On Wed of this week we went to Florence with a senior couple, Denis and Jackie Hawkins, who live and work in the area offices in Germany. He works with me on finance and she with the mental health issues of missionaries (young and old) for about 12 missions in Europe. She mostly uses skype to work with missionaries, and did it in her hotel room, while he sat with me helping me with things I am still learning. They are going home from their 23 month mission this fall and are making another tour of Europe, they were in Rome last week. He worked with me on Monday and Tuesday and then asked if we could go with them to Florence on Wed, which the president readily agreed to. We left about 8:30 am, riding the Frecccaosa, the red arrow train (fast), getting in at 10:30, and we had 11:15 entrance tickets to the Uffizi Gallery, one of the world's most famous. I will post a few of the hundreds of pix I took, with some brief comments.
Train station at Rogoredo, Milano, closest to where we live, There is a subway, bus and train station here and is very convenient. It cost 100 round trip for each of us to go to Florence. It takes almost 4 hours to drive there on the freeway.
The Uffizi, literally means offices, were built in the 1500s by the Medici family, which ruled Florence and the Renissance for almost 400 years--the US isn't even that old. They were government offices, three stories (there were no elevators then) with long hallways and large office rooms, which now house art collected by the Medici and their successors.
It is arranged chronologically, this is one of the first things we saw, a Greek casket from about 400 BC.
Again, there are 3 stories of hallways, with pained ceilings (from the 1500s), doors leading into offices, now with art, and with a lot of statues and paintings in the hallways. Notice the many small portraits along the ceiling, which have been there for over 500 years.
Look out the other window and you can see the River Arno, with its famous Ponte Vecchio (old bridge). According to Dad (Lamro) who camped on this side of the river for six months in a tent during the winter, they did not bomb out this bridge because it was not wide enough to get a tank through--all the rest were bombed out.
Look out another window and you can see houses where regular Florentine people still live, and lived when Dad would take his army rations in the evening, when they stopped shooting at the Germans. The Italian housewives would cook up the American rations, along with what they had, and make nice home made meals. Dad said he tried to teach them the gospel in his poor Italian with no translated materials. He also said the electricity went off at night, so the Germans could not see what to shoot at, so they used lamps and candles behind closed shuttered windows, which they still have.
A copy of Michaelangelo's David (the original was moved in the 1800s into its own building, to keep him out of the weather). Inside this building is also a museum, which we did not have time to see. There are many museums and art galleries in Florence.
Very nice post. Thanks for keeping us all up to date.
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