Mosaics and Modern Art

Though you can't tell from the photo, we're in front of Santa Croce. The church and piazza are beautiful. Last weekend, we saw a puppet show there (there's a video clip of said show at the bottom of the page).


Last Friday I went to Ravenna and looked at early Christian mosaics and ate amazing pasta with gorgonzola cheese and hazelnuts. It was as good as it sounds.

This was in the dome of a baptistery and it was completed somewhere in the early-mid 400s. Baptisteries were especially significant in early Christian times since a person couldn't enter the church until they converted.

I love this mosaic because the story behind it is so intriguing. Ravenna was the seat of Theodoric the Great who triumphed Arian Christianity, which stated that Jesus was not fully divine. This mosaic used to depict Arian bishops, but when the council of Nicea decided on modern Christianity and declared Arians heretics, they needed to alter earlier contradictory art. They covered up the bishops with the curtains, but decided it was too much work to redo the columns, leaving these odd disembodied hands.

Dante was exiled from Florence as a result of him choosing the losing side of a political power struggle. While in exile, he wrote The Divine Comedy which is considered to be the greatest literary work composed in Italian. Ever. Since then, he's become Florence's favorite son. There ae statues of him all over and a giant tomb waiting for his remains at Santa Croce where Galileo and Michelangelo are buried. However, he continues to rest in Ravenna, where he died.

This is the outside of the St. Francis's Basilica in Ravenna.

This past Friday, I went to the Gori Sculpture Garden. Basically, Giuliano Gori, a filthy rich art collector, bought a seventeenth-century villa in Tuscany and turned the area and farmland into a huge open-air museum. He invited artists to come in the early 80s and do site-specific work. Apparently, this was a huge success and since then artists have been invited and commissioned to do bunches and bunches of works. It takes about 4 hours to walk the park, and to see it you have to first write and let them know why you want to see it. It was amazing. The place is filled with large-scale modern sculpture and installations. This is a view from the villa.

This is a teahouse that was originally part of the property. Inside, there's a room that has a giant tea-leaf pyramid. And bathrooms.

This is me walking around a piece called "The Rings of Time." The artist planted the flora of Tuscany, from the prehistoric to the modern, in concentric circles. Those bronzed branches next to me are meant to signify extinct plant life.

This is Ariel and I in front of some grapes and olive trees. The entire place smelled delicious. The air was so fragrant, I wanted to bottle it.

This is a piece called Daphne (the nymph who turned into a tree- except here she's returning to earth in a more rudimentary form).

Yesterday, we happened upon a parade. I have no idea what it was for. Sweet outfits, though.