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The Florentine
Art and culture from Florence, Italy, focusing on exhibitions, museums, artisans and more.
The Venice Bienniale, which opens the first week of June, is modern visual art's most famous and, arguably, its grandest international festival. It attracts the cream of the global art world, with high-rolling collectors mooring glamorous yachts in view of piazza San Marco. The Biennale is also
My mom and I are great friends, but we don’t agree on anything when it comes to sharing private information online. When we attended the exhibit Virtual Identities at ...
This time of year, we start thinking about bikini waxes and getting into perfect shape for those lazy, hazy days on the beach. To help us, every day there seems to be a new diet fad to try that frequently turns out to be a nutritional nightmare. Yet there have
Villa Romana, the Florence home of the Alliance of German Artists on Via Senese, has been transformed for a unique art installation, currently running there. A bourgeois family has moved in and trouble is afoot. No one, not even the maid, emerges unchanged when a mysterious young man in white
Among all the giants and geniuses of art in the history of Tuscany, only one has two major museums in the region, one in Florence and the other in Pistoia, dedicated to his works: Marino Marini. Born in 1901 in Pistoia along with his twin sister, Egle, who throughout
After waiting 10 years for it to be completed, Florentines were very unimpressed when, in 1575, they first saw the statue of Neptune towering over his fountain in piazza della Signoria right in front of Palazzo Vecchio. Disappointed because he seemed so static and inexpressive, they disparagingly called him Il
On December 10, 1942, a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan replaced the annual Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm, which had been suspended in 1939 because of World War II. Eleven of the 28 laureates then living in the United States attended. Most of them had fled
April 25 marked the 66th anniversary of Italian liberation from fascism. This year, the national holiday fell on pasquetta, the day after Easter, marking rebirths both religious and national. On ...
John Blake MacDonald's 1880 painting Lochaber No More depicts the mournful moment on September 20, 1746, when Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender to the English throne, commonly known as ?Bonny Prince Charlie,' left Loch Nam Uamh in his beloved Scotland forever. After his rout at the battle
Following a lengthy restoration, one of Florence's greatest masterworks can now be seen up close. Closed for five years, Agnolo Gaddi's most illustrious fresco, Legend of the True Cross, which decorates Santa Croce's Cappella Maggiore is now open, and visitors are invited to climb up scaffolding to
In London last spring, over 120,000 visitors crowded into a temporary exhibition at the British Museum to look at small works on paper from the Italian Quattrocento. The exhibit, Drawings from Fra' Angelico to Leonardo, was described as a ‘once in a lifetime' exhibition by the media and
Lady Justice stands proudly in the middle of piazza Santa Trinita, on top of the tallest ancient Roman column in Florence. The 11.17 meter high oriental granite column weighing about 50 tons originally came from the natatio, the monumental swimming pool of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome.
The ‘angry young men' on exhibit at Palazzo Strozzi might just have easily been called the ‘troubled young men,' for each had his share of eccentricities and issues. Mirò often resorted to anorexia for inspiration. He would lie in bed for days, without eating, sketching the shapes
Have you ever met someone famous when he or she was still young and unknown? That's how I felt coming out of Palazzo Strozzi's latest exhibit, Picasso, Miró, Dalí. Angry Young Men: the Birth of Modernity. With a cinematographic yet scholarly approach, curators Christoph Vitali and
For a time, Italy's greatest actress of the Belle Époque, Eleonora Duse, lived in a villa in Settignano.
In TF 137, we discovered medieval street names related to the textile trade. Now let's look at some even older streets. If anyone ever tries to sell you a ‘light-filled apartment' on via delle Burella you can tell him that it is an oxymoron. For the
Distant relatives, the two men stand today, cast in bronze, looking at each other across one of Florence's most patriotic piazzas. Renamed Piazza dell'Indipendenza after it became the site of the bloodless uprising in April 1859 that led to the banishment of Grand Duke Leopold II from Tuscany,
The process of Italian unification was the result of nearly 60 years of events, daring action and revolutionary ideas. Here is a timeline of the key moments leading to and ...
When I began my life in Florence as a student, many years ago, I was baffled by what seemed to me to be unpronounceable and illogical street names. Via Calzaioli just would not roll off my tongue, nor could I remember the word until some months later, when I needed
On July 10, 1973, John Paul Getty III, the grandson of John Paul Getty, the owner of the Los Angeles-based Getty Oil Company and founder of the California museum that ...
‘Street art, or guerilla art, needs to be reinvented in dialogue with the Renaissance city,’ says Clet Abraham, the French-born artist who has come into the public eye for his ...
Watching dancers on television as a small boy in his hometown of Casale Monferrato in Piedmont, where he was born on March 26, 1975, Bolle decided that dance would be his future. At age 11, he won a place at the prestigious La Scala Theatre Ballet School and went to
On November 4, 1966, as the flood waters lapped about the base of his statue, almost reaching his slippered toes, the poet, writer and politician Dante Alighieri, considered the father of the Italian language, looked gloomily down from its pedestal in the middle of Piazza Santa Croce, where he then
