13 luglio Mardi David and Pisa

 Anche, nostra viaggio in Italia. Questo tempo andiamo a Academia vedere David. Molto, molto, bello. 

And then if was off via alleys and larger roads to the Galleria dell’Academia, which contains the incredible marble statue of David created by Michelangelo between 1501 and 1504 when he was still in his late 20’s.  Several other sculptors had taken this 17-foot-high chunk of marble and begun carving out the lower legs portion half a century earlier, but the work then lapsed. Michelangelo then took up the job and sculpted an astonishing figure of a young man (the Biblical David who slew Goliath) with astonishingly accurate bodily contours with the exception of an outsized head and hands.  Yet you do not notice these, however, unless you study the statue with the expert eye of an artist (lacking in this observer) or have read a guidebook in advance (nope) and been aware of it.  What I did question was why David’s penis was uncircumcised.  As a Jewish lad, he should have been.  A guide book later informed me that the uncircumcised penis was “consistent with Renaissance conventions.”  Well, la-de-da!  The Academia also contained lots of frescos and a large room full of plaster statues, including one by Botticello of a cute, pert Beatrice, the Florentine who was the romantic love of the poet Dante Alighierei’s life.

Andiamo in treno a Pisa. Incredibile! Tutte le cose sono incredibile in Italia. L'arte e le sculture---cosi tanti. 

We got off in Pisa, bought a local map and walked about a mile to the Campo dei Miracoli – the Field of Miracles that contains the Duomo, baptistery, cemetery and Campanile, this latter being the famous Leaning Tower.  Most tourist guides describe this as one of the most gorgeous squares in all of Italy, and we had to agree.  Walking toward it we both remarked on how shabby the buildings in Pisa looked. But not the Bell Tower.  The closer we got to it, the more awesome it looked.  It seems ready to topple over at any moment. In fact, it is15 feet out of plumb.  The marble tower rises 180 feet, and has been hexed almost from the beginning of construction in 1173.  By the time the worked their way up to the third level five years later, it was starting to tilt in the watery sand base, and construction was halted.  It wasn’t resumed for almost a century as Pisa was engaged in a series of wars.  Because the subsoil settled during this hiatus, the tower did not fall completely over.  Architects then decided they would build additional stories higher on one side than the other to try to straighten it out. From certain angles, this vertical curvature is said to be evident, a banana effect one guide book says, but I didn’t notice it.  Anyway, that tactic didn’t work and eventually cables were attached and anchored 300 yards away to pull the tower against any further lean – kind of a tug of war, and subsoil was removed in two stages from underneath the higher side. By the time we visited, engineers predicted it would no longer lean any farther for at least another 200 years.  Tourists now are allowed to go in 30 at a time for half an hour and climb the 286 steps (tall side, 186 feet) or 284 steps (shorter side, three feet lower) to the top. Kathy and I waved to the bunch that was up on the observation deck while we took photos of the tower and the other astonishing structures. I managed to straighten the tower by taking a photo from the tilted side.  Yeah, Hercules Henry!  Oh yeah, it is a bell tower, and there are seven up there, one for each note in the scale.    I wonder if anyone ever tried to play “Do, a deer, a female deer …”  from “The Sound of Music” on it.