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Summary of these posts so far:

• Planning, packing, and flights: here.
• Car rentals and driving in Italy: here.
• Italian restaurants and the hotel we stayed at: here.

In upcoming posts, I’ll be talking about tourist sites and gorgeous artworks in Florence, Pisa, Siena, and Livorno.

First up: the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze, a.k.a. the Academy Gallery. I’ll make some suggestions for don’t-miss items at the Academy in a moment. But first …

A few thoughts on visiting museums (in Florence or elsewhere)

We had many wonderful guides in Tuscan museums, and only one or two that were subpar. But what if you don’t want to book a tour, and you don’t want to spend your time squinting at museum labels or being jostled by a herd of tourists as you click through an audio guide? Should you skip the museum and go sit in a cafe?

There are other options. Here are three, for starters.

1. The deep dive

Ignore most of the works (however famous they may be), and focus on finding one artwork that attracts you. Unless you’re an art historian, the point of visiting a museum is not to improve your knowledge of art history. It’s to find works that mean something to you, personally. Given that, it’s perfectly acceptable to wander through the galleries, only stopping when you see something that you love. Or that fascinates you, even if it’s does it by being so repulsive you can’t turn away.

Once you’ve found a work, see if you can figure out why that particular work made you stop. Some possibilities:

• Does the story interest you? How does that story relate to your life?
• Do you love or hate one of the faces in it? Who does it remind you of, and are the associations positive or negative?
• Do the colors make you happy? (I love the vivid shades of red in the Ghirlandaio painting below: it jerked me to a stop in the Academy.) Where could you use those colors the next time you redecorate?

If you really want to do a deep dive into a particular painting, see my ebook How to Analyze and Appreciate Paintings.

2. The fly-by

An alternative to looking closely at one painting is to look at many artworks for one particular thing.

• Ignore the figures and look at landscapes behind them. What’s the land used for? Is it hospitable to humans or not?
• Look at the houses: what would it be like to live in them?
• If you’re a parent, look for paintings of the Madonna and Child. How are the two shown relating to each other? What are they thinking?
• Send your teenager looking for weapons. Chances are he or she has seen something similar in video games.

3. Art historian in training

If you decide you would like to learn more about art history, see if you can find examples of each of the innovations listed in Innovators in Painting or Innovators in Sculpture.

Two more thoughts on museum visits

• Hold yourself to 2 hours at a stretch in museum galleries, unless you know you have great stamina for this sort of thing. Rest your feet and your mind while you have lunch or a cup of coffee in the museum’s cafe, and then go back to the galleries, if you want.
• However you choose to approach the museum, it’s always fun to discuss with someone else which work was your favorite and why. It’ll leave you with a good memory of the museum you’ve been visiting. Take a photo with your phone – maybe even take close-ups of a couple details. If you’re going into the museum shop, that’s the work you want a postcard of.

The Academy’s Collections

And now on to what you’ll find at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.

The Academy was established by the Medici family as a teaching collection for the art academy next door. It holds 5 very different collections. Set your priorities: start with what interests you most.

• Half a dozen works by Michelangelo, whose David, completed 1504, stood in the Piazza della Signoria for more than 300 years. It was moved here in 1873 – the David in the Piazza della Signoria is a copy. The Academy also has half a dozen large, unfinished works by Michelangelo. If you visit the Academy and the Bargello, you’ll see most of Michelangelo’s major sculptures.

• Paintings of the Florentine Renaissance, including works by 15th-c. artists such as Ghirlandaio (see painting earlier in this post), Uccello (who’s fascinated with linear perspective), Botticelli, and Filippino Lippi. There are also some paintings by 16th-c. Mannerists such as Bronzino.
• 13th- and early 14th-c. paintings, mostly from Florentine monasteries that were shut down a century or two ago. You can spot these from afar by their gold backgrounds: that’s one of the features of medieval painting that Masaccio and other artists of the early Renaissance rejected. I’m not particularly fond of art of the 13th-14th c., but it’s useful to see a few of these medieval works so you know what Renaissance artists are reacting against. If you stroll through a room full of these paintings in the Academy, you have my permission to skip the dozens of examples in the Uffizi. Main points: flat backgrounds, repetitive compositions, cursory anatomy.

• Plaster models of works by 2 sculptors who taught at the art academy in the 19th c.
• A gallery of historic musical instruments, including a startling upright piano from 1739 (possibly the earliest ever) and a pair of elaborate, expensive hurdy-gurdies.

Notes on my visit to the Academy, Jan. 2024

My husband and I booked a tour with TakeWalks.com: the Pre-open Tour Academy and Dome, which is billed as a VIP tour of the David and the Duomo, with early access to the Academy and a skip-the-line Dome climb with terrace access. Price for two: $311.36. Given how crowded Florence was on the day we visited, it was a good thing we did this. We visited Florence years back on a cruise, and discovered we’d have had to spend hours on line to get into the Academy, with the possibility that it would close before we reached the door.

There were 15 or so in our group, led by a very informative guide. He had a mike, so we could hear him through an earphone set-up. This set-up is required for groups of more than a few people, to prevent shouting in museums. We stayed with our guide for about 3 hours.

At the Academy, the guide talked about a few Renaissance (15th-c.) paintings, then Michelangelo’s Slaves, then the David. Oddly enough, I found the David less impressive than some other sculptures I’ve seen, partly because it is so very familiar, and partly because I find it distracting to look at art from the midst of a dense crowd.

As soon as we’d seen the David, our tour guide led us out of the Academy and over to the Duomo (Cathedral). Our tour ticket didn’t allow us to return to the Academy. I’d like to spend another hour or two there – probably later in the day, when the crowds have thinned.

Train travel

Remember I said my first few posts were on questions I didn’t know I should ask? One of them was about where to park.

From our arrival on New Year’s Eve, we knew street parking in central Florence is tough to find. So rather than risk missing our 8:30 meeting time for the tour, we decided to take the train into Florence. To arrive by 8:30 with time to spare, we had to leave our hotel at 6 a.m., drive half an hour to Pontedera, figure out where we could legally park, catch a train to the Florence SMN (Santa Maria Novella) station (an hour), and then walk 25 mins. to the tour’s meeting place.

Florence SMN is large and very crowded, especially at rush hour. When we wanted to return home, we discovered that Pontedera isn’t prominently listed on the departure boards, nor was Pisa, which I knew from driving was in the right general direction. Because I’d been looking at the map when we drove to Pisa the day before, I eventually figured out that the terminal for the Florence-Pisa train is Livorno, on the coast near Pisa. Had we paused to snap a photo of the arrival / departure sign by the train when we arrived at SMN, we could have spared ourselves some agitation. (The guards are busy guarding: they don’t answer questions from bewildered passengers.)

Next week: Florence’s Cathedral, a.k.a. the Duomo or Santa Maria dei Fiori.

More

• My post on introducing kids to art is here. Some of it applies to grown-ups as well.
• Want wonderful art delivered weekly to your inbox? Check out my Sunday Recommendations list and rewards for recurring support: details here. For examples of favorite recommendations from past years, click here.