Bits & Pieces

    Pezzi e cianfrusaglie- That's how the Italians say bits and pieces. And that's what I have for this post about Italy. I've already posted a chronological description of our November tour, but I have some bits and pieces that I'd like to display.

  Before Venice, we had been in Amsterdam. I wondered if anyone swam in the canals there. Swimming is forbidden in most canals for safety reasons, but there are a few designated swimming areas in the canal system. The canals occasionally freeze so there's hockey too. 

  Swimming is forbidden in the Venice canals because the canals are part of the sewerage system. Also, you might get hit by a motorboat. But I can imagine a drunk tourist late at night risking the $500 fine.

  When we arrived in Florence, our bus dropped us off by a little park with a statue of Savonarola. I had a vague memory that Savonarola had been a bad dude. Sabra, our tour director, said that Savonarola was the bonfire of the vanities guy. 

  Savonarola was a fifteenth century Dominican preaching friar. He was disgusted with the voluptuous lifestyle of the Florentines and preached hellfire and damnation. 

He was a rabble rouser and got the young people on his side. They chased the Medici rulers out of town and established a republic with Savonarola as dictator. Savonarola ordered the gathering of objectionable items such as nude paintings, wigs and makeup, love poetry, games and dice, and music and musical instruments for the famous bonfires. 

  Savonarola and Florence itself did well for a few years. His mistake was in not cooperating with the pope who excommunicated him in 1497. The pope had lots of temporal power in those days and the Florentines got nervous. 

  Savonarola offered to undergo a trial by fire to prove God was on his side. But he had second thoughts at the last minute and lost all credibility with the people. Machiavelli was a contemporary and observed in his book The Prince, "Once you lose the mob, you're done for.” Savonarola was tried, hanged, and his body burned on the site of the vanities bonfires. 

  The soon-to-emerge Protestants loved Savonarola because he called the Church a whore. Martin Luther was a fan. The statue of Savonarola went up in the nineteen hundreds when Italy was trying to unify and the pope was getting in the way. The statue was saying- In your face, papa. 

"All is vanity..."

   While passing along an arcade outside the Uffizi Museum in Florence, we saw a line of 28 statues of famous men of Florence. Genius needs the proper setting to flourish and Florence in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries provided that setting, at least for men.  I was proud of myself for recognizing 12 of the 28 heroes, including Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, etc.

  Good old Amerigo Vespucci's statue was among the greats. Amerigo had worked in Spain for a Florintine businessman during the age of discovery. When his patron died, Amerigo married a Spanish woman with connections and he travelled on a couple of voyages to the New World. He may or may not have written letters about the land he visited, which is now known as Brazil. Whoever wrote the letters realized this land was not Asia, but a new continent or continents. So when the German mapmaker Waldseemüeller made his world map in 1507, he named the new continents Amerige. 

  I've always felt funny having my home continent(s) named on such flimsy grounds. But Amerigo's statue in Florence inspired me to look up the meanings of the names of the other continents.

Europe: Princess raped by Zeus

Asia: East 

Australia: South

Antarctica: Opposite the Bear

Africa: No one knows

So America looks good enough as a name after all. 

Better than North and South Columbia.

Wait...there's more.