There’s a prominent spot along the Lungarno in the Oltarno of Florence dedicated to somebody named Nicola Demidoff. There is an elaborate white marble monument dedicated to this person, with a portrait sculpture of him raised on a dais in the center, surrounded by 4 main allegorical figures who seem intent on supplication to children. The whole confection is covered with a glass roof and it is almost impossible not to question who/what/when/where/why about this ensemble when you walk by. I know I always wonder when I am near it. Lorenzo Bartolini, the important 19th century sculptor, created this elaborate monument which makes it doubly interesting to me.

You know I looked into it, don’t you?! Count Nikolai Nikitich Demidov (1773 – 1828) was a Russian industrialist, collector, military commander and art patron of the wealthy Demidov family. He was also the Russian ambassador to Tuscany where one of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany named him the “Count of San Donato.”

Nikolai Demidov inherited his father’s industrial empire aged only 15, including the iron and copper smelting plants of Nizhny Tagil, Nizhny Saldinsky, Verkhne-Saldinsky, Tšerno Istochensky, Visimo Utkinsky, Visimo Shaitansky, Laisky and Vyisky along with 11,550 serfs. He entered the diplomatic service and moved to Paris, becoming ardent supporters of Napoleon I of France. (Thanks to Wikipedia, as always.)

Portrait of Nikolay Nikitich Demidov, Collection Alexandre Tissot Demidoff

However, rising Franco-Russian tensions forced his recall and he, his wife and their children moved back to Russia via Italy (!!), arriving in Russia in 1812. He fought with distinction in the Russo-Turkish War and at the start of the French invasion of Russia he financed the creation of an infantry regiment, naming his son Pavel as one of its officers, which he then commanded against Napoleon’s forces, fighting at Oravais and Borodino.

Portrait of his wife, Elisabeta Alexandrovna Stroganova by Robert Lefèvre (c. 1805), Saint-Petersburg, Hermitage

In 1813 he gave his important collections to the mineralogical museum of Moscow founded by his uncle Pavel Grigoryevich to replace those lost in a fire; he also gave art collections to Moscow University. He financed the construction of four cast iron bridges in St. Petersburg. He modernized his factories’ infrastructure, which doubled his fortune. He gave his home over to many industries and public utility services, perfecting the exploitation of mines. At the Nizhny Tagil plant he founded a school in which, in addition to general education subjects, they also taught “the general principles of mechanics and practical mining art.” This school, which gave the best craftsmen for the factories of Demidov and others, was transformed into a district school in 1839 and subordinated to the department of the Ministry of Public Education.

Demidoff also played a significant role in advancing the horticulture of Russia: he acclimatized Bordeaux and Champagne vines and Lucca olive trees to the Crimea, imported horses from England, Merino sheep from Switzerland, ordered Kholmogory cattle, Orenburg goats and Caucasian mountain horses. In addition, he made experiments in the cultivation of cotton and saffron.

Nikolai Demidov served as chamberlain to the Emperor, a Hereditary Commander of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, and member of the privy council.

Portrait of Nikolaiy Nikitich Demidov on ceramic by an unknown artist, c. 1820. Kramskoy Historical and Art Museum, Ostrogozhsky

In 1819 he was made Russian ambassador to the court of Tuscany. After divorcing his wife, who moved back to France, he lived his last years in France and Italy among scholars, financing the creation of schools, hospitals and other charitable institutions in Tuscany. He bought 42 acres of marshland north of Florence from the Catholic Church and there built the Villa San Donato from 1827 to 1831, where he set up richly-decorated private rooms, a suite of 14 rooms housing his enormous art collection, a theatre and a foreign languages academy. I’ve posted about this place many years ago and will again.

His collections, reputed among the most lavish private collections in Europe, was divided between his residences in San Donato, Saint Petersburg, Paris and Moscow, and included works by Flemish and Italian masters, decorative art objects and a famous collection of weapons now in the Wallace Collection in London. His collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures is now at the Hermitage Museum. By decree of Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, on 23 February 1827 Demidov was made “Count of San Donato” for the services he had rendered to Tuscany by setting up a silk factory.

He had built a home for the elderly and orphans and donated a special capital for its maintenance. The grateful citizens of Florence in honor of the donor named one of the squares, near the Demidov Charity House, Demidovskaya and placed on this square a statue of Nikolai Nikitich. A public Monument to Nicola Demidoff designed by Lorenzo Bartolini is located on Piazza Demidoff overlooking the river Arno in Oltrarno.

I’ll be returning to Count Demidoff in future posts, for he made a lasting impression on the map of Tuscany during his lifetime. He is a most fascinating figure.

The tower of San Niccolo’ was once a part of a gate or portal in the former defensive walls that surrounded Florence. Like all the other medieval gates in the city, it was fortunately not razed in the 19th century expansion of the city, but like the others, it stands rather forlornly in an isolated position.

A piazza was built around this particular gate and interestingly enough, it is known as the Piazza Giuseppe Poggi, about whom I have written in this blog many times.

The gate was erected in 1324 and stands 115 feet tall. I was lucky enough to enter the tower through its 160 steep steps a few summers ago. Florence will occasionally open the gates for visits and its best to sign up ASAP if you want to be one of the lucky people to enjoy the experience!

The gates of Florence were built to the designs of architect/artist Arnolfo di Cambio for the circumferential walls around Florence.

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the
square holes.
The ones who see things
differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect
for the status quo.
You can praise them,
disagree with them,
quote them,
disbelieve them,
glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you
can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change
things.
They invent.
They imagine.
They heal.
They explore.
They create.
They inspire.
They push the
human race forward.
Maybe they have to be
crazy.
How else can you stare
at an empty canvas and see
a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear
a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and
see a laboratory on wheels?
While some may see them
as the crazy ones,
we see genius.
✨
Because the people who
are crazy enough to think
they can change the world,
are the ones who do.”

• Rob Siltanen

Making hay of the mild weather, I’m out walking and walking and love seeing the rowers.

Some great graffiti! Wish I had the talent to create these paintings. I’d do it indoors though.

The Carnival of Venice is an annual festival held in Venice, Italy, famous throughout the world for its elaborate costumes and masks. The Carnival ends on Shrove Tuesday, which is the day before the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday.

While the Carnivale in Venice is the most famous celebration, the rest of the Catholic world celebrates as well. And, one aspect of any celebration is food! glorious food!

There are a bunch of foods specific just for this festa. And, since we’re happily in Italy, the treats and their names are specific to the regions from which they come!

I was walking through a local grocery store and was greeted/confronted with a huge display of seasonal treats here in Florence! You could not escape it!

These fried dough treats are called different names in different regions of Italy: Some of the fried sweets most popular across Italy during Carnivale are frittelle, cenci (which means rags), chiacchiere (meaning chat or gossip) and little fried balls of dough called castagnole. They might also be called “lies” or bugie and some of the lies for sale here are “chocolate lies”, “apricot lies”, and “hazelnut lies.”

Castagnole means ‘little chestnuts’ in Italian, but there’s nothing nutty about this popular carnival treat. The name derives instead from the resemblance of these little golden-brown fried doughnuts to chestnuts. A recipe for castagnole is recorded in a manuscript from the 1700s, and they are often made at home during the period of carnival.

The dough used for castagnole is typically flavoured with lemon zest and aniseed liquor, and the finished article is often filled with chocolate or pastry cream before being rolled in sugar. Best enjoyed piping hot! In Venice you’ll often find castagnole under the name favette.

For more on food see: https://youtu.be/R2UuJVrMeWQ

I know that some of you were dying to know if my 2 new camellia shrubs turned out to be the same variety or different. I posted about this last week and at the time, it was a mystery. I had hoped for them to be different, but who could tell when they were just in bud. Both appeared to be pink, that’s all I could say for certain.

But shrub one turned out to be Nuncio’s Cameo (if it was labeled correctly!).

And shrub 2 turned out to be Nuncio’s Pearl. It is somewhat opalescent. Both shrubs have gorgeous blossoms!

The craziest things make me happy. I loved this little basket of tangerines from Spain for sale at my local market and was fascinated to see that the producers have been in business since 1940. Think of that! Since the mid of WWII. Imagine the things this company has weathered.

I love the label.

A little Spanish to add to the interest.

Pretty as a picture. I tasted one: deliciioso, in both Italian and Spanish!

These are the things that make me happy!

Warning: before reading this post, please find a comfortable seat in a quiet place and a hot beverage. You are going to need some time and focus to take in all the details! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

I’m setting up housekeeping in my new apartment in Florence and it takes a lot of trips to the local grocery and hardware stores. I like to go down new streets once in a while as I’m beating my way to a negozio, and I am usually rewarded with something truly interesting.

Recently I walked by this palazzo with its very attractive signage over a main door. I recognized it immediately as a former butcher shop and was amazed by the magnificence of the edifice that housed what I think of as a fairly pedestrian business. I stepped across the street to take in the full view and was really impressed. Clearly, this was a very lucrative trade for the person/family that commissioned this building.

In the photo below we see the elaborate sign that proclaims “butcher shop” and in case there was any question, the products are specifically named on either side of the door. We have agnello (lamb), suino (pork), vitella (veal) and pollame (poultry).

Also, check out the elegant door.

The street number of 35 is given above both groups of meat types in an elaborate art nouveau (in Italy the style is known as Liberty) script. Have you ever seen prettier numbers? I haven’t.

Below, to increase the feeling of antiquity in the building, we see the metal objects attached to traditional Italian palazzi. Some of it was to hold torches. Some of it was to tie horses to. I know that when this building was built, neither use was needed. Still, the metal is created and attached in the traditional way, to give a sense of of antiquity to this actually modern structure.

On the right end of the building, as seen below, is a tower detail, and even though it isn’t much taller than the rest of the palazzo, it makes a reference back to the heyday of Florentine commerce and wealth, which fell in the 11th and 12th centuries. At that time many Florentine towns and cities were filled with tower houses. If you’d like to know more about these tall structures, here’s a great source: https://www.feelflorence.it/en/node/16855. Florence used to be full of really tall towers but most were razed. It’s a quick trip to San Gimignano in Tuscany where you can still see a town filled with Medieval towers if you want to get a sense what a medieval town was like.

Between the first and second windows from the bottom up on the “tower” is a frieze in sgraffito. This refers to an artistic or decorative technique of scratching through a coating on a hard surface to reveal parts of another underlying coating which is in a contrasting color. It is produced on walls by applying layers of plaster tinted in contrasting colors to a moistened surface. Sgraffito on walls has been used in Europe since classical times. It was popularized in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries (see Wikipedia for more). So, now our “historical” tower makes reference not only to the 12th century, but also the Renaissance era as well! What a mighty tower!

.

The pastoral scene depicted in the frieze is totally appropriate to a Florentine citizen. With Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder as our reference, wealthy Florentines often/usually had country estates as well as city houses (palazzi), and would go to the country to escape the heat of the Florentine summer as well as the oft-recurring plagues. Likewise, the country provided the harried businessman with farming activities to act as a therapy and ease the mind. Cosimo liked to tend his grape vines for just that reason.

In the frieze we see on the left the matriarch of the family (this is all my supposition) with one of her children. We can only guess that she is as fertile as the farm itself and has many offspring. Sitting in a gladed forest, the wife and her daughter seem to be playing with the family dog. To the right of them stand two healthy Chianina breed steers which are pulling the two wheeled carrozzo, into which workers (could it include the man of the house? I think so because if the two men loading the cart were farmworkers I don’t think the woman and her daughter would be freely sitting near them. It just wouldn’t have happened) are dumping baskets of grapes.

One of the steers seems to look at the mother and daughter and the other looks backwards to the activity behind. Next, an additional worker is cutting the grapes clusters from the overhead vines in the annual rite of passage known as the vendemmia, or grape harvest. The worker to his left seems to have begun the pressing of the grapes with a long paddle. Further to the right and only halfway depicted in the frieze is another lady who reaches to pluck a ripe grape. Who can resist the sweetness of a ripe grape in summertime? I know I can’t and being near the ripe plants loaded with clusters doing the heat of August and September is positively intoxicating. You really don’t even need the wine!

Because this is an Italian home, one needs to add a religious image to make the ensemble complete. In a nod again to the Renaissance, the patron of this building program selected a ceramic relief panel gracefully depicted the Virgin Mary and Christchild. They are attended by 2 cherubim, who provide the figures with some implied heavenly protection. But, beyond the usual subject matter, this work of art makes another reference to the Florentine past: Luca della Robbia (1400-82) was a sculptor from Florence and is noted for his colorful, tin-glazed terracotta statuary, a technique that he invented and passed on.

Now moving to the left side of the palazzo, we see an entirely new set of motifs. Here it seems that the patron wanted to celebrate his city home in grand style. Here we find what I surmise would have been the main entrance to the home of the patron on the upper floors of this grand but rather modern edifice. The family needed a doorway to reflect their status and they got it. Outlined by trim in a semi Gothic arch the grand wooden double doors make us take notice. They are topped by a metal grill which covers a window to let light into the building. The large use of plate glass alone tells me that this is a 20th century building.

Every worthy Renaissance family needed a balcony from which to see and be seen and this significant decoration would have held several family members at one time. The highly decorated exterior sides of the balcony with its dental molding carries three medallions with Medieval or Renaissance looking carve outs. You might want the pleasures of a modern build, but you want to tie yourself visually to the rich Italian Renaissance background of which you are an entitle heir as a Florentine. Even if you are living in the 20th century.

To reach the balcony from the piano nobile, one needed a doorway and the architect provided a grand one here. Outlined in trim that matches that of the entrance below, this time a round arch is employed as the top. And in the semi-circle enclosed by the arch is more sgraffiti, this time not harkening back to country pastimes, but depicting a contemporary motif of an oversized stylized floral design.

Above the balcony ensuite are the windows demarcating the 2nd floor. (In Italian architecture, if you didn’t know, the first floor of a building is designated as O. What in American would be called the second floor is the what Italians call the piano nobile, also called the first floor. This is where the noble family had their living quarters.)

Oh! how lucky I feel! to live in a place where spring starts before April!

Look at the blooming roses! This is not standard even here at this time of year; this shrub is in a particularly sunny location.

Along the way Lungarno, the weeping willows are coming to life!

The photos below are of one of my favorite early spring blossoming shrubs: commonly called the flowering quince but beautifully known in Latin as Chaenomeles japonica. I love the bright coral-colored blooms! I grow one in my garden in Denver. It blooms much much later than February in that climate.

Unfortunately for me, these gorgeous shrubs are planted down the meridian of a very busy highway and I couldn’t get any good pix because of the zooming traffic. But, you know I did my best!

I spotted one magnolia bud on a tree in my hood. Somebody needs to get out the pruning shears and shape this tree up! It’s got a lot of old growth that needs chopped off.

One of the avenues in my new neighborhood is graced with tens of mature umbrella pines, perhaps my favorite tree of all. It’s hard to get a good picture of these massive things, but I did my best!

Along this avenue I spotted this sculpture. Know nothing about it…yet.

Found a tabernacle, almost impossible to see, attached to a fairly modern building. The Italian tradition of erecting tabernacles along busy walkways has continued at least until the 1950s.

Closer to my apartment building, I came across this interesting juxtaposition of buildings on a block nearby. From what I am learning, my neighborhood was planned by Giuseppe Poggi, a famous architect who made many decisions about how the city of Florence would be developed in the 2nd half of the 19th century. He designed the famous area known as the Piazzale Michelangelo, for example. The first two buildings seen below from my neighborhood, from left to right, look to be original to the late 19th century. The 3rd one down is obviously 20th century. I like the history and being attached to this historic area.

Life is nothing if not interesting here.

In my new home I’m 2 blocks from the Arno river. This last Sunday I decided to take advantage of the glorious afternoon and check out what surprises the Arno near me held. I was not disappointed!

For one thing: little flower blossoms! Oh! what a sight for sore eyes! Three weeks ago I was living in snow and ice in Illinois. Though I do miss seeing my donkey.

One last look at my long winter legs. Pretty soon the shadows will change and I’ll be regular sized again.

Across the Arno I spotted this proud graffiti.

And, last but not least, a poster advertising a play soon to be staged in Florence.

The title of this play is: An Average Little Man (Un borghese piccolo piccolo) Taken from Wikipedia.

An Average Little Man (Italian: Un borghese piccolo piccolo, literally meaning a petty petty bourgeois, also known in English as A Very Little Man) is a 1977 Italian drama film directed by Mario Monicelli. It is based on the novel of the same name written by Vincenzo Cerami. The movie mixes “Italian-Style Comedy” (commedia all’italiana) with psychological drama tragedy. The film was an entrant in the 1977 Cannes Film Festival. In 2008, the film was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that “have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978.”

Plot
Giovanni Vivaldi is a petty bourgeois, modest white-collar worker nearing retirement in a public office in the capital. His life is divided between work and family. With his wife Amalia he shares high hopes for his son, Mario, a newly qualified accountant, not a particularly bright boy who willingly assists his father’s efforts to make him hired in the same office.

The father, in an attempt to guide his son, emphasizes the point of practicing humility in the presence of his superiors at work, and he enrolled himself in a Masonic lodge to help him gain friendships and favoritisms that, at first, he would never hope to have.

Just as the attempts of Giovanni Vivaldi seems to turn to success, his son Mario is killed, hit by a stray bullet during a shootout that erupts following a robbery in which the father and son are accidentally involved.

Misfortune and sufferings consequently distort the lives, beliefs and morality of the Vivaldis. Amalia becomes ill, loses her voice and becomes seriously handicapped. Giovanni, now blinded by grief and hatred, throws himself headlong into an isolated and desperate quest. He identifies his son’s murderer, abducts him, takes him to a secluded cabin and submits him to torture and violence, eventually bringing the killer of his child to a slow death.

Then, for Giovanni arrives – at his set date – his retirement and, only a day later, the death of his wife, who had by now been overcome by her disability.

Giovanni is now prepared with serenity and resignation to live into old age, but a spontaneous verbal confrontation with a young idler revives in him the role of an executioner who will, presumably, kill again.

BTW, I found the movie on Youtube and watched it tonight. It was so 70s: weird and kind of wonderful both.

And that, my friends, was my interesting, sunny and warm Sunday afternoon in Firenze! I had to take off my puffer coat to stay cool.