Santa Maria Novella, Rucellai Palace, and the Galileo Museum

Ah, so I'm super behind in my blog posting.  I feel like this wouldn't be such a problem if I weren't doing so many things each day, but there is a ton I want to see here, so the days are very full.

So, Monday is the day that most of the museums in Florence are closed, so I had to pick things that were a little different, like churches and less well known museums.  Remembering my mishap of the other day, I wore long pants so that I would not be stigmatized at the church and set off to see Santa Maria Novella.

Santa Maria Novella is a Dominican church and is now right across the street from the main train station in Florence.  Part of the facade was designed by Alberti, the famous Renaissance architect, and inside is Masaccio's fresco "The Trinity."  This, again, was a work we discussed in my course.  Besides that there were a bunch of little chapels and a sacristy off of the main church with gorgeous works by Vasari and Giotto which were pretty stunning as well.  Again, no pictures were allowed inside.  I dont know why this bothers me, since I've always thought it was kind of weird when I see people taking pictures of art, but I guess I just want to make sure I remember what I saw here.  So, to solve this problem, I've been buying lots of postcards.  These will likely be used to decorate my room in England, thus killing two birds with one stone, as they say.

Anyways, here's a picture of the facade:

After the church, it looked like it was going to rain, so I decided to find a place to have lunch as soon as possible.  On the way, I stopped by the Rucellai Palace (again, a place from class), also designed by Alberti.  Unfortunately, they don't let tourists go inside, but it was nice to get to see the facade. I ended up eating lunch near there at a cute, very homey little trattoria.  Pasta, pasta, and more pasta.  I'm going to get fat I'm eating so much pasta.

So, full of pasta, I decided to spend the afternoon being science-y.  While I love art (this vacation is basically entirely about art), science is always fun, and a lot of exciting things in the history of science happened right here in Florence.  The history of science in Florence is preserved at the Galileo Museum, which recently underwent a huge renovation and is now beautiful and new and really well done.  It was awesome to spend the afternoon look at astrolabes, quadrants, globes from the 15th century, alchemy sets etc.

The big draw of the museum though is pretty fascinating and morbid at the same time.  In a room dedicated to the innovations of Galileo (who did quite a bit of work in Florence and who is buried in Santa Croce, more on that later), they have three of his finger in a box.  I find this absolutely hilarious.  Most people think of Galileo as the scientific genius who was struck down by the reactionary provincial church (the real story, in fact, is much more complicated, which, if you take History of Science with Professor Servos, you will learn).  So it's kind of ironic that pieces of him are kept exactly as churches have relics of saints.  Anyways, I wont put a picture, because it might freak people out.

PS: Since I plugged the Servos course, I'll also say that when I talk about my "Art History class" what I mean is "Art and Architecture 1400-1800" with Professor Courtright which was wonderful and amazing and which I would highly recommend to anyone still at Amherst with courses to fill.