Florence’s Pantheon and my favorite church in Florence, Santa Croce hosts 270 tombstones that pave the floor of the church, honoring those who strongly impacted the course of history in the fields of art, history and music. The most famous tomb belongs to Michelangelo, followed by those of
Tabernacles are lovely frescoed or sculptured niches shaped like small temples. During medieval times they were placed on almost every corner and usually contained a sacred image— often of the ...
‘I said, I killed him,’ she said, and her voice was light and cool as though it was trying to float free from her body, where the bones pressed painfully ...
The Museum of San Marco was opened to the public in 1869 after the abolition of monasteries, which occurred in 1866. It has its own place inside the old monastery of San Marco, built between 1437 and 1444 under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici for the reformed Dominican
Chiesa La Badia FiorentinaVia del ProconsoloMidday Prayer Tuesday-Saturdayat 12:30pmThe church was founded and endowed in 978 by the German princess Willa, widow of Umberto, Margrave of Tuscia (Tuscany). The slender bell tower (la badia) is a landmark in the Florentine skyline and used to call the artisans to
Ilove any work by Jacopo Pontormo, a tortured soul who produced amazing Manneristic colors in his works. Doris Kryst describes Man-nerism as ‘an emotional accentuation of movement and expressions of the body, eccentric composition of space with distorted perspective, anatomical exaggeration, restless variation of light and artificial color.&
Alost-in-life tractor salesman plopped smack dab in the center of Florence. He’s the only man in a group of 18 women psychologists attending a seminar concerning the feminine aspect of the psyche. In other words, primitive man meets goddess.Samsara begins with a brief introduction by
Mary Jane Cryan lives in a small town nestled between Rome and Tuscany that has been under the protection of the English crown since the time of Henry VIII. Travels to Tuscany and Northern Lazio, the latest addition to her decades of ferreting out hidden history, gives readers a glimpse
Nothing can be more depressing than to encounter a husband who boasts of having seen everything in Rome in three days, while the wife laments that, in recollection she cannot distinguish the Vatican from the Capitol, St Peter’s from St Paul’s.Augustus Hare: Walks in Rome (
Who would be a tour guide? If you have ever spent a summer in Florence, wincing at compatriots who argue in restaurants and make fatuous remarks in museums, you will have asked yourself this very question. In Too Much Tuscan Sun, Dario Castagno tells of encounters with tourists so strange,
While recovering from World Cup fever, Italian football will remain in the grips of a nasty scandal. The investigations of systematic match-fixing are being labelled Piedi Puliti – ‘Clean Feet’, – and the story has already claimed a tragic casualty in the form of the Juventus star