Our lunches came with dessert. Mine was a a glass of fruit. Trudy’s was some kind of pudding thing. Afterwards we were rested and quite content, ready to tackle the rest of the day.
“Well, so where should we go next?” I asked.
Heh. Where should we go. The right question would have been, Where are we going next? because in reply to my query, the fair and industrious Trudy immediately pulled out a map and pointed, “Here.”
And with that, we were off to the Basilica of San Lorenzo.
Florence is so small that we had walked by here often, and although we knew we would come back, we had never been tempted to change our plans, because from the outside, although obviously large, the church is … frankly … unfinished.
For all the greatness of the Medici over the centuries, for all their spectacular wealth and for all the centuries of building its chapels and tombs, the place was never completely finished. Michelangelo had a magnificent facade design for the front, but it never got beyond a small-scale wooden model. As a result, the outside of the basilica looks more like a stone fort rather than the magnificent place it is.
Bear with me. Let me take a brief tangent here…
There were several places in Florence where this unfinished nature of some of the spectacular places was a little unsettling. For all the greatness of the Medicis and in spite of their role in ushering in the Renaissance, in the end, the unfinished nature of some of their grand projects seems to be cautionary tale of sorts, a metaphor for mortality, for the inevitable passage of time, for the certainty that things will change and even greatness will fade. This is by new means a new thought. From Ecclesiastes
Vanity of vanities … all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
Oh for heavens sake. That’s a bit pretentious. But I confess, this is the feeling I was often left with in Florence, especially with this church.
Even the groups of people hanging out on the red-brown steps of the wide stone plaza beside the church looked as if they were waiting for something to happen (unlike the folks hanging out on the Spanish Steps every evening in Rome, where a multitude of things were happening all the time).
And that’s the end of my tangent.
So now we went in. And oh gosh, the going in part is (obviously) the important thing. In stark contrast to the outside, the inside of the basilica is absolutely stunning. Of course, anyone who does the slightest bit of research on the place would know this, as we did, but the difference was nevertheless shocking.
We saw the old sacristy with Brunelleschi’s have sphere sitting on top of his cube. We saw Michelangelo’s new sacristy. We saw the main chapel with its huge octagonal mausoleum and stunning, multi-colored marbles. But the the truly amazing part was the main interior of the basilica with its pietra serena stonework that has an oddly modern feel to it in spite of the classical and renaissance designs of the place.
I have spoken too long. I leave you with this view of the interior.
The rest of the day will have to come later.