Florence, Italy – Santa Croce (part 2) – Thursday

Continuing on our Thursday morning, in Florence, at Santa Croce …..

(Every once in awhile I remember to take a self portrait, or Andrew kindly asks if I want him to take a picture of me. ….. proves I was there, right?)

also: I was wearing Andrew’s glasses for a little bit because my eyes aren’t so good at seeing far away. Which is why I’m going to go to the eye doctor sometime this year.

Andrew loved the skulls. Lots of skulls on the grave/tomb markers. Pretty morbid, to us. But I’m sure it was stylish at the time … .

I love this pic below. Just look at the size of this place! And the scaffolding ….. but the high ceilings and the big open area in the middle, with that high window…. love.

I don’t know what this (below) is, but it definitely looks like the sculpture or painting was removed, huh? So interesting…. look at that texture of the wall. Imagine that the whole place looks like that under the decor ….

One of the biggie’s I was pretty excited about : Michelangelo’s tomb:

From Rick Steves:

Santa Croce was Michelangelo’s childhood church, as he grew up a block east of here at Via dei Bentaccordi 15 (where nothing but a plaque marks the spot). The tomb, with the allegorical figures of painting, architecture and sculpture, was designed by Michelangelo’s great admirer, the artist/biographer Vasari.

I don’t know if you can tell from the images how big the thing is, but I couldn’t fit it all in one shot ….

We really learned a lot about Michelangelo while we were in Italy (all still to come on the blog, but we saw David, St. Peter’s basilica, the Sistine Chapel, La Pieta and more) …. I feel like it wouldn’t have been a complete trip if we missed this memorial to him. …

{sidenote: we saw Angela’s last name ‘Lingrosso’ a lot of places}

Scaffolding covered almost half of the art in the church….. kind of disappointing, but they were nice enough to show us what we were missing …

little bitty nun! I love it!

and even more skulls

This piece of tunic was revered to be St. Francis of Assisi’s …. for real.

But then I found this article stating it couldn’t possibly be.

However, I also listened to an interview (can’t find the link at the moment) talking about how the actual authenticity of relics is less important than the meaning behind and the respect it receives.

hmmmm…..