Our House in the Mountains Blair Pessemier Acrylic/linen 12 x 20" 30 x 50cm
Monte Cimone Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/linen 8 x 10" 20 x 25 cm
Ponte Vecchio Laurie ox Pessemier Acrylic/wood 16 x 24" 40 x 60cm
Artnotes: If this is Friday, it must be Florence
It was a week of catching up, and getting done those things
we’d been meaning to do for ever so long.
We each got library cards; we introduced ourselves and our artwork to
the local furnishings store; bought wood to paint on at a nearby lumberyard. It
sounds like nothing, but as we learn Italian, each task is a major hurdle.
A friend came to dinner Thursday night and brought the BEST
dessert I ever had, from the AC bakery in Bologna. It was a cake, made like a Napoleon, layers
of light, crunchy pastry, chocolate and cream, with the finest sheets of
chocolate on top. We are very lucky to
have made friends here, especially ones who like to eat.
Our real “long meant to do” foray this week was a visit to
Firenze, aka Florence. It is a mere 2
hours from our house, and I have been thinking of the Ponte Vecchio for
weeks. In fact, I am thinking of doing a
one-day-a-week painting workshop there. “If
this is Friday, I’m painting in Florence”.
I love Florence images, and maybe some people visiting the city of art
will want to make their own?
We walked around – neither of us had been there for more
than 35 years. We were overwhelmed with
just how wonderful it was – we’d both thought so years ago (Blair with Notre
Dame’s Architecture program, me with Tom Brown), but it’s reassuring when you
realize you were right. When I visited Florence after college, I saved
up from my summer job on Cape Cod. I
made 90 dollars a week, saved 50 from every paycheck, and somehow managed to
buy an airplane ticket and travel around for three weeks (Europe on $5 a day). Those days are gone forever, despite what the
presidential candidates might promise.
Of course, there were many more tourists, this time mostly
Asian. I longed to see the Giotto
frescoes in the Baptistry, but the 15 euro entry fee was daunting. We settled for/reveled in standing beneath
Brunelleschi’s dome in the cathedral. David
(the copy) stood outside the Palazzo Vecchio, and my heart did a little
skip. We went to the Boboli gardens, the
target of my first trip, and wished we had days to walk through them. There was a sense that Florence was a place
only for the rich to visit – but we managed to soak up a lot and not spend a
fortune in our 4 hour stay. I don’t know
if we looked “down at the heel”, but two French girls shared their wine with us
at the restaurant, on the banks of the Arno (I can hear them now “weren’t those cute little old people?”)
I am hoping to go back to Florence, now that we know how
easy that is, and revisit the Laurentian library. I had never actually gone into the Uffizi and
the portrait of Federico da Montefeltro
and Bottticelli’s Venus are beckoning.
The Ponte Vecchio, was as beautiful as I hoped. And who knows, if it’s Friday and you’re in
Florence, maybe we’ll paint together?
