Serendipity in Florence

The day we had earmarked for spending in the area around Il Duomo and a visit to its interior  turned out to be wet. I have to say that it rained at some stage every day we were in Florence, generally quite lightly. But this day was wet most of the time. We had not, as previously mentioned, reserved tickets to go and climb the Bell Tower, nor for climbing into the Dome itself. In theory you can visit the inside of the Cathedral for free, but when we arrived at about 10,00 a.m. there was a very long queue. Supposedly it was about two hours long. We walked to the frint where the entrance was roped off and no-one in the queue was going anywhere, so that was 2 hours plus however long it was before they let anyone in, and as I say it was wet. We sat and contemplated the outside of the cathedral for about half an hour, watching people come and go and the queue not move an inch, and trying to take  reasonable photographs of the outside,  and then  we decided to have a wander about, preferably along some small overhung streets as the rain was getting harder. 

This was how we fell across the Baptistry of San Lorenzo. It's huge and, having looked it up since, extremely important in Florentine history and architecture but what drew us in were the cloisters. You could just catch a glimpse of them from the street and we're suckers for cloisters at the best of times so we coughed up 9 euros apiece and walked in. They were lovely. Also dry.  As a bonus the tickets weren't; for the cloisters per se but the Medici Library which was on the second storey and fabulous. 

yup, very wet. This is half the long side of the Church, it's huge. 

the cloisters at ground level

and from the second storey

and a view of the first and second storeys

the Medici library 

 above and below the reading room 

yet again a magnificently painted ceiling and the question has to be why? did medieval Florentines spend most of their time on the floor? 

We didn't know much about San Lorenzo before we went to Florence and even now we know very little. Twenty or thirty years ago we'd have been more prepared, have read up more and known more about what to look at, not just here but Florence in general. And that's very laudatory but actually I wonder if perhaps just wandering about and following our noses and going to places that catch our eye and interest isn't in the end more enjoyable. I couldn't have appreciated the cloisters more if I had known the date they were built or who had designed them, we went to see them because we just like cloisters. And the Medici library was just a wonderful extra. 

Japanese Garden Reprise

I know, it should be Florence but we are all somewhat stressed over an ongoing situation with the Glasgow flat and I just can't face looking at more photos of Florence and deciding what to write and which photos to share. I'm hoping to calm down over the next couple of days and be able to concentrate better. 

Meanwhile Son No 2 is with us for a week and as the weather looked sort of OK-ish we decided to go back to the Japanese Garden at Cowden, which the OH and I visited last spring,  as in spring 2024. The OH is a big acer fan and son no 2 had never been and was keen to see it, so off we went. 

The weather turned beautiful; warm and sunny. Oddly when coming out of the office having presented our tickets I heard an early middle aged-ish man say to the woman he was with, 'we'll be glad of our coats, it's turned chilly'. Which astonished me as I just had a shirt and jumper on, and felt a bit warm tbh. And the OH is always telling me how I feel the cold. 

We had a lovely stroll around the garden followed by a not terribly satisfactory lunch in the cafe, mainly because two of us made bad choices. We all took lots and lots of photographs and here are a few of mine.

Son no 2 on the Bridge of Doom. I went over it last time; I wasn't going to make the mistake of doing it again! 

It's a very beautiful and peaceful place and we all enjoyed our visit very much. I'm sure that as we live here longer we will have many more visits. 

Another Lovely Walk

 It seems Sunday morning is  becoming our  walk time since yesterday we did a walk for the second Sunday morning in a row. Perhaps that's not quite often enough to establish it as a habit and certainly I can't see us venturing out if and when the weather turns, but yesterday it was fine and so we looked at the walk books and decided on Plean Country Park. 

It was a pleasant enough woodland walk, but it taught me that I prefer walks where I can see water. And also reminded us that walk book descriptions are not 100% to be relied upon. However we didn't get really lost, despite some very vague instructions at one point,  we met lots of friendly dogs, mostly with friendly owners and I took some nice photographs. 

A little bit of autumn colour in the trees/leaves

yay! a tree tunnel

and the would be arty DK shot! 

Taking of habits I went back to Knit Group last week and really enjoyed myself, I would have gone back to Pilates on Saturday but it was cancelled for lack of numbers ( hope that's not going to become a thing) and this morning I also went to the U3A crime fiction book group which again I enjoyed.So that all looks promising for establishing an autumn/winter routine which I feel is important. 

Tomorrow - more, and possibly the last of,  Florence.

A Lovely Start to October

 We've had a good few days, I thought I'd write them up before I did any more of Florence. 

First off we have a 'good grief, how long has that been hanging about unfinished?' craft project, which is now finished.

a day and night stuffed hare. I machined round this when I was having my sewing lessons a couple of years ago but then they stopped, at which point all it really needed was stuffing. However I have absolutely no faith in my ability to stuff anything, so it had languished in a drawer. Until about four days ago when I told myself to just get on with it, on the grounds that my stuffing expertise was not going to magically improve while the thing lay there untouched. So I got it out, stuffed it and then sewed up the gap. It does actually stand (?sit) on its own and I'm really pleased with it because 

1) it's a finished project

2) not only did I finish a project but I used up a lot of stuffing 

3) it's really nice

Next up - Happy Mail

It is a Christmas Bunting Knitting Kit from Debbie Abrahams. If you're not a long term reader you might like to check out my previous posts concerning my conversion to knitted Christmas Bunting which are here and  here . I was sort of vaguely aware that there were bunting kits other than the one I had already done,  and as I had enjoyed knitting the first one, and as I really liked this one, and as I got an e-mail offering me 10% off which came to just over the postage cost, I succumbed. 

And before anyone rolls their eyes heavenwards, can I just say I have already made a start!

Sunday was a lovely day and we decided to try another walk from one of our local walk books. Happily this one did not take us through a dank and dark canal tunnel partly excavated by the body snatchers Burke and Hare, but much more pleasantly around Loch Airthrey, which lies at the heart of the University of Stirling campus. The weather was glorious, as were the views. 

As when we went to Gartmorn Dam, there was a heron

Yesterday we went to lunch with some friends which was lovely and I got to look at someone else's wool stash which was fun. It wasn't really an occasion for photos. I'd hoped, since we were going into Perthshire aka Big Tree Country, for swathes of autumn colours on the trees, but it was still maybe a mite too early and possibly we weren't quite far enough north. Another couple of weeks maybe. 

Today we went to Dunfermline, mainly to catch The Lost Words exhibition; words by Robert Macfarlane and images by Jackie Morris. I'm a fan of Morris, Macfarlane not so much. That said, I will admit, albeit through gritted teeth, that I found his words on this occasion to be mainly very well done; hugely evocative and, unlike his books, he hadn't put himself at the centre of them. Sadly, and oddly I thought,  taking pictures at the exhibition was  expressly forbidden, which I found doubly irritating as there were no cards or postcards of the artwork to be had in the shop where there were various other things related to the exhibition for sale. So here's a picture of the really nice cafe in the Dunfermline Library and Gallery where we had a light lunch after visiting the exhibition.

Dunfermline has a very splendid abbey, not that we went in, and a very steep set of streets with lovely views towards the hills.

There was also a very nice craft shop, mainly sewing, but with some wool as well. I didn't buy anything, as they didn't have the specific thing I went in search of, but I'm sure I'll be back - to both the shop and to the town as there was lots more to it that seemed worth exploring than we had time for today. 

Florence - Buildings and Views

 I can't really call this one Florence - Architecture, much as I'd love to, but I just don't know enough about architecture for that not to feel pretentious. So this is a collection of photos of famous and perhaps not so famous buildings in Florence and some views over the city which were taken from various different places. I did my best to keep the omnipresent building cranes out of my photos but it was a difficult thing to do and occasionally I failed. 

above and below, photos taken from windows of the Uffizi - you can see the rain on the hills in the top one

this is the terrace cafe at the Uffizi looking towards Il Duomo

and this from the same place looking over to the much nearer Palazzo Vecchio

This is the front of Santa Croce from the ground ...

...and this is Santa Croce from part way up the Palazzo Vecchio. You can see how far back it goes, it's absolutely huge and presumably it would have cost too much, even in Florence, to face the sides and back with marble as well as the front!

This is a very small part of Il Duomo, it's impossible to get all of it in at ground level. It's amazing. Years ago someone told me I wouldn't like it because it was garish, but you know, I did like it. As I said to someone else, I wouldn't build one like it in my back garden but taken for what it is it's rather lovely. And totally breathtaking. 

This is the bell tower of Il Duomo. You can pay to climb it. We didn't. 

Part of the charm of Florence, like Paris, is just being there and slowing down and looking at stiff that might not be famous but somehow says something about the city. We did a fair bit of sitting and people watching and building spotting; this one was in the square in front of the Cathedral. I loved it.You can also see how crowded the area around the cathedral is, even in the wet! It rained quite hard that day. 

Today's  was definitely a photo heavy post!

Florence - Art

 or some of it anyway. 

The main pull of Florence for me was the art so it will be no surprise to anyone that we spent our first day in the Uffizi. The OH was inclined to the view that it wouldn't take us that long as it was 'only two floors' Ha! 

It was only two floors but they were both huge. Also the lift wasn't functioning so that was a lot of stairs to climb. The top of the Uffizi is a l-o-n-g way up. In fact it's so far up that at the top there is a notice advising you not to look down. 

It's very regimented. They call the Alhambra 'the factory' in Granada, but honestly that's  a lot more relaxed than this was. I forget how many times our tickets were checked but it was at least four,and we had our bags scanned as well. There is also a one way system so you can't just check out the bits you're interested in and then leave, or skip bits. We did rush past the sculpture. We know nothing about sculpture. And to be fair there are lots of seats so whenever we felt the need for a sit down and a breath catch, there was somewhere to sit. Full marks on that score. And of course the places was rammed with tourists. 

I feel to fully appreciate the paintings in Florence you really need at least an MA in Early Italian Religious Painting. Otherwise it's just a lot of Annunciations and Visits of the Magi and lives of saints that, if you';re not Catholic, you've probably never heard of. There are, I discovered, only so many annunciations and Visits of the Magi that I can cope with and the Uffizi reached that limit quite early on. 

However, a few highlights

This one does come from a series of a life of a saint of whom I had never heard and depicts his miraculous repair of a broken kitchen sieve. (I kid you not). Personally I cannot detect a kitchen sieve, broken or otherwise, in this picture, unless it's the rhomboid(?) on the floor near the right hand corner, bu anyway it tickled me. 

I was gobsmacked by the skill of whoever painted this picture of an open book 

Then there were the Botticellis , of course 

That birth of Venus photo is rubbish but as always with famous pictures there were crowds round it - and the Primavera of course - which is why it's sideways on. I'm not bothered because I bought a post card. For once a gallery shop actually stocked a postcard of a picture that I wanted. 

And there were just loads more; a beautiful Leonardo, some lovely Rafaels although not many, a few amazing portraits,  mainly by Flemish artists! 

The Leonardo

and if you looked at that angel and said Gosh, how Burne Jones is that? - well snap! 

The problem with galleries like this ( apart from the tourists) is overload. Ideally you would live next to one, and visit every day for  a year and just look at a very limited number of paintings each day, and then you could appreciate each of them more fully.  Counsel of perfection I know. So I shall just be grateful that I got the chance to go at all. 

Wool stats and finished projects for September

 A more satisfying result than the last couple of months, that's for sure. In was only 100g which was the Yarn Unique artists club skein and I have not ordered September's even though it is Matisse so I'm giving myself a pat on the back for that. Out was 464; net decrease for the month 364, net decrease for the year now 5840. So that's something. 

Unsurprisingly, I finished yet another  pair of socks - a very old skein from The Knitting Goddess and these were for the OH. A bit subdued for him but he seemed pleased with them regardless, and they went on holiday to Florence. 

The 'big finish' was this stole for which I used the Giddy yarns 2023 Advent which was A  Midsummer Night's Dream themed. I find stoles easier to wear than other shawl shapes which was why I chose this pattern, the Adventuresome wrap by Ambah O Brian which someone had given me as a gift a while back. It too made a debut in Florence. Once I got going it was easier to knit than it probably looks. 

No predictions whatsoever about how October's numbers will go, I don't have a clue!