628a Amtrakistan; Astronaut's View; Renaissance Florence

19:38And then you sent the guitar going end over end all the way across, and then you swam through the air and you grabbed it just before it would crash into the wall, and then you'd mermaid yourself right out of sight into the next floor upstairs. That was so graceful. It was balletic. Yeah, your verbs are all wrong, but they're very, very explanatory because you don't need to swim and you don't need to mermaid and you don't float up. You are weightless. It's magic. You're Superman. You know, you can fly. The things that look magical are like some sort of bizarre, mesmerizing special effect. That's just normal life.

20:15That's the way it is.

20:16Rick Steves:That relates to something I learned by reading your new book, You Are Here. The whole notion of which way is up. You know, in my work, I'm always working with people's ethnocentricity. You know, the British don't drive on the wrong side of the road. You're just looking at it from an American point of view. They drive on the other side of the road, right? Now, you've got something that's related to that, but it's even more fundamental. It's that what is really up and what is really down. And you challenge people to enjoy this photograph that looks upside down to us and resisting the impulse to turn it over.

20:46We want the world to look like a two-dimensional, north-up, clearly defined collection where each country is a different color. That's how everybody sees the world for whatever reason. And of course, it doesn't look anything like that. And it's always orthogonal. You're always looking at – when you look at a piece of paper, it's a straight-on view. But when you're actually looking at the ball of the earth itself, almost everything is on the oblique. It's at an angle. And so things are distorted. And north is never up. But I would send a picture to the ground, and immediately there'd be this hubbub on Twitter of saying, well, you got the picture sideways, Scott, as if I was completely in the wrong, and it just made me laugh every time.

21:24Rick Steves:This is Travel with Rick Steves, and we're traveling beyond orthogonogality. And we're talking to Commander Chris Hadfield, who spent, well, how many times? You went around the world 2 ,336 times in 146 days. On my third flight. All told, 2 ,593, I think, over the three space flights. Oh, you show off. I haven't even been around the world once. And you do it in 90, what, 92 minutes. 92 minutes. Now, do you ever think that 500 years ago, the 500th anniversary of Magellan sailing around the planet, you make 16 round trips in one day. Magellan spent a life, he died halfway through, and it was still a success, you know.

22:01Yeah, some of his crew made it the whole way. Yeah, you think about that, actually, Rick, all the time. You look down. As you come across the Sahara, if you look right, You can see all the way down to the Great Rift and Lake Victoria. And if you look left, you can see all the way to Cairo and the Mediterranean. You can see the whole length of the Nile just by sweeping your head left and right. And when you think of the thousands of years of history along that river and the explorers and trying to find the source of the Nile, the Blue Nile and all that, and you just move your chin and it's right there.

22:33And you cross the Atlantic in just a few minutes, and the all-pervasive feeling of the historic struggles that have allowed us to understand our planet, they're right with you the whole time. You really see a global perspective, but with a huge respect for the history that got us where we are.

22:49Rick Steves:You talk about just how your perspective changes, you know, how small we are, but also just the slice in time, too, to kind of appreciate geological time as well as how little we are in the big scheme of things. The geology of the world, you know, we live in the little pockets of cities and almost everybody lives in a city. So you forget the vast swaths of the world that are harder to live in but that are mostly exposed rock or exposed sand or someplace it's really hard to build a septic system in a house. But those ones are the ones you're constantly looking at when you're in a spaceship. You see the huge barren swept rock that is on the edge of say the Sahara or by the Gobi Desert as you're coming down out of the Himalayas or the empty quarter down on the peninsula.

23:35It's vast and it's surreal looking at when the sculpture is time and wind and an immense dryness has turned it into shapes that are otherworldly. And that's most of what you see of the world is the nature of it. and only occasionally do you see a pocket of a bunch of people living together.

23:54Rick Steves:Oh, man, and just to think of it as the sculptor is nature, not Michelangelo, but nature. We're time-traveling in the Travel with Rick Steves show archives with a conversation we had with Colonel Chris Hadfield back when he had just published his remarkable close-up photos of Earth from the International Space Station. The book is called You Are Here. And, Chris, you're talking about the sweep of things. I love the way you commented and you proved it with a photograph, a beautiful photograph, that you can see Havana in Cuba and Washington, D.C. at the same time from, what are you, 250 miles up in the air?

24:26Sometimes you get really enamored with something that's straight below you. But the beauty of the space station is we built this huge, big, bulging blister of a window. And so it's got a great big window that faces square down to the Earth like a glass-bottomed boat, but it's got windows all around the side. And you need to remind yourself to raise your eyes to the horizon because that's when suddenly you can see from Havana all the way to D.C. or you see from the Yucatan all the way up to coast. You can follow the San Andreas Fault its whole length just by tracing it with your eye as you see so much of the world in just a careless glance.

25:02Rick Steves:Chris, in your book you talked as a photographer about kind of getting all excited. The weather's going to be good and we're going to see the Nile way up at its source or we're going to check out Ayers Rock in Australia. If we get a glimpse of it, the weather's good, we're in the right track. and then you're going at 17 ,000 miles an hour, right? So if you don't get it right, not only do you have to go around the world again, but you have to wait for the weather and the right trajectory and all that sort of stuff. It must have been really fun for you to be aware of what's coming up and anticipating with your camera, but then realizing if you blink, you miss it.

25:34Rick Steves:What's it like going 17 ,000 miles an hour? I'd wake up in the morning and I'd have a look at our ground track for the day. I'd look at where the 16 orbits, because the world turns underneath you. So every time you come around, it's a new part of the world. And I would look and see, oh, today we're going right smack dab over top of whatever, the Panama Canal. Everyone wants to get a picture of the Panama Canal on a sunny day because it's almost always cloudy somewhere there. And so I would wait. And I'd come around. I'd set my alarm on my wristwatch. And so somewhere about Hawaii, you'd go ripping over to the window and you'd get the camera and be looking.

26:07And you'd come down crossing Central America. And you'd look ahead and you'd go, oh, it's cloudy again. And then so you'd wait another week. But we've been living on the space station for 14 years. And the beauty of being up there for months and months at a time is you can say, oh, I didn't get it today, but I'll get it next month when things line up right.

26:27Rick Steves:Chris, when you were taking these beautiful photographs that fill your book, who owns these photographs? Does NASA just let you take the photographs and do with them what you like? What kind of legalities are there? We all own those photographs. They belong to everybody. And that's, in fact, my wife and my prophet from the book all goes to charity because those pictures belong to everybody. Is that because you're a nice guy or is that because it's a requirement? No, I was a government employee using government equipment on government time. But in truth, they ought to belong to everybody. Imagine those pictures that the guys on the way back from the moon where they saw the whole globe for the first time.

27:00That's not a personal photo. That's a photo for every person that exists. I like this book even more. And there's no difference.

27:05Rick Steves:I just suddenly like this book even more. This is beautiful. Even before Chris Hadfield's video of Space Oddity went viral on the Internet, he was a member of an all-astronaut rock and roll band. He's got dozens of space videos up on his own YouTube channel. And even the airport in his hometown of Sarnia in Ontario is named after him. Colonel Hadfield's book of Earth close-ups from the International Space Station is called You Are Here, Around the World in 92 Minutes. Now, the title of your other book is The Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, and then the subtitle is what going to space taught me about ingenuity, determination, and being prepared for anything.

27:44Rick Steves:Of course, you can look out that beautiful window and enjoy the view and ponder the world, but this other book deals with something even broader. Talk about the value of going to space from just being back on Earth and better understanding life. In order to do something as complex and as challenging and as right on the edge of our capability, but also as dangerous as flying in space. You can't just do that using regular ideas and regular behaviors and regular ways of dealing with stuff. You kind of need to exaggerate and change how you do things. I observed over the 20 years, especially speaking in schools and to groups over those 20 years, I observed that the things that we have had to learn how to change have practical application for everybody.

28:28How do you separate danger and fear? How do you prepare for something that is one chance only and optimize your chances of success? How do you do all that stuff? And so the purpose of that book was really to be useful, to try and tell some space stories, but use them really to let people maybe pick out some behaviors or ideas for themselves that might help them then face life on Earth more successfully.

28:53Rick Steves:Wow. So it occurs to me, this is a travel show on the radio, and we're talking to one of the ultimate travelers, a man who's lived in the space station. And just like travel on Earth gives you different perspective, traveling over Earth gives you even more of a different perspective. And then when you get back down into the rest of your life, you've got skills that you learn from that travel that can help you live better. I think it gives you not just the visual perspective, but visual perspective is important, of course. I think it helps you appreciate the finer points of everything that you look at, but also more of a temporal perspective, a perspective of time, a perspective of distance, maybe an increased feeling of contentment.

29:34And oddly enough, Rick, to go around the world a hundred times, it increases your optimism. You see the world for what it truly is, the immensity of it and the age of it and the patience of it and the inherent beauty of it. And it pulls away your focus from the little nitnoy day-to-day stuff that's going on in your household, on your street or in your little town or whatever, which of course is important, but it's often blown way out of importance. And travel helps, I think, settle things into their proper settings. And the amount of travel that we do on the space station, suddenly you see the whole world that way as one place with all of us together on it.

30:15And you come back with a great sense of calm and optimism about the future of the whole thing together.

30:20Rick Steves:You see things in a more true perspective. In an honest perspective, not as distorted by a television camera or an excited reporter or a transient impression of it. And that was really the motivation in my second book. I took 45 ,000 pictures and I tried to choose the 190 that just showed the world without telling people what to think. Just say, this is actually how varied and interesting and magnificent and ugly and beautiful and complete our world is. And think about it. And where you are is just a part of that one long joint continuum.

31:25Rick Steves:Chris Hadfield's photos are published in You Are Here, around the world in 92 minutes. His autobiography is An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. Colonel Hadfield's also written a children's book about facing your fears called The Darkest Dark and a series of space thrillers set in the Cold War era. He hosts a podcast called Chris Hadfield on Energy and his website is chrishadfield.ca. And we come down to earth to the heart of the Italian Renaissance on the streets of Florence, next on Travel with Rick Steves.

32:00Rick Steves:It was the right time and the right place, Florence, Italy, in 1401. That's when the decorative brass baptistry doors were dedicated at the cathedral in the center of town. And it tells us that the classical ideals of the Greek and Roman world were being reawakened in what today we call the Renaissance. To help us explore the sites connected to the greatest achievements of the Renaissance as we stroll the streets of Florence, we're joined by tour guide and art history scholar Anna Piperato. Anna's an American from Massachusetts who studied art history in Italy. Her studies awakened a love of the stories and art of this period, so she makes her home now in Tuscany.

32:37Rick Steves:Anna, thanks for being here. Thank you, Rick. Buongiorno. So what is the Renaissance? Well, the Renaissance is a period of time that the word itself means rebirth, but it's a rebirth of classical culture in a very specific time and place, Florence in the 15th century. So it would be the 1400s. And why Italy? Why Florence? Well, gosh, there was something in the water, perhaps. Well, I should say the wine. The wine, right. Yes, but it was really a time of economic prosperity under that family that we've all heard about, the Medici. And when you have a town that's in a period of relative peace with relative economic prosperity, then you have the time to make art.

33:17So you've got this big banking family that has lots of money, and art is cool, and I guess if you pay money for artists, you get more people becoming artists and more focus on that. Yes, and then, of course, you get competition, and competition breeds creativity. Well, speaking about competition, so they have the new baptistry, and the leaders of the city say, well, they don't just say, have Pedro do it. They say, let's have a competition. Exactly, and in the year 1401, the baptistry is a much, much more ancient building. It's huge in the center of Florence, right by the cathedral. And they wanted to make doors.

33:50They said, well, what kind of doors shall we make? Let's have a competition. And the best metalsmiths in Florence and in Siena and Tuscany entered this contest to make a quattrofoil with the scene of the sacrifice of Isaac. And we have two panels remaining, so you can be the judge, but I'll tell you who won. It was Lorenzo Ghiberti. Uh-huh. What's a quattrofoil? You're an art historian. You lost me there. Well, quattro means four. So a four-leaf kind of, oh gosh. Like a four-leaf clover of art or something like that? Inside of which you have to make a scene. Oh, okay. So it's a... A gothic quatrefoil, we call it.

34:23And the big deal was Ghiberti was merging mathematics with art in order to show three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. Yes. So they were relief panels on the door. So there's not a lot of three-dimensional space. But he was able to show the scene, the sacrifice of Isaac from the Old Testament, in a very dramatic way. And also, the Florentines are known for being a little bit stingy. And he was able to cast this bronze quatrefoil in only two casts, as opposed to seven, which is the other panel that... So part of the reason he won is it would save the city money. Of course. Wow. The banking city is very aware of these things.

34:58So we've got this Ghiberti baptistry doors and so on, and they say that kicked off the Renaissance. How could that event kick off the Renaissance? Well, it's hard with all of these movements, it's hard to say when something begins or ends. And of course, we could say the Renaissance began even at the end of the 1200s, early 1300s. But then, you know, 1348, some little rats went by, fleas actually, and the Black Death kind of just put a pause on everything. So they were on the verge of having this cultural explosion, this new smart age. Yes. And then the plague hit and it knocked everybody back.

35:30Exactly. And it was impoverished, and then we don't have any money or concern for great art here. Exactly. We've got to survive. Right. So when Florence especially was able to pick itself back up again, some cities like Siena never fully recovered, but Florence did. And they went far ahead, shall we say, than where they were before. Okay. Well, this is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Anna Piperato. She's a guide from Italy, and her specialty is Florentine art and Renaissance art. And we're going to go on a Florentine Renaissance walk now. And Anna, if you're going to take a walk across town, let's just do a little short walk and we can piece it together.

36:05Where should we start? Well, I think a great place to start would be the Piazza Santissima Annunziata. Ooh, say that again. I love that word. Piazza Santissima Annunziata, the piazza, the square of the most holy annunciation. Okay, so this is the square of the holy annunciation, and why would we start there? Well, it's a great place to start because we've just talked about the doors, and I mentioned that another panel survived. It was by a guy called Brunelleschi. He lost the competition, And rather than say, I'm going to become a better metalsmith in Florence, he's like, I'm out of here. Ciao, ciao.

36:33And he leaves. He goes to Rome. He goes on a walkabout and he discovers the classical orders of ancient Rome. And he comes back to Florence. And in 1419, he is commissioned by the Silk Guild, which also employed metalsmiths to make the Hospital of the Innocents. And the Hospital of the Innocents is the first example of Renaissance architecture that we have in Florence. and it's not just a beautiful building but the function of the Hospital of the Innocents really embodies the humanistic spirit that is now running through Florence. Humanism. Yes. Because I love this term humanism. It's part of the Renaissance.

37:06It's part of the birth of the modern world. Before it was the opposite of humanism. We're just little worthless creatures at God's mercy, you know, and now there's a sort of a pride and a dignity. It's not anti-religious but it's a new way to look at things. What is humanism? Well, it kind of does what it says on the tin, right? human. If God made us in his image, then surely some part of us must be divine. And the perfect shapes, of course, you know, the triangle neck represents the Trinity. But if you look at the Piazza Santissima Annunziata and the Hospital of the Innocents, you have the square and the circle.

37:38And just think of the Vitruvian man. And if you go to Italy, look at your one euro coin, because there's a man who fits perfectly in a square, which is finite, but perfect, mortal, and a man also fits perfectly in the circle, which is infinite and divine. We are both human and divine. I love it. I love the way you teach that. Now from there, you look down the street and you see this dome that just towers like a monster over the city. It's just like, it's massive compared to the architecture. And you think, 500 years ago, that was really massive. So let's walk to the dome and tell us about that.

38:11So it's wonderful. From that piazza, you walk down Via dei Servi and you see that imposing dome, which was by Brunelleschi again. So he leaves. He's not a metalsmith. He becomes the greatest architect of Renaissance Florence. And his style goes throughout the centuries, really. He's classic. And the dome was a feat of Renaissance architecture. The cathedral itself is the second cathedral on that same site. And that was Gothic, basically, wasn't it? Yes, it was Gothic. Started in 1296. And it was enlarged when the Florentines heard the Sienese wanted to make a larger cathedral. They said, no, we're going to make a larger cathedral.

38:45But problem, we have this massive church and a massive hole, and we don't know how to make the massive dome that will cover it. So they built the church with the hole, not putting a Gothic spire on it, but waiting until they could do something more modern. Yes. And we even have a 14th century fresco that shows the dome that the Florentines knew they wanted. And it wasn't until Brunelleschi, after he did the Hospital of the Innocents in 1420, he said, I know how to do this. Now that dome had quite an impact because I remember when Michelangelo was building the dome in Rome for the Vatican for the Pope.

39:16Yes. And Michelangelo was a Florentine. He said, I can build you a bigger dome, but it's not going to be more beautiful than its sister in Florence in my hometown, the Dome of Brunelleschi. And Michelangelo, you have to imagine when you're taking this Renaissance walk, Michelangelo took the same walk. Florence was his teacher. All the architects and the artists that we see, he saw as well. So he'd be inspired. And the Dome is this medieval or this Christian sort of ensemble. You've always got the church, you've got the baptistry, and you've got the bell tower. Yes. And this is quite a bell tower, Giotto's Tower.

39:46Yes. Giotto started the bell tower in the 1300s. And then, of course, well, he died, as people sometimes do. And it was continued. And it's this massive, massive bell tower that was then finished at the end of the 1300s. and in the 1400s, decorated by the likes of Andrea Pisano in the 1300s and Donatello in the 1400s. So people don't realize it, but they're walking under an outdoor art gallery. Each niche is with a statue by a very important sculptor. Probably today they're modern replacements to get them out of the acidic air. And one thing we should mention is just behind that Duomo, there's an amazing museum, the Museo del Duomo, the museum of the cathedral, where the original art from that great church and the bell tower is kept.

40:26And they've just redone it, and it's absolutely spectacular, and that's where the original doors of the baptistry are located, the original statues from the bell tower, and all sorts of wonderful things that show you how Brunelleschi made that dome, including simple inventions like pulleys with gears in them so that the pack animals wouldn't have to be taken off to go up and down. It's a fascinating, intimate look at that amazing cathedral. And the amazing thing to me is half of the tourists are lining up to get into the Uffizi Gallery and the Academia to see David. And the Museo del Duomo, the museum of the cathedral, I mean, there's people there, but it's never a long line to get in.

41:00No, and it's absolutely worth your time to go there. I highly recommend it. This is Travel with Rick Steves, and we are taking a Renaissance walk, and our guide is Anna Piperato. Anna lives in Siena. She guides all over Italy, and her specialty is Italian art. Now, from the Duomo, we're going to walk down to the river, and as we walk, we find sort of the main pedestrian drag of old Florence, and it happens to be an old Roman road, doesn't it? Yes. In fact, part of the foundations of the cathedral lie on the old Roman walls. So the road that we're going to go down now from the cathedral is called Via dei Calcaiwali.

41:38Wow. Calcaiwali. It's very difficult to say with all those vowels. I just call it calts. Via Celts. You can call it what you want to call it. Calcaiwali. Okay. Calcaiwali. So we're walking down from the cathedral on an old Roman road. This is a grid plan because the Romans always had the same kind of rectangular, fortified town with two streets that cut through it. And on the middle would probably be the Forum. Exactly. That's exactly where it was. And as a matter of fact, you come to the Forum. Yeah. So if you go down the Via dei Calcai Wali, well, actually, you'd go down Via Roma to get to the Forum.

42:07That makes sense, doesn't it? But basically, the Forum is right where the Cardus and the Decumanus would meet, the East-West Road and the North-South Roads. and up until the 19th century you could see the old Roman Forum but they decided to redo everything after unification and make Florence modern. Because Florence was the capital of it when they newly united Italy and they needed something grand. Exactly. So they cleared that out and you've got this huge sort of modern triumphal arch there today and it's a cool square where everybody gets together. There's a carousel, there's strolling thieves, there's outdoor cafes.

42:39It's quite a place to see and be seen and a little Roman column. Exactly. I think it's the only Roman thing you see when you walk around town. Yeah, pretty much so. Yeah. But there's a church right a little farther down the via Calzeole, which is very important for art historians. It's in every art textbook. Oh, it's a fantastic building that surprisingly some people often miss. It's called Orsa Michele. Orsa Michele. And it's this huge rectangular building filled with niches with statues on them. And that was really a place for the guilds of Florence because we had the Republic of Florence that was ruled by the guilds, these mercantile...

43:12Like unions, like labor unions. Labor unions, thank you very much. Labor unions. So the guys that make the shoes and the guys that were the carpenters and the guys that were the roofers, and sometimes they wanted to advertise. Yeah, they wanted to advertise what they did, who their patron saint was, and so they had this idea that the niche should be dedicated to the patron saints of the guild. So, for example, the Armorer's Guild, their patron saint is St. George, and Donatello made a wonderful St. George, and he originally would have had a helmet and a sword so you could see what the Armorer's Guild was capable of making.

43:42So a few steps past that church, We get to the big square, and in front of it is the palace. Yes, we come to Piazza della Signoria, where there was the Palazzo della Signoria, which we now call Palazzo Vecchio, which is still the town hall of Florence today. And you'll recognize Michelangelo's David right in front of it. And it's a copy today. It's ugly, if I may say, because the real David is in the Accademia. You know, it's funny because it wouldn't seem ugly on its own. No. You all know what the real David looks like. And then you look at this thing, and it looks like somebody's spit it out of a little toy.

44:13The real David breathes. He's got blood coursing through those veins. But David was a symbol of the Republic of Florence, right? The little guy against the big enemy. And so he protected the Republic of Florence for many, many years. So that was an apt mascot for Florence, wasn't it? I mean, it was Florence against the other city-states. Back then it was city-state against city-state. Yes. And they had their own pride. And David, you know, the shepherd boy that slayed the giant because God was on his side. Exactly. And what's funny is we talked about humanism before. and of course David is an Old Testament hero.

44:45On the other side of the door of the Palazzo Vecchio we have Hercules, who's a pagan symbol, but he relates to Christianity because he's also half man and half divine.

44:55Rick Steves:We're exploring the birthplace of the Renaissance, Florence, Italy, with art history tour guide, Anna Piperato. Anna includes a list of upcoming events in Tuscany on her website, sienaitalytours.com. Our show archives include conversations about Florence and the Renaissance with authors Salman Rushdie and historians William E. Wallace and Miles J. Unger, plus more street tours of Florence. You can hear them from the Travel with Rick Steves archives at ricksteves.com slash radio. So, Anna, we've got the Palace of the Medici family. That's the banking family that kind of paid for all this stuff to a certain degree.

45:34And now, just a few steps away, is the river. What are we going to find when we go from the Medici Palace down to the Arno River? Okay, so then you're going to follow David's gaze, as it were, and kind of walk through this big piazza that's the piazza of the uffizi. Uffizi means offices, but it, of course, is now the collection, the greatest collection of Renaissance art in the world. So that was the offices of the city government. Yes, the offices of the Medici and of the government. And then one of the first art collections in the world, which now, thankfully, is open to the public. It's in the running for my favorite art collection anywhere because I love Italian paintings.

46:09That's saying something. You got it. And that's just filling the whole courtyard up on the high floor. Exactly. But we're going to keep walking through that courtyard now. And you're going to pass through a lot of, you know, statues of famous men, famous Tuscan men staring down at you. Because the Renaissance is not just art. It's not just the four ninja turtles, you know, Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo, and Raphael. But you also have these magnificent patrons of the arts, like Lorenzo the Magnificent. Right. Right. A guy with quite no problem with his ego. Exactly. Exactly. And political science, Niccolo Machiavelli, we all know that word Machiavellian, right?

46:42The Indians justify the means. He was Florentine. He was Florentine in the 15th century. He knew Lorenzo the Magnificent and his family. You also have, of course, later scientists and inventors. You've got Dante. Oh, Dante, the father of the Italian language. Right there. Dante Alighieri. And Amerigo Vespucci. I've never heard of him. Exactly. And so this stuff is not just Italian. This is part of our American history as well. because when Amarigo Vespucci went to the States, it wasn't the States then, but when he went to the New World, and in fact, our continents were named after this Florentine.

47:13Yeah. So we finally then pass that courtyard and we belly up to the banister and ahead of us is the Arno River and we look to our right and we see the bridge that people just love to see, the Ponte Vecchio. Yes, and Ponte Vecchio, the name doesn't actually mean anything interesting. It just means old bridge because there would have been many more bridges along the Arno River, but of course, during the Second World War, It was the Germans, they destroyed the train station and the bridges because they had to destroy all means of communication, as it were. But even the German generals said, no, this bridge is too beautiful to destroy.

47:44So they had the buildings on either side bombed so the bridge itself was preserved, but as a means of passage, it was no longer viable. So I'm not used to thinking Nazi generals, but there's one guy we can say, danke. Or let's say grazie. He had some good taste in art anyway. Okay, good. So that really is a short walk, and it covers really so much of the art that really inspired us to move forward into the modern age. Indeed, indeed. And it's a very pleasurable walk. And if I may, do it first thing in the morning and watch the city wake up with you, and you can have all those things to yourself.

48:18And again, imagine yourself back 500 years seeing these things come up for the first time. And everything we saw was out of doors. You could do it after dinner, too. Totally free. Everybody's back in their hotels. It's cool. And you can review all of these great, great souvenirs of the city that really kicked off the modern world as far as art and high culture goes, Florence. Anna, it is just exhilarating. Your enthusiasm and your passion for this is contagious. I want to go to Florence. And if I was with you and you wanted to take me to one little moment, one site, indoors or out, where I could really be inspired by how important the Renaissance was, how beautiful it was for civilization, where would you take me?

49:00This might be one of the hardest questions anyone's ever asked me, but I love the Bargello. The Bargello is a sculpture museum, and there's a statue in there by Donatello, the greatest 15th century sculpture, and it's one of his Davids. It's the bronze David, so you have this little boy who has just defeated the giant. He's naked except for boots and a hat, and he is the most Italian David you've ever seen because he's just full of confidence. And yeah, I did that. And the statue is not perfect. There are holes in it. He's a little bit feminine and he's still confident. Yeah, but he's prepubescent and he's...

49:35Rick Steves:He's just sort of exquisite. He's exquisite, even though he's not perfect. He's perfectly imperfect because Donatello was someone who was taking risks with his bronze casting. It's the symbol of the city. It was commissioned by the Medici. It was meant to be seen in the courtyard of the Medici Palace, a symbol of Republican Florence, a symbol of the rebirth of classical culture. and just a really gorgeous thing to look at because life, as messy as it can be, is also beautiful. And the Medici did actually really believe in that. And this is art for art's sake. It's a celebration of exactly what you said, humanism.

50:11Humanism. Okay, it is also propagandistic. We're talking about a major family here in the 15th century, but we can also look at it art for art's sake. It's fantastic. The message is there and the beauty is there. David by Donatello in the Pargello.

50:23Rick Steves:Yes. There's artistic treasure none can measure here in Florence. Great is every statue looking at you here in Florence. Travel with Rick Steves is produced at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington by Tim Tatton, Kaz Merhal, and Donna Bardsley. Andrew Akeling and Sherry Court upload the shows to our website. Our theme music was written and performed by Jerry Frank. You can find links to our guests and search the show archives at ricksteves.com slash radio. Grazie mille. Ciao.

51:19Rick Steves:And for a candid and fun-loving insight into each itinerary, don't miss our archive of hundreds of tour scrapbooks created by tour alums competing in our annual contest to win a free tour. And independent travelers can also learn from the day-to-day descriptions of our smartly-designed tour itineraries. All of that is at ricksteves.com.