college.

The U-shaped gallery backs up to the Arno River, and even on an overcast day it made for a pretty view of the Ponte Vecchio -- all of those colorful protrusions from the bridge are tiny jewelery shops.

I got separated from the others in the 50-room museum, and without a functional cell phone or a planned rendez-vous time, I decided to head across town to check out the David's exquisite marble physique in the Galleria dell'Accademia, since they hadn't expressed much interest in seeing the statue.

Only after snapping a few pictures did I learn that you aren't supposed to take photos in the museum (even without flash, like I was), but as a result I have pictures to post, mwahaha. I wonder how taking pictures harms marble statues? A brief Google query doesn't provide any answers... maybe Italy just like to assert itself in silly arbitrary ways like France does. At any rate, there's not a whole lot more to this museum than David and the four unfinished Slaves also sort of shown in this picture, though it was very cool to see such a famous statue in the (marble) flesh. Even though this gallery was built specifically for the David about a century ago, there's recently been a debate about whether he should be moved again due to the vibration created by the volume of tourist traffic in central Florence, though it seems to me any move would just be a stop-gap measure, since tourists are still going to flock to David no matter where he goes.

On the last day, we took advantage of the reasonably nice weather to visit the Biboli Gardens in the Palazzo Pitti, the 15th century residence of the Medicis. The Palazzo is actually composed of six different museums, but we were running short on time, energy, and museum enthusiasm and limited ourselves to the gardens. I'm sure at some point in the future I'll kick myself for that, but even a month later the feeling of museum saturation is still fresh enough that I don't yet regret it.