The Collected Traveler: Central Italy Tuscany & Umbria collected by Barrie Kerper
One of the books I bought before M and I took our first trip to Italy in 2002 was from an unusual series of travels books called The Collected Traveler. I bought the Central Italy: Tuscany and Umbria edition, since one of our stops was to be Florence. I liked the idea of this book because it was not a typical travel guide. Rather than listings of accommodations, sights, restaurants, etc. it is a collection of previously published articles and essays of all subjects related to the region. From personal reflections to advice on which sights to see, each piece offers a unique perspective on this popular destination that traditional guidebooks do not have. Also, because of its anthology format, the book is decidedly more literary, with much more intellectual (and physical) heft, than its conventional counterparts.In fact, it offered so much intellectual edification that I didn’t get very far into it before it was time to get on the plane. But I did manage to learn a few very important things that were invaluable, the most important of which was the existence of Vin Santo, a sweet, viscous dessert wine produced only in Tuscany. Reason enough to visit Italy.
The only other particular from the book I remember distinctly is a particular museum in Florence that we did not have time to visit during our three days in the city (there being a general strike on our last day). This description is from the essay "The First Time I Saw Florence" by Sallie Tisdale.
The list of must-see sights in Florence is exclusively artistic and historical, with a single exception. A friend said I mustn’t miss a little-known museum called La Specola, which means “observatory.” No casual visitor would stumble upon the place, located on a side road south of the Piti Palace, through a dark, dirty courtyard, and up three flights of stairs. The museum is open mornings a few days a week, and, from day to day, certain floors and rooms are closed.The Collected Traveler: Central Italy Tuscany & Umbria collected by Barrie Kerper
The surpassingly weird La Specola is the best antidote in town to an overdose of gorgeous Crucifixions. It is part of the University of Florence’s Natural History Museum and contains a tribute room to Galileo though its main attraction is zoology…
But those who go to La Specola do so for the human corpses most of all. Passing out of the animal rooms and into the waxwork section is a step through the looking glass, from natural history to nightmare. In perfect realism, chickens and turtles, human fetuses and pregnant women, spinal cords and skulls, genitalia and whole bodies, fill the rooms. Each is dissected in a different way—for these are teaching models…
…A walk through these strange rooms is a walk through a disturbingly violent fantasy world. The brilliant waxwork artists weren’t content to make body parts according to drawings. They created sculpture, and all the models look alive in the midst of the evisceration. A young woman, gazing serenely, reclines on a soft bed, holding her braid in her hand, her chest and abdomen exploded into Technicolor butchery. Half-dissected heads in cases have their eyes open and a bit of goatee showing. A large man made to demonstrate the lymph system seems to rise in agony off his pallet, eyes wide and hsocked by the brutality of his torture; he is called by local people lo scorticato, “the skinned.” One room contains the life-work of a modeler famous in his time, Gaetano Zumbo—four brilliant dioramas of macabre plague scenes, a series depicting the effects of syphilis, and a decomposing head.
I mentioned my visit to the desk clerk at my hotel. He looked wistful and smiled in memory. “Ah, La Specola,” he said. “I have not been to La Specola since I was a child.”
posted by Renee at 8:04 PM
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PISA'S CAFÉ DELL'USSERO: A RENDEZVOUS FOR ARTISTS
In May 1845 John Ruskin prolonged his stay in Pisa in order to draw the early 15th -century Palazzo Agostini on the Lungarno, or river bank, of the Tuscan city. "There is nothing like it in Italy that I know of", he said; and, writing to his father, he added: "They have knocked a great hole in the middle to put up a shield with a red lion and a yellow cock upon it for the sign of a consul, and they have knocked another at the bottom to put up a sign of a soldier riding a horse on two legs, with inscription All'Ussero Café." The sign mentioned by Ruskin was short-lived, since it was thrown into the River Arno the following year by liberal students who could not even stand the sight of that Hussar. It reminded them of Austrian rule over partitioned Italy; but the Café, one of the oldest in Europe, is still there. It has been there since 1775, as attested by copies of documents, letters, and contracts exhibited on its walls, which mention the presence of a Café on the ground floor of the late-Gothic brick Palazzo Agostini in the very heart of Pisa, next door to the oldest hotel in town, the Victoria, patronised, among others, by Ruskin and Dickens, and even by British royalty. Several police reports in the local Public Records Office reveal that for over two centuries this historic Café has been the favourite resort of radical Mazzinian students and of the more open-minded dons from the nearby University, who used to convene there not only to sip a cup of coffee and play billiards, but also to discuss political issues and comment upon gazette reports on revolutionary movements in the Papal States or in the Kingdom of Naples, then under Bourbon rule, and which had been the subject of Shelley's "Ode to Liberty", or his "Sonnet on the Republic of Benevento". Contraband translations of such works of Byron as The Prophecy of Dante or The Lament of Tasso were also circulated and read in the Café, and they inflamed the minds of students like F.D. Guerrazzi and Giuseppe Montanelli, who were later to play an important political rÛle in the Italian Risorgimento. Other students who were to become some of the most renowned nineteenth-century lyric poets and satirists in verse, such as Giuseppe Giusti, Renato Fucini, and Giosuè Carducci - the first Italian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906 - made their first improvvisazioni in the lively atmosphere of the Caffè dell'Ussero, as was the case with Antonio Guadagnoli, who, according to Giacomo Leopardi, had made a fool of himself by improvising playful verses on his own long nose in the Accademia dei Lunatici, the literary salon of Madame Mason, formerly Lady Mountcashel, who had played host to Percy and Mary Shelley, and particularly to Claire Clairmont, during their stay in Pisa. By the turn of the century, this literary Café had been transformed into a Café-chantant, and then into one of the first cinemas in Tuscany, only to be restored to its original function at the end of the First World War. In the twentieth century the Caffè dell'Ussero resumed its literary and artistic vein, and it was attended by artists like Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist Movement, Guglielmo Marconi, Charles Lindberg, opera singer Renata Tebaldi, and scores of Pisa University students, who were later to distinguish themselves in a variety of professions; some of them, such as Enrico Fermi and Carlo Rubbia, were to win the Nobel Prize, while others would become Prime Ministers or Presidents of the Republic.
Caffè dell’Ussero - Lungarno Pacinotti, 27 – Pisa (Italy)
http://www.ussero.com
It is a monument to Italian culture in the 1400's Palazzo Agostini, on Lungarno. Its walls are covered with glorious memories from its most famous visitors of the Risorgimento when they were students: Carlo Goldoni, Gacomo Casanova, Vittorio Alfieri, Filippo Mazzei, John Ruskin, Domenico Guerrazzi, Giuseppe Giusti, Renato Fucini, Giosuè Carducci, Cesare Abba, Giuseppe Montanelli. In 1839, it was seat of the meetings of the first Italian Congress of Scientists
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