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Monica Vitti auditioning for "Il deserto rosso" by Antonioni

"Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance."

"I mean simply to say that I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space."

M. Antonioni (29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007)

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Firenze III

Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, building began in the mid-13th century, and was finished about 1360. The most intersting church in terms of artistic masterpieces, especially those by Domenico Ghirlandaio'.

Firenze II

San Gimignano 

Men sitting outdoor in San Gimignano, an amazingly well preserved small medieval hill town in the province of Siena.

 Youth meeting point at Piazza Santo Spirito

Firenze

The plane and the train...

 The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore completed in 1436.

Durante degli Alighieri (Dante).

Outside the Basilica di Santa Croce, source of the Stendhal syndrome: When 19th-century French author Stendhal visited the Basilica, where Machiavelli,  Michelangelo and Galileo are buried, he saw Giotto's ceiling frescoes for the first time and was overcome with emotion. He wrote "I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling." Although there are many descriptions of people becoming dizzy and fainting while taking in Florentine art, especially at the Uffizi, dating from the early 19th century on, the syndrome was only named in 1979, when it was described by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who observed and described more than 100 similar cases among tourists and visitors in Florence.

Scuola del Cuoio of Santa Croce. Originally a 13th century Franciscan monastery, Scuola del Cuoio of Santa Croce is the largest leather school in Florence and was created after WW II.

Oceanus Fountain l'Isolotto at the Boboli Gardens  (Giardini di Boboli) 

behind the Pitti Palace, the main seat of the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany at 

Florence, laid out for Eleonora di Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I de' Medici. 

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