#DanielScanlon

[honorsphilosophyitalytrip-blog]

January 23, 2018

Ciao, its your boy Dan.

​Today was a tough day waking up seeing as the gang took on karaoke at a local college bar last night, coupled with the painful realization that it would be our last day in the beautiful city of Florence. Given the option to spend the morning as we wished, Steve and yours truly decided to finally head out to see the Duomo, the massive Catholic cathedral located in the center of Florence less than a five-minute walk from the hotel. The tickets for the Duomo included access to the museum, dome, cathedral, baptistery, bell tower, and the crypt.

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Naive as we were, we allotted half an hour to see the museum before heading to climb up the Duomo. As it turned out, we had vastly underestimated the size and beauty of this museum tucked away next to the Duomo, the museum consists of three floors, 25 rooms, and over 750 works of art taken from the Duomo displayed either inside or outside of the cathedral. The works represented hundreds of years of history from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

​The museum was swarming with beautiful artifacts from the Cathedral including many sculptures by famous artists like Donatello, alters, ornate candles, paintings, scrolls, replicas of the museum, and recreations of the materials used in building the cathedral. Perhaps the most astonishing pieces were the baptistery doors which Michelangelo christened as “Il Paradiso Florentino”. The name is a play on words seeing as the small area between a cathedral and its nearby baptistery is called the Paradiso, and Michelangelo loved the doors, exclaiming that they are worthy to stand at the gates of paradise.

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After seeing the museum, we ventured into the Duomo, marching up the stairs to behold the cathedral floor from a bird’s eye view and see close up the magnificent ceiling depicting the final judgement. It was enlightening to see the fresco on the Duomo ceiling so close.

​Next, we ventured outside to the top of the Duomo to glimpse the most spectacular view of the city of Florence we could have imagined. Walking around the Duomo, we were granted a 360-degree view of the city of Florence, a fitting cap to a week in the city.

​After touring the Duomo, Florence’s most iconic cathedral, we went on with our tour guide Isabela to see the Uffizi, the most famous museum in Italy (because technically the Vatican is not in Italy). Situated in the piazza outside of the museum were many famous sculptures including The Rape of Sabine (which we had already seen the plaster of in the Academy) and Perseus and Medusa, both of which were spectacles to see.

​The Uffizi museum is essentially a gift from the famous powerhouse Medici family which wielded immense power over Florence for years and were avid art collectors responsible for launching the careers of artists like Michelangelo. The story goes that the last surviving member of the Medici family, Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, seeing that she would be forced to leave all the Medici family heirlooms and artwork to the Austria Habsburgs, drew up a testament proclaiming that all the Medici art belong to the city of Florence, preventing it from being shipped away to Austria.

​In the Uffizi, the artwork ranges from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and this progression in time is very easy to see in the works presented in the museum. Artwork in the Middle Ages was far more two dimensional and not very aesthetically pleasing, seeing as the manifest focus of the artists was to educate the populace about the importance of the biblical figures in their lives. The figures were purposefully made to look inhuman and different from the real people viewing the art because the message was that Jesus and Mary are not like normal people, the viewers were not meant to see themselves in the artwork.

Over time, however, the artworks became more and more realistic, factoring in depth through shadows and portraying the subjects in a more realistic way. A major artist during this transitional period was Giotto, an Italian painter that brought some depth and realism to the paintings of his time and breathed life into his subjects to some degree. Later artists would go on to abandon the common practice of using gold as the background of religious paintings, a technique meant to portray that the setting for the scenes depicted is the golden kingdom of heaven.

Eventually, the Renaissance would bring rebirth to Italian art with the revival of the realistic Ancient Roman artworks and the celebration of the realistic beauty of the individual and the universe. The museum was scattered with beautiful sculptures from this time and paintings by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The risk these painters took in the art to push the envelope of what was accepted at the time is astonishing. Michelangelo insisted on including many nudes in his work to celebrate the human form and da Vinci attempted to capture life more truly, making angels wings more realistic as opposed to the convention of making the wings other worldly. The church would even go on to paint over da Vinci’s wings reminiscent of how the Sistine Chapel was painted over to censor the nudes Michelangelo painted.

The museum’s most famous attractions, however, are the Birth of Venus and Primavera both by Sandro Botticelli. The Birth of Venus depicts the Roman myth of Venus, the god of love and beauty, emerging fully formed from a seashell and being given clothes to wear. Primavera shows a collection of Roman gods together in the woods celebrating the onset of Spring. The god of wind blows March winds, while Venus and cupid cause Mercury to fall in love with a nymph and turn her into the goddess of Spring. The consistency of the facial features of Venus in these two Botticelli paintings is due to the fact that Venus is represented by Botticelli’s muse.

After a long day of art, most of the group headed out to Rubaconte to enjoy some unlimited pasta and wine, and some absurd portions of bread, bruschetta, and prosciutto. Stuffed with an excessive amount of bread, pasta, wine, and memories, the group readied to head off to Verona, eager to face the next part of their journey through Italy.

[honorsphilosophyitalytrip-blog]

January 13, 2018

After an early morning wakeup and some sonny side up eggs, we headed out to the train station, weaving through the many lemon trees littered along the Sorrento streets. A hop, skip, and a one hour train away was the city of Naples, the unlikely resting place of all the artifacts discovered during the Pompeii excavation in the eighteenth century.

Founded by the Bourbon King Charles VII of Naples (who would later go on to become King Charles III of Spain), the National Archeological Museum of Naples was the world’s first public museum, created in an attempt to assert Naples as the cultural epicenter of the world. The King (and later his son Ferdinand after taking the throne) intended the museum to attract travelers far and wide to admire the Greek, Ancient Roman, and Renaissance sculptures, paintings, and mosaics as well as the ruins from Pompeii and other nearby towns buried by the Vesuvius eruption.

Honoring King Charles’ vision, 14 Delawareans and their enthusiastic Neapolitan tour guide Sabina came to the museum to gawk at the ancient art, and busily speed-walk from exhibit to exhibit in an attempt to capture everything the collections offered. Due to the nature of the volcanic eruption that froze Pompeii in time at the height of its glory, preserved in volcanic ash and rock, the works at the museum were excellently maintained, uncharacteristic of other artwork from that era. It was astonishing to see the Roman mosaics and paintings that are near contemporaries of Christ, immortalizing Roman history and art at the zenith of its grandeur.

Because the Romans in 79AD had not yet established Christianity as the state religion (as they would do in the 4th century under Constantine), the art works revolved around Roman pagan beliefs and paid homage to the many Roman gods. Naturally, many of the students took it upon themselves again to update the ancient artwork by reenacting it with more modern subjects, posing alongside the classical sculptures.

Equally astonishing were the exhibits containing household items frozen in time in Pompeii and other cities along with the art. Ancient silverware, locks and keys, and even surprisingly familiar surgical tools found in these cities in 79AD were on display.

The Bourbon family’s private collection of Roman artwork from a restoration in Rome was also on display at the museum. Many of the Roman god sculptures there were admired, and then mimicked by the students.

Another great attraction in Naples students ventured to after exploring the museum as much as possible was Il Castel dell’Ovo a castle built on an island with a connecting land bridge in the first century BC, fortified in the mid fifth century AD. The beautiful castle offered a scenic viewpoint of the Mediterranean as well as some artworks scattered around inside. The rocks along the land bridge to the castle also provided a fantastic view of the sun setting on the Italian coast.

The real triumph of the day however, was when five brave souls ventured out into the streets of Naples to solve a mystery that has befuddle mankind for ages; a quest to discover the world’s best pizza, rumored to be located in the very city of Naples. Legends had told of two great pizzerias, Dal Presidente and L’antica Pizzeria de Michele, whose ovens churned out pizzas that made men cry. Upon entry into the rustic looking, almost castle-like Dal Presidente restaurant at lunch time, the boys knew they had stumbled upon greatness.

Dal Presidente offered a diverse collection of pizzas topped with various meats and vegetables like prosciutto or sausage and peppers, but the boys ordered simple bufalo mozzarella pizzas. The pizzerias were to be judged on the content of their more basic pizzas to keep it fair. The first bites of the Dal Presdiente pizzas muffled the boys’ voices and lightened their souls. It was the unanimous decision of those gathered at that table that it was undisputedly the best pizza any of them have ever encountered in their travels. The sauce, mozzarella, and bread all instruments in a magnificent orchestral masterpiece of a pizza. The bread was soft and chewy, the mozzarella melted, and the tomato sauce ran over the boys’ fingers. Somehow, they all felt closer to God in that moment.

It was impossible to imagine that the next pizzeria could compete with the miracles performed at Dal Presidente that day. Venturing inside L’antica Pizzeria de Michele, it was a different scenery inside, the building was modeled to look as if it were coated in marble and the restaurant itself was much smaller than the caste-like Dal Presidente. Surprised that they were given no menu, the boys inquired the server how they may order. The restaurant in fact only offered a limited selection of pizzas, but what the cooks did make, they were masters in their craft. They offered a margherita pizza, double cheese, and pizza marinera. The pizzas overflowed over the plates, the chewy, lightly blackened crust from the wood fire grill, dripping tomato sauce overwhelming our senses as we dug in. My final analysis, the pizza at Dal Presidente had the slight edge because it has less grease and was a neater, crisper pizza.

Ciao!

Dan