History, History, Everywhere…
From a history buff perspective, Florence was sometimes frustrating. I didn't know enough and Florence wasn't set up to fill in the gaps.
The physical remnants of Florentine history are everywhere, but historical explanations are a bit thin on the ground. Renaissance palaces, forts, and churches are open as museums, but the emphasis is on the art rather than the historical role of the building. Some like the Bargello, offer a few excellent panels that explain what the building was originally used for and its transformation over time. Others, like the Forte di Belvedere, don't even have a plaque telling you when it was built.*
Here are a few highlights, mysteries, and miscellaneous tidbits:
1. If you only have time to visit one museum, I suggest you skip the Uffizi and go to San Marco.--formerly the Dominican monastery that housed Savonarola, now a museum devoted to the work of Fra Angelico. This small museum blew us away. Seeing Fra Angelico's Annunciation in real life was amazing. Seeing it in context was instructive. This is one museum where the English language tour was definitely worth taking. It was given by a curator who was impassioned, opinionated, and knowledgable. We came away knowing more about the Dominican order, the iconography of the paintings, and Fra Angelico's role in the Renaissance than we could have imagined. The short version: the extraordinary frescos in San Marco had no real impact on the development of the Renaissance because they were not seen by the public until centuries later. They were created for the use of a cloistered order for purposes of contemplation. This turned my sense of art history on its head.
2. A old German Lutheran church on the waterfront, currently used as a small performance space. There's a story there. I'm sure of it.
3. One of the most useful bits of historical data that we found wasn't an official display at all but part of a construction site: a series of boards on the construction hoardings with the arms of the medieval guilds and a description of what each guild did. Fascinating.
4. The Hall of Geographical Maps in the Palazzo Vecchio was probably my favorite Renaissance room in Florence. Never completed, it was commissioned by Cosimo di Medici to represent the entire known world in a single room. Map nerd heaven. If time had allowed I could have spent hours in this room.
5. <This: 
--seen in the Piazza Signoria. Since I previously had seen an historical monument held up by turtles on its corners,** I assumed there was some connection. between turtles and Florence. Like wolves and Rome. This was incorrect. The Florentine spirit animal is the lion. *** The turtle statue turned out to be part of a series of works by Belgian artist Jan Fabre called "Spiritual Guards." The work was intended as "a self-portrait of the artist "in his dual capacity as knight and guardian, as a mediator between heaven and earth, between natural and spiritual forces." To me it looked like Elvis on a giant turtle.
After we got home, I discovered an excellent website that would have helped a great deal. Timeline Florence is one man's effort to make sense of 2000 years of Florentine history. Complete with pictures and links.
*Finding something--anything--that would tell us about the history of the fort became something of a quest. At which we failed.
**Shades of Terry Prachett!
***Given the realities of male lions and turtles in the natural world, a turtle would actually be a more powerful image, in my opinion.
Jawaharlal Nehru: Architect of Independent India
In March, 1919, India's Imperial Legislative Council passed the repressive legislation known as the Rowlatt Acts. The new laws continued the special wartime powers of the Defense of India Act, which had been intended to protect India against wartime agitators, and aimed them at India's nationalist movement.
At the time the Rowlatt Acts were put in place, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) was a prime example of the "brown Englishmen" that Thomas Babington Macauley had described as the goal of Western education in India. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he practised law with his father, the prominent barrister and nationalist leader Motilal Nehru, and enjoyed a lifestyle that was luxurious by both Indian and European standards. At his father's urging, Nehru had joined the Indian National Congress on his return from England in 1918 but at first his involvement in the nationalist movement was at best perfunctory.
That changed when Mohandas Gandhi called on Indians to "refuse civilly to obey" the newly passed Rowlatt Acts. In the Sikh city of Amritsar, Gandhi's call for a national day of work stoppage escalated into a spiral of arrest, protests and violence that ended in the massacre of thousands of Indians who had gather for a religious observance in a public park called Jallianwalah Bagh.
When Nehru overheard General R. H Dyer boasting about his role in the massacre,e he was outraged. He flung himself into the independence movement, touring rural India, organizing volunteers and making public speeches. It was then, he wrote in his autobiography, that "I experienced the thrill of mass feeling, the power of influencing the masses."
The British imprisoned Nehru for his nationalist activities for the first time in 1921. Arrested nine times, he spent 18 of the next 25 years in jail for his participation in Gandhi's non-violent non-cooperation (satyagraha) campaigns. He used his time in prison to study and write, transforming himself from a "brown Englishman" into an Indian scholar-politician. He practiced yoga, studied the Baghavat-Gita,* and replaced his suits and top hat with clothing made from khadi (homespun).
Gandhi handpicked Nehru as India's first prime minister, despite substantial differences in their vision of India's future. They agreed that poverty would be India's greatest challenge after independence, but disagreed on the solution. Gandhi looked to India's past for the answer, which he believed lay in self-sufficiency at the village level, with a spinning wheel in every hut. Nehru, whose exposure to what he described as "this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India" had led him to the principles of Fabian socialism, looked for national self-sufficiency, based on "tractors and big machinery." When Gandhi accused Nehru of being unfaithful to his vision of a "harmonious village India", Nehru countered that he did "not understand why a village should necessarily embody truth and non-violence".
When India achieved independence from Great Britain in 1947, Nehru became its the first prime minister and minister for external affairs, a dual position he held until his death in 1964. He developed a policy of "positive neutrality" in regard to the Cold War, and served as a key spokesperson for the unaligned countries of Asia and Africa. He committed India to a policy of industrialization, a reorganization of its states on a linguistic basis, and the development of a casteless, secular state.
*And Marxist political theory.
Road Trip Through History: In Search of Roman Florence
When you're in the heart of Florence, it's hard to remember that anything happened there other than the Renaissance. You can find the Etruscans in the nearby village of Fiesole. Sienna is essentially a medieval town. But Florence seems to be all Renaissance, all the time.
In fact, the city of Florentia was founded by the best known Roman of them all, Julius Caesar, in 59 BCE as a settlement for veterans of the Roman army. It came to be an important stop on the trade route to the sea and a center of the Roman textile industry. This stuff is not included in the guide books.
My Own True Love was determined to see something of Roman Florence and I was certainly willing. After all, the Roman baths turned out to be one of my favorite things in Bath, England—a city which is as closely aligned with the Georgian period as Florence is with the Renaissance. Besides, at some level the Rnaissance was all about reconnecting with the classical past, right?
For the most part, the Roman past is a ghost in Florence. Built on the plan of a Roman military camp, the grid of the central streets, remains, though I will admit that is is not readily visible to someone who lives in Chicago, where the grid is absolutely clear.* The two major streets from the Roman era, the Via Roma and the Via Coros still cross where the city’s forum once stood. The Via Proconsul, which takes its name from the title of a Roman official, follows the line of the now invisible Roman city wall.
It took some digging to find something concrete to look at.** The Palazzo Vecchio is in some ways a microcosm of Florentine history: Renaissance rooms in a medieval fortress built over a Roman theater. The Palazzo itself is stunning, but we were on a quest. We started with the Roman theater. While I have my issues with audio tours, in this case I strongly suggest that you download the tour app at the top of the stairs before you enter the excavations. We went through the excavations without it the first time and were frustrated by the general lack of signs and our own ignorance. We went back upstairs, My Own True Love (who is less easily discouraged than I am) loaded the app on his phone, and went through the excavation again. This time we understood what we were looking at and came away with a sense of the structure of the theater, its role in the Roman city, and a renewed appreciation for Roman engineering. ***
We later learned that you can see the ruins of an early Roman Christian church and an even older Roman home under the Duomo. If we'd just gone down the stairs to the gift shop, we'd have been right there. Maybe next time.
*Except where it isn’t. Angled streets, rail yards and the river add elements of confusion.
**Literally and figuratively. Concrete was one of Rome’s major contributions to world architecture, along with the arch and the vault.