selenak

Figuring that Sunday would be the time when everybody and their dog visited Florence, we spent yesterday driving through Tuscany, visiting Villas and admiring the landscape. Which made for an interesting ongoing switch between Renaissance, Baroque and some fin du siècle, with the occasional Romanic church thrown in. (The later reminded me of those basilicas I've seen in Israel, years ago.) One more proof how movies tend to hijack your imagination: I kept having Visconti associatons throughout. If it wasn't "Death in Venice", it was "The Leopard". Yesterday's opulence and decay, though sadly none of us, who presumably embody the new world, looks remotely like Claudia Cardinale. The smell of flowers is very strong everywhere - roses, petunias, gardenias mostly. And since a wind was blowing, one heard the rustling of leaves, too, which I imagine is a similar sound to the sweeping of robes on the floor.
Since the late afternoon had brought us pretty close to the coast, we thought we might was well go all the way and visit the hotel near Viarreggio which a friend had recommended to us; we had ultimately decided for another one (the peaceful countryhouse near Florence where I'm currently staying), but wanted to look the alternative up and say hello to the aquaintances of the pal mentioned above. Big mistake. For starters, we should have used some logic to deduce that Sunday evening is the official Worst Time Ever to drive away FROM the coast, which we had to do in order to return to our hotel. Ah, the joy of traffic jams. Thankfully, we could cut across country after a while.
In any case, I'm so relieved we picked the Marignolle and Florence over the coast. Much as I love the sea, that hotel and its beach looked like it could have been in Rimini. (For American readers: Think Waikiki Beach. Technically beautiful but far too overcrowded.) Staying there would have ruined the vacation for yours truly, who is something of a snob when it comes to feeling like a sardine, or an ant.
Today it was Florence again. Admiring Michelangelo's last Pieta (the one he didn't finish, not to be confused with the early work standing in St. Peter in Rome) I was struck again how the two iconic presentations of Mary strike a cord because they capture quintessential experiences of humanity. The Madonna, the young mother with her baby; and the Pieta, the grieving mother with the body of her dead son in her arms.
Watching fresco after fresco, or rather, fragments of them, also brought back one of my half-grown plot bunnies, which resulted from Angel telling Holtz they were in Rome because Darla wanted to see the paintings in the Vatican. I had the idea of him having painted her as the Madonna, just for the blasphemy of it, and that they'd have smuggled that painting in the Vatican. (Believe me, that collection isn't just Raffael and Leonardo; there is some pretty avarage art there as well.) Now of course, with Connor's fate playing out the way it did, seeing that painting again maybe in an Los Angeles exhibition or maybe in the W&H vaults…