Florence and the rain of JanuaryThe umbrellas and the reflections multiplied by the street
italia 20.10 and the abstraction of the tour: listening to our guide, Natale, in front of Alberti's facade of Santa Maria Nouvella… holding us an immeasurable distance away from Florence and January's rain:
the beauty of Alberti's geometric hand,
our adjacency to this masterpiece,
the distance between.
our adjacency to this masterpiece,
the distance between.
Our tour cut a section through the city from the west to the east. Our walk between the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella and the Franciscan church of Santa Croce described a not uncertain tension held in careful equilibrium: the Renaissance seemed to emerge from this balance. And the Duomo and Piazza Signorelli, together at the fulcrum mark the center point. And we read the city through the rains of January, and we await our return.
Great shots. The buttery yellow of the sky, the hard dark stone of the streets, and the pedestrians, all seem to be parts of a character of place.
ReplyDeleteplace
ReplyDeletegenius loci
that elusive sense of belonging to the land which forms the stone of the walls and sheds the rain down the center of the street. In Firenze, everything owes its respect to the Arno, and must turn and face it. Place seems to rise up in some sort of liturgical call and response to the land. And the traces of this halting and staggered dialog remain slightly more permanent than the changes that sweep through the environment: the persistence of architecture.