I decided to have a visit to this news exhibition about Van Gogh: there won’t be his actual paintings, just projections of his paintings. The exhibit is located in an old church of Florence, Santo Stefano Church, near Ponte Vecchio.
It taught me different things about Van Gogh life and, above all, his Japanese side. I already knew he was mad – think everybody know that – but when I read he used to chop off some of his body parts (like his ear) I was completely astonished. And I also read about his use of the color: blu and read for crazy mood, rage and contrast, as here:
The red vineyard, Van GoghVase with red poppies, Van Gogh
then yellow..
yellow for the best mood: so bright as his sunflowers and rooms that became yellow-painted
Sunflowers, Van Gogh
then the violet and purple, which were used to get the standard pale stars (of his popular paintings) more lively and particular. From Van Gogh words, he said that if you look better into each star you will surely notice these shades that make it not so common:
The starry nights, Night Terrace and others, Van Gogh
And then what sounds very new to me: for a period of his life he was influenced by Ukyio-e paintings, that’s why also the projections represented different Japanese aspects: the red and white flag and sun, candid flowers and peach blossoms, portraits about Japanese ordinary persons..and so on. One of the distinctive aspect of these paintings is that very heavy black lines that outline each subject of the drawings. Watch here:
Iris – Van Gogh and his Japanese sideVan Gogh – Ukiyo-e
It was an interesting date with the artist, a mad and tormented soul that seems to have fight with the outside, finding the rest the world in his work of arts.
It’s time to upload some new pictures for you! It’s been a while I haven’t written any article, so busy!
But now I’m ready for maybe one of the best articles, with the best pictures: views from the top of Dome of Florence and the Bell Tower too: Brunelleschi vs Giotto, what a contest!
It was Saturday afternoon, after 2 hours working hard in the gym, why don’t take a tour of the city and enjoy those wonderful and breath-taking moments? Enjoy them!
Dome of Florence – views from the top of the Bell Tower
Brunelleschi’s Dome of Florence and views
Bell Tower, Florence: views from the top
Bell Tower, Florence: views from the top
Bell Tower Florence: from the top-top
What do you think about these views?
Well, if you would enjoy some more pictures from another perspective – from the top of Brunelleschi’s Dome (the Cupola), just follow me! You’ll discover some very exclusive points of views 🙂
Yesterday, Saturday afternoon, what to do during a Saturday afternoon in Florence if you don’t want to spend time shopping somewhere and you have already gone for a walk (2 hours walking!)…?
It was today, 18th February that Florence celebrates the death anniversary of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici.
Thanks to it, there (still?!) is free entry in several museums of the city were, and Santa Maria Novella was one of those.
It has been several time I didn’t enter that door, hence the results are surprizingly amazing!
Look at those pictures to know what I mean, discover the inner side of the first Gothic Church in Florence:
Santa Maria Novella entrance (looking back) – FlorenceSan Thomas of Canterbury, right wall of SMNGiotto Crucifix in the middle of the central aisleSanta Maria Novella – central aisle and altarSanta Maria Novella main altar, Neo-gothic style, rebuilt in 19th CenturyCappella Tornabuoni, magnificent stained-glass windowsfrescoes by Ghirlandaio – final part by Michelangelo Buonarroti
For this last picture it’s worth to say that historical arts tells us that those frescoes were made by Ghirlandaio and its collaborators: one of them was Michelangelo Buonarroti and it is told that he contributed to paint the final part of the fresco…but it also told that Ghirlandaio was so jealous and envied him for his work of arts that decided to dismiss his pupil.
But let’s go on with SMN pictures:
Groin vault in Tornabuoni chapelGiant wooden bookrest of 6th Century (in Tornabuoni Chapel, just behind the main altar)Cloister of Santa Maria NovellaIn Santa Maria Novella’s Cloister
and the the final view:
Santa Maria Novella – front view
I found it very very very interesting, so, even if it doesn’t seem to have an English version, enjoy the virtual tour/map of the Church here, you can have different explanation of what you’re gonna see if you once decide to visit Santa Maria Novella, Florence.
Yes, you have to wait until two or three days before San Valentine’s Day to have the right idea for your lover.
It happens every year, each time you start thinking and watching shop windows, but then you think you want something different, something special that reminds you and you love of that particular feeling.
Anyway, here’s my preparation to San Valentine’s Day… Starting from a tour in Florence, passing by those little vintage shops full of things and old tools and books and posters..
Santo Spirito Street – Florence
going towards those refined and polish shops as the Rinascente, where you can enjoy its facade that is totally dedicated to the new fragrance of Ferragamo ‘Emozione’:
Rinascente Florence Emozioni Ferragamo
arriving to a fantastic idea, an homemade one.. that’s it! Here you are the solution:
San Valentine’s choko-biscuits
I know they will be very appreciated 🙂 above all if thinking about San Valentine Day’s I was sure to have…
…in Naples.
Imagine having lunch at home, because you man loves to prepare lunches for you..and you also have at your disposal a fish market where fish is very cheap and fresh and it has a wonderful taste:
Fish market
and you can add some very good raw fish, enjoy this picture where you can see oysters (top!), razor shells, smooth clams and some others mollusks:
Raw fish: oysters, smooth clams, razor shells
Zoommm in the oyster:
Then, it’s time to enjoy the nice sun outside, so let’s have a walk in one of the man street – Via Toledo, also called via Roma – that goes straight to Piazza Plebiscito. At first, you meet a surprisingly great juke-box (with a poor man inside!) designed by Baci Perugina: you just need to choose your song and it starts… (then I discovered all the songs were part of Tiziano Ferro’s archives because of a particular partnership between him and Perugina brand, they created a limited edition for this loving occasion):
Baci Perugina and Tiziano Ferro for limited edition ‘Autografi d’Amore’
Let’s finish the tour with something more pretty and less popular, in one of the narrows that lead to ‘Quartieri Spagnoli’ of Naples..a green and red Gallery of Love, full of flowers:
Love Gallery – Quartieri Spagnoli Naples 2015
Hope you enjoyed your San Valentine’s Day and mine too! 🙂
Actually, it’s happening even more often to have an alternative Saturday night.
Maybe because now the Saturday night is becoming the Friday night, after a long week spent working..
maybe because things are changing, and you start to understand you don’t always need to go clubbing or dancing to have your Saturday night. Anyway let’s enjoy together this new opening in Florence. I passed several times just in front of it but never stopped there. It looks like a mix of a perfume shop, a saloon, a tea house, a posh Italian bar. And it is.
They said it’s a totally new concept store: they sell perfumes, home fragrances, but also teas, tea cups and coffee pots and all the staff you can have in your kitchen. And you can also enjoy a meal, or a chocolate, infusions and cakes, pies, muffins and go on..
Look at those picture to better understand what I’m trying to say, read what it’s written on the first one, then go on..
Living style. Rooms become the perfect stages for a creative contemporary collection. Taking a new eye to the home.Teatro dell’Ozio shop – handmade bags
The first lines of the picture show the concept of what you can see in the surrounding area of your seat (a comfortable sofa or white comfortable chairs made of wood). Then enjoy the ambient: a mix of ancient arches, romanic tiles, black libraries and branches that seem to be the dark touch of this place:
Teatro dell’Ozio – Florence
And then, it follows the bathroom area (?!) – well I’m joking, this is the privè:
Teatro dell’Ozio – Florence
Here it follows the shopping area:
Teatro dell’Ozio – Florence
We finally went for a set of infusions and a chocolate muffin with pistachios cream:
Infusions in Teatro dell’Ozio
..really hard to remember their ingredients, but their taste and flavor were very palatable and helped feeling relaxed for this alternative Saturday night.
I’m not very passionate about vintage, in the sense that I don’t like to wear vintage clothes and dresses from the past, look like old women even if you are just a twenty-years old girl. Anyway, it took place a very weird vintage fairy during last weekend in Florence. People say it’s the very end of Pitti weeks – even if I don’t really agree with this. ‘Pitti people’ really look like different from the ones I saw there, in Stazione Leopolda.
It was very enjoyable, because of people, music, clothes, accessories and atmosphere all around: not only vintage clothes, but also self-made clothing, tissues, old baggages and glasses and go on…
Vintage clothesVintage bags – not so expensive bagsVintage collections! flowers, postcard, old memories
And now the best snapshots, old clothes that look like curtains, people that look like some old movies’ characters (very impressive) and some view forms of the place from different perspectives:
Vintage accessories – view from a mirrorOld curtains (?!)impressive peopleVintage CollectionVintage Collection
don’t miss the next Vintage Selection event, let’s see in 2016!
It was Sunday afternoon, after a long long Saturday night..
Just woke up late – obviously 🙂
Going out for shopping? Buy some new shoes? Just have a walk around?
Stop thinking, it’s time for a chocolate, very hot chocolate to keep this Sunday alive,
in a total relaxing place and enjoy the mood it could give you.
The answer was ‘Hemingway’. That little chocolate place in Piazza del Carmine, Florence. Once I saw it, but I didn’t stop there. But on last Sunday it was the perfect idea.
Well, now the ‘piazza’ should be also better than before, because the parking has been removed and it’s completely a pedestrian area, wonderful.
And wonderful is the smell you can eat just entering the place. Hemingway, why Hemingway? Was he passionated about chocolate, a chocolate-addicted? Wrote he about chocolate? I really don’t know.
And then the menu, where you can read about it.
Just a little research to discover this little emotional instant in Hemingway life: …On the night of July 8, 1918, Hemingway was struck by an Austrian mortar shell while handing out chocolate to Italian soldiers in a dugout. The blow knocked him unconscious and buried him in the earth of the dugout; fragments of shell entered his right foot and his knee and struck his thighs, scalp and hand. Two Italian soldiers standing between Hemingway and the shell’s point of impact were not so lucky, however: one was killed instantly and another had both his legs blown off and died soon afterwards. Hemingway’s friend Ted Brumbach, who visited him in the hospital, wrote to Hemingway’s parents that: A third Italian was badly wounded and this one Ernest, after he had regained consciousness, picked up on his back and carried to the first aid dugout. He says he did not remember how he got there, nor that he carried the man, until the next day, when an Italian officer told him all about it and said that it had been voted to give him a valor medal for the act. As Brumbach reported, Hemingway was awarded an Italian medal of valor, the Croce de Guerra, for his service. As he wrote in his own letter home after the incident: Everything is fine and I am very comfortable and one of the best surgeons in Milan is looking after my wounds.
Hemingway’s experiences in Italy during World War I would become an integral part of his larger-than-life persona, as well as the material for one of his best-loved novels, A Farewell to Arms, which chronicles the love of a young American ambulance driver for a beautiful English nurse on the Italian front during the Great War.
Here’s the explanation.
And now enjoy the dark side of this post, from the very Belgian dark chocolate 99% (really hard to finish it!), to the less one 72%:
Belgian dark chocolate, 99%Belgian dark chocolate 72% in the back (sorry I missed this picture!)
oh, whipped cream really helped to enjoy them better 🙂
And chocolate at your disposal is in every shape and color and taste and flavor: bonbons, pralines, chocolate spoons, gianduia, macarons (or macarals?), chocolate with liqueur or grappa…
chocolate in every shape
and let’s finish with a view of the place:
Hemingway chocolate bar, Florence
If you have some Sunday afternoons to spend in a relaxing place and mood, just try this chocolate bar and its wonderful chocolate, maybe avoid the 99%! or be sure to have also 2, 3 bottles of water with you – mouth dried up – .
Just going to Via Guelfa, in a very comfortable and welcoming restaurant:
Indian restaurant – Royal India
It’s the first time for an Indian taste here, so maybe it’s better to have the fixed-price menu and enjoy several dishes, spicy creams, tikka chicken, vegetables, flavored rice and, obviously, tandoori chicken. Typical products to remember: Pappadam and Puri, two kind of flat bread.
In the meantime, let’s see the place: all those colors drew my attention, green, purple, red, yellow, like the original pigments.
colors of IndiaIndian colorsIndian drapes and curtains
Then, here you are some particular staff shown on the shelf, like these turbans:
Indian turbans
Actually, the traditional names for Indian turbans are ‘Safa‘ or ‘Pagri‘, depending on the kind of tissue they are made of. And generally, the colors depend on the kind of celebration you’re going to have: weddings, birthday or obviously, pale colors as brown and blue for unhappy ceremonies.
Well, let’s finish with the traditional Indian black tea named ‘masala chai‘ and typical desserts (almost based on sugar and coconut) and colorful sweets you’re served at the end of the dinner, in order to help you to digest:
Indian black teaIndian dessertIndian digestive sweets
Yes here we are, the second part of out tour in the countryside of Tuscany (near Arezzo) going until the upper side of Umbria. Enjoy for example, this little fiorentina, fresh meat from poor Tuscan-rooted beef:
Fiorentina DOP from Tuscany
Then, it comes the best hamburger you can find in this area: Crispi’s Chianina hamburger. It looks like a classical McDonald’s one, but it isn’t, I swear it.
Chianina hamburger in Arezzo
let me also add this picture, it’s the one I prefer. It’s named ‘Lo sfondo’ that is to say you will have that sense of happiness while eating it and stomachache just after it 🙂
Chianina burger: ‘Lo Sfondo’
And now let’s stop thinking about food, and have a look to some souvenirs you can get while going all around: magnets representing those landscapes and fields you can find on your road, sign about famous films run in those areas (as the one shown in the picture below: New Moon, Twilight), postcards about cantinas (the place where wine is produced) and historical monuments…
Tuscan souvenirs: postcards, magnets, posters
and then the most particular picture: a poster about the different kind of glasses, with different shapes and glass: generally they are linked to a particular kind of wine. Wine experts always say that there’s a only kind of glass for a specific wine, have a look here:
poster about wine and glasses: the kind of glass you use is related to the kind of wine you’re going to drink
Finally, let’s have a good Italian coffee, together with some special chocolate becoming exactly from their best production known all over the world: baci perugina frim Perugia
Italian Coffee in Montepulciano (La Briciola restaurant)chocolate from Perugia (‘baci perugina’ are the most popular in the world)
