21.6.13

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 

Florencelaid out for Eleonora di Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I de' Medici





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