Tuesday, 7 October 2008

A week in Florence: Day 6 - The Uffizi


Dating from August 1993.

Firenze Citta' d'incanto
Florence, city of enchantment
Primavera Fiorentina agli Uffizi
The Florentine springtime at the Uffizi Palace

The Uffizi Gallery is one of the oldest and most famous art museums in the world. At the time of our visit, it had been only three months since it had been bombed.  A car bomb had exloded in the Via dei Georgofili and damaged parts of the palace, killing five people.It has never been established who the bombers were.  Parts of the museum were, unsurprisingly, closed for repair during our visit.  The bombing was no doubt also responsible for the fact that in mid-August, normally the height of the tourist season, we found Florence busy but not crowded. Apparently nowadays waiting times to visit the Uffizi can be as long as five hours unless a time has been pre-booked.
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4 comments:

  1. Nice. Looks like a road of flowers.

    Cheers,
    Velu

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  2. My niece and her husband recently visited Italy and I enjoyed looking at their pictures. This one looks familiar. Also many of the statue David, or a replica. Did you say David was in Florence? I think you did. Nice pictures.

    A sad aside: they said they had to throw away some very expensive wine at the airport that they had been told they could take with them. They had carefully picked it out for their collection. Apparently the rules are different for intraEuropean plane travel than for international flights such as theirs. I'm guessing the guard at the airport didn't really throw it out. The plane was leaving. PIty. the wine was a major investment for them.

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  3. How sad! To have the world's oldest museum destroyed. It's a lovely building from the outside.

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  4. Thanks Velu!
    Max, yes David is in Florence. He is magnificent :) Joking apart, I would never have expected a sculpture to be quite so breathtaking, to make me stop and stare. No picture can do it justice. I'm so sorry for your niece. I presume they wanted to take it in the cabin with them. As far as I can gather, airlines can all have their own rules.
    ECL, I think it's been completely restored now. While we were there large portions were still closed off. I can remember being less than pleased at still having to pay the full entrance fee, but I suppose they needed all they could get.

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