Look! The Medicis had me painted right into the wall of their palace! Bet you can’t figure out how I took this photo (yes, I took it). They did have themselves painted into all the fabulous frescoes, but I guess I didn’t pillage and plunder enough villages to qualify for the honor.
Today’s walk took me to a high tech museum and a low tech museum. One was a Medici Palace, the other was the Museum of the History of Science. Can you guess which was which? The high tech one was…the palace. In a room off the courtyard, which used to be Lorenzo the Magnificent’s bedroom, there was a multimedia lab where you stand on a lighted square and point at a spot on a huge screen in front of you showing the wrap-around fresco from the Chapel of the Magi. The spot where you point then zooms in to give a detailed explanation (in English) of what is going on in that section of the fresco. You go upstairs to see the real thing, and then you actually understand what it is showing.
The low-tech museum had an amazing collection of renaissance mathematical and scientific instruments, ranging from perpetual motion clocks to sextants, electrostatic and electromagnetic machines, surgical and obstetrical devices (ouch!) and Galileo’s instruments, including his embalmed middle finger (not sure how that one was used, presumably to tell the established scientists what he thought of them). But to my great dismay, none of the instruments were explained in any language – what they were for or how they worked. So it was just an enormous variety of weird-looking contraptions that I had neither the energy nor the scientific ingenuity to decipher. (Photos added to the most recent album.) At least the exhibit devoted to sundials had some descriptions, and I discovered that there are not only sundials all over Florence dating to the 14th century, but a number of the churches have celestial “camera obscuras” that light up specific masterpieces at noon on the summer solstice (so Dan Brown was not just making that all up in The da Vinci Code!).
Because every silver lining has to have its cloud, along with the lovely spring weather (we’re in short sleeves) a plethora of those nasty mosquitoes have descended upon us. Even after closing the windows at night and slathering those horrible chemicals all over me, I got 8 bites on my forearms alone in a single night. But I’m lucky – Allen is allergic to mosquito bites, and has itchy welts all over his face and neck. We’re trying all the local antidotes, ranging from garlic paste on the bites (that ought to be a big hit in a closed elevator) to a plug-in device that … I don’t know how it’s supposed to work. Looks like one of those ridiculous air-fresheners. We bought it and we’ll have to see.
