Florence Tour

Tuesday was our tour day, so we had some quick breakfast and headed outside the hotel to wait for our pickup at about 9am. We met up with the rest of the tour at the train station and took a bus to Piazza Michelangelo for a view of the entire city. The piazza is situated on a hill just to the south east of the city along the boulevard. This is the ritzy area and the majority of the houses have private parks or gardens. We stayed here for about 15 minutes and admired the view before boarding the bus again.
Next stop was the Academie. This used to be a school where students could go to study art and has been converted to a museum. Inside we spent a little bit of time perusing the medieval painings and the gallery of musical instruments collected by the Medici. The musical instruments had some interesting pieces including an upright piano, some hurdy gurdies and some string instruments made by Stratevari.
Next we moved to the sculptures which included the "Slaves" by michelangelo. These pieces are purposely left unfinished. The figures all appear to be trapped within the marble and are struggling to escape. You can get close enough to see all the gauges made by Michelangelo's chisels and the pieces are quite stunning. The highlight of the Academie is of course Michelangelo's David. There is a seperate room specifically for this piece. David was completed in 1504 and was originally designed to stand atop of the cathedral. The intended positioning of the figure led michelangelo to make the davids hands and head larger so they would appear more proportional from the intended perspective. There is an amazing amount of detail for a statue meant to be so far from the viewer. The veins in his arms and the intensity of his expression wouldn't be visible at all. David was a popular subject for a lot of artists at the time, yet michelangelo made this one unique. Usually david is portrayed as a young boy, here he is depicted as a bit older, in his twenties. Usually david is shown in celebration after killing Goliath, however Michelangelo has shown him in the moments before his confrontation, holding the stone in one hand and his sling in the other. You can see in his expression that he is focused, with a clarity of purpose.
There was a showing of Robert Maplethorpe at the museum as well. They had taken some of the photos and placed them next to other pieces in the gallery. There were 4 photos placed next to the David. I don't understand why the gallery would do this as it seems silly to compare Maplethorpe to Michelangelo, and the photos seemed to be placed in the way and obstructed some angles of the sculpture - Please Italy, stop trying to mix old and new, it doesn't work, detracts from the originals as well as the modern pieces and is quite annoying.

The tour was going to the Duomo next so we decided to leave them and head off on our own. We headed to Santa Croce, another church south east of the duomo. Santa Croce is a bit smaller than the duomo but houses the tombs of Gallileo, Michealangelo, Dante and Machiavelli - quite the lineup, and being a fan of all of them, this was was a must see. The interior of the church is being restored so there was quite a bit of scaffolding and some of the sites were pretty obstructed. The monuments to Dante and Machiavelli were tightly wrapped and protected from falling stone so they could not be enjoyed. Luckily Gallileo and Michelangelo were untouched and in full view. We wandered through the church museum and spent a bit of time in a small garden which most of the other tourists didn't seem to find interesting. It was nice to be able to relax in a beautiful place that wasn't crawling with people.
It had been a pretty full morning so we headed back to the hotel for a little rest.