Getting My Culture On

Battistero di San Giovanni

    It does pay to do some trip planning, because some months ago I happened upon on-line travel tips that led me to buy advance tickets to:

        1) Michelangelo’s secret room.   This is a small room below the Medici Chapel that, in the 1970s, was discovered to have sketches made by Michelangelo that had been covered over with plaster. The plaster was removed and the sketches revealed but not made viewable by the public until 2023.  They only allow 4 people in at a time and only for 15 minutes. Of course, photos of the room and sketches are all over the place online, but it was cool to see it in person.

    Just upstairs from this spare chamber is the incredibly hubristic Chapel of the Princes, which was supposed to house the remains of the Medici family members but guess what – those enormous sarcophagi are empty and the family member’s remains are in a crypt elsewhere in the building. 

 

  

         2) My second ticket-score was for the Baptistery Mosaic Restoration Tour – The famous Battistero di San Giovanni has gorgeous mosaics in its dome made from tiny glass tiles, usually viewable only by craning your neck looking from the ground up.  But you can’t even do that right now because the mosaics are being restored and are shielded from below by netting. But they are offering tours (only on Saturday, only once in English, only 10 people) in which you get to climb the scaffolding and see the mosaics up close with the restoration in progress.  This was super cool and our guide was excellent. We were so close we could have reached out and touched them (forbidden!), and she was able to point out differences in craftsmanship and materials over the many years it took to complete them originally. Photos up top were also forbidden but here I am ready to climb the scaffolding.

        My cultural frenzy continued on Sunday when I visited Casa Buonaratti, Michelangelo’s family home, as well as Casa di Dante.Both were interesting but not especially photogenic, although Casa Buonaratti houses a collection of Etruscan era relics (!) 

     

        That's it for now. I've also been enjoying time taking solo walks and hanging out with fellow travelers on this trip. 

(seems like I have some formatting issues in this post-- I'll try to correct later)