We begin our 20th Wedding Anniversary celebration with a luxurious 5-day stay in the Westin Excelsior, Firenze, ideally situated on the Arno River in Piazza Ognissanti.
We weren’t fortunate enough to snag the Belvedere Suite, but we did secure an inside corridor suite with Starwood points. Our rooms in the Excelsior Florence, a palace built by Carolina Bonaparte, are ours for 5 luxurious nights.
The hallways are adorned with lounges displaying original chests tucked between baroque red velvet chairs, and the walls are trimmed in oil paintings from the dynasty of this most nefarious of European families. The palazzo serves as the ideal backdrop for our time in Firenze – the city where art, architecture, modern banking and astronomy collided during most singular concurrent spark of brilliance – the Renaissance!
I begin with the requisite walk up the back streets to scout out shopping and dining venues and take no more than a dozen steps before locating LaBottega d’Artre Lastrucci. The Lastruccis boast a fine selection of hand-carved, individually painted wooden statues which can be matched to create a unique, and decadently expensive crèche.
I opt for some more economical triptychs featuring replica Botticelli Madonnas. As in so many places in Florence, the elderly owners proudly regale me with the area’s lore – and as always, the locals are far better informed than any tour guide! I learn the Maestro himself, Alesandro Filipepi (or Sandro Boticelli, as he is called today!) is, along with Amerigo Vespucci, entombed across the plaza in Chiesa di Ognissanti, and the bottega is mere steps from the area where Sandro’s shop once was! I am awed to find myself in the very place where this proliferate genius painted many of his masterpieces! I walk out onto Ognissanti square, and can almost imagine the bustle of craftsmen, the sweet smell of paint and the clink of the stone mason’s chisel that was once life here back in the 15th century.
Later in the day, we chance upon Chiesa Ognissanti during a rare opening, and so peruse this small pantheon to see the burial site of Amerigo Vespucci whose cognomen is immortalized as my own great America! Walking further on in apse to the right, we locate the tomb of the great Sandro Boticelli, all but obscured in a corner. It is ironic that this most proliferate of masters of the high Renaissance should have so simple a marker in death. I surmise it was Boticelli’s wish to be entombed in his local parish, having found his God in the flames of Savonarola’s sermons. Those fearful speeches once drove Boticelli to toss his more “profane” (think: allegorical) works into the flaming bonfires of the vanities – an immeasurable loss!
I do not believe that God in His wisdom would ever have wished destruction of such great genius, having gifted it to the man in the first place, but much as today, those were turbulent times, the people harshly divided – Guelfs or Ghibbelinis, religious zealots or decadent humanists, oddly not different from today’s liberals and conservatives, and decide we have not really changed at all from then to now. I will continue to ponder this dichotomy as my travels here unfold over the coming week.
For tonight, I light a candle, and say a prayer of thanks for the gifts this young prodigy left us for all time in the Uffizi, which we will visit after our tour tomorrow in Siena and San Gimignano.
