The View from a Drawbridge

This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.

Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!

The city of Florence, Italy is known as the cradle of the Renaissance. That makes perfect sense as it was one of the wealthiest cities in medieval Europe thanks to the Medici, and it was a center for trade and finance. Where there is money, there is artistic opportunity. The amount of art produced and collected in this city, and the sheer number of creative minds that were drawn to it, beggars the imagination. In fact, in my blog post entitled Weird Travel Syndromes, I discuss one that only happens in Florence, and it’s described as “being so overcome by the art of Florence that one experiences ecstasy, dizziness, and disorientation.”

Dear Husband and I are a bit too pragmatic to come down with such a syndrome, but it’s safe to say that we were quite impressed by all the sites we visited in Firenze. I wish we had more time there, because there were some things we were forced to omit from our itinerary. But I’m glad we made time for the Uffizi Gallery, because it is one of the most important galleries in all of Italy. In 2024, it got nearly 3 million visitors. (For context, the next most visited Italian gallery, the Academia, also in Florence, only got 2 million visitors that same year, and it houses Michelangelo’s David, which I’ll also be blogging about at some point.)

With that number of visitors, you’d be a fool not to make advanced reservations online. Ours were the earliest morning reservations possible, because we had a lot to see and do that day, and we’d only be able to devote about 3 hours to the Uffizi. (Everyone has their own gallery pace, but this was actually the perfect amount of time there for me. I could linger at the masterpieces that impressed me the most, skip over the works that didn’t, and take in the rest at an ambling, yet steadily moving, pace. (Wear comfortable shoes. You’ll regret it if you don’t.)

Uffizi (pronounced uu-FEET-see), in Italian, means offices. When this building was built, that was its original use. Cosimo I de’ Medici commissioned it in 1560 in order to gather all his committees, agencies and guilds under one roof, along with his administrative offices and the state archive. The exterior still gives off a bit of an intimidating, official air. The job was completed in 1581, and the top floor was made into a gallery for the Medici and their guests. The first works on display included their collection of Roman sculptures. Over time, the gallery has been expanded and renovated into the architectural and artistic marvel one sees today.

The entrance to the Uffizi is through the looooooong central courtyard, which is lined with sculptures of notable historic figures who called Florence home, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Amerigo Vespucci, and Galileo. (Some of our photos were taken the night before, as you can wander through the courtyard at any time.) Those sculptures were fun to see, but frankly, I got even more pleasure from getting the stink eye from the hundreds of people who had not made reservations whom we got to breeze right past. People have been known to wait in line for 5 hours to get into the Uffizi. We had better things to do with our time.

After that, it’s simply a matter of getting through the metal detectors, which are there for good reason. In 1993, the Sicilian Mafia set off a car bomb outside that destroyed some art and frescoes and killed 5 people. In 2022, the climate activist group Ulitma Generazione glued themselves to the glass of Botticelli’s Primavera, and in 2024 (probably after having figured out that removing glass that you’ve glued to your skin is a painstaking process, because avoiding damage to both the artwork and your skin is difficult and time consuming, and while that’s going on, you’re a captive audience to ongoing ridicule, and most likely permanent scarring to your idealistic, yet shortsighted body), they glued images of flooding in Tuscany to the glass of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. (I’m all for Global Climate Change awareness, but if this were my only visit to the Uffizi, and someone blocked my view of the Venus, I’d have been more than a little pissed.)

Anyway, after the metal detectors, your first reaction will be that of disappointment, because you will be ushered through a lot of empty rooms, and you’ll be thinking, “Um… this is it?”. And then you climb stairs. Lots, and lots and lots of stairs. 126 in total. I had to stop several times to catch my breath. But the gallery starts on the upper floor, after all, and then continues down to the 2^nd (which in Europe they call the 1^st) if the spirit moves you, then on to the exit. And the place is huge. But fear not. All of that will be worth it.

Now, unless you are an art history major or have an affinity for Italian Renaissance Art, I encourage you to download the Rick Steves Audio Europe App on your phone and listen to it as you go through the galleries, because not only does he hit all the highlights, but he really provides some insight that allowed us to view these works with a much greater sense of appreciation.

The app is free, and it includes tours of all the major sites in Europe. His Uffizi tour is 61 minutes long. It discusses, among many other things, how the art evolved from very flat looking two-dimensional works toward ever more perspective, and how they learned to fully employ depth of field. A fascinating example of this was the gallery’s display of dozens of Madonna and child images. The Madonna never smiles in any of them, but baby Jesus looks remarkably different in each one. The backgrounds started off plain, and they became more detailed and realistic over time. It was like watching artistic technique develop over centuries in fast forward mode.

For those of you who don’t have the good fortune of ever visiting Florence, I strongly urge you to visit the Uffizi Gallery website, because it’s one of the most impressive ones I’ve seen of its kind. You can see images of almost everything that they keep on permanent display, as well as view a detailed map, read about the gallery’s history, and learn more about the architecture, sculpture, and art.

As with most art galleries, the Uffizi is best described with imagery, so let me show you my very favorite room: The Tribune. This Octagonal, domed room with the marble floors and the blood red walls displays art to perfection. I would be content living in this room. Whether the architect knew it or not, he had an affinity for feng shui. Just peering into the room gave me a sense of peace and quiet despite the crowds swirling around me.

We got to see so many impressive works of art. The most recognizable  for me were The Birth of Venus by Botticelli c. 1485, and The Calumny of Apelles by Botticelli c. 1495.

But we also saw works by a variety of artists including (but by no means limited to) Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Caravaggio, and Donatello. (And believe me, every Mutant Ninja Turtle joke you are tempted to put in the comments below has already occurred to me.)

And the corridors, my God, the Corridors!

Not only were the ceilings gorgeously painted, no two panels alike…

…but the corridors were lined with exquisite sculptures such as these:

I particularly liked meeting some of the ancient Romans I had been reading about in preparation for this trip. I greeted all of them like old frenemies. “Hello, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Drusus, Young Nero, and Commodus, I’ve heard so much about you!”

I never felt so privileged by a visit to a gallery as I did by the Uffizi. It was an honor to be in the same room with some of these masterpieces. It may not have risen to the level of “ecstasy, dizziness, and disorientation”, but it was some good sh*t, indeed.