Tuscany
17 October 2024
We had a wonderful holiday in Tuscany last week, visiting Florence, San Gimignano, Volterra, Siena and Lucca. In Florence we visited the Uffizi Gallery and the Bargello Museum, immersing ourselves in works from Giotto to the Renaissance giants Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. Bizarrely, by contrast, in Volterra we came across an excellent exhibition of works by Banksy ('Realismo Capitalista'), at the Centro Studi Espositivo, which was really interesting. We loved the Tuscan hill towns of San Gimignano and Volterra - imposing small walled cities, with high buildings lining both sides of the paved pedestrianised roads within the city walls. San Gimignano is known as the Medieval Manhattan for its amazing skyline of high towers. The main square in Siena - Piazza del Campo - is a stunning sight: the setting for the annual Palio di Siena horse race is a huge, sloping expanse of paved tiles in diagonal slices fanning out from the Palazzo Publicco (city hall) towards a crescent of high balconied buildings. And in Lucca we walked right around the city walls - really a large fortified grassy mound rather than a wall, with a broad tarmac road along the top, encased by pretty avenues of plane trees. It was a lovely sunny autumnal day with the leaves drifting down onto the walls and lots of people walking or cycling around the perimeter of the old town.
Labels: Exhibitions, Holidays
posted by Robin Simpson @ 9:16 am
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