The greatest painting ever made!

 

The greatest painting ever made is...

Oh my god, this is so exciting!

I'm on the edge of my seat!

The greatest painting ever made is...

The Deposition from the Cross by Jacopo Pontormo!

Wait, why isn't everybody more amazed and excited? 

Oh, right, because this is the third part of our analysis of this painting.

 

You want to see the painting? 

Okay, here is a barely adequate reproduction to get us warmed up:

Now, even though we are on the third and final part of our review of this greatest painting, parts one and two have merely set the stage and provided the context for our discussion today. So finally there's going to be tons of stuff today actually about the Deposition!

But first let's review as briefly as possible so we're all set to discuss this masterpiece like we're all big time Art History Majors.

1. Deposition from the Cross is the greatest painting ever, better than any other, with the understanding that there are many other greatest ever paintings, also better than any others. Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it.

2. There were three sequential periods in art broadly around the time of this painting; Renaissance, then Mannerism, then Baroque. They are like an Oreo cookie. Renaissance is the first cookie and was about harmony, balance, developing naturalism, and the birth of individual celebrity genius. Baroque is the second cookie naturally progressing from the first, being about applying that mastery of naturalism to our own recognizable world and all its passionate, gritty reality. In between the two lay the strange and mercurial cream of the Oreo, Mannerism, the period which our painting by Pontormo occupies the very epicenter of.

3. Mannerism was the wild and crazy artistic answer to "What do you do when you've mastered naturalism and perfect anatomy and 3D rendering through linear perspective?" With the answer being: 

You mess with it. 

4. Michelangelo, genius of the Renaissance, kicked off Mannerism by getting so good at Renaissance art that he was bored of it (see hand, below, for example of perfected Renaissance naturalism).

So Michelangelo invented (sort of) Mannerism, taking complete command of the naturalism of Renaissance art and twisting it to the artist's vision, understanding, and expressions of heightened elegance. This, as seen below, in an example of his Sistine Ceiling, which is the first, great, and wildly influential, Mannerist work.

Now we're up to date!

Here is Jacopo Pontormo:

Hey, wait, we recognize this guy.

Where do we know him from?

Oh yeah, there he is. The figure on the far right in our painting, kind of in the back there.

Hi Jacopo! (One day maybe I'll tell you about his food journals!)

The best place I have ever been for looking at art, just wandering in someplace and looking at art, is Rome. It's not that there aren't dozens of places to pay to go see amazing art, or even legendary museums with blood curdlingly long lines and oppressive crowd control (hello Vatican Museum!), but you can also just wander into any number of mostly churches and see Raphael frescoes ignored in the corner, or a Michelangelo sculpture with a few velvet ropes protecting it, or countless Caravaggio paintings in dark side chapels that you will find pictures of in every reputable book on the history of art, and that are now just... sitting there, for you, in the dark.

But The Deposition (as we will henceforth call it) is in Florence. 

And Florence, while featuring nearly as great and vast a collection of art as Rome, does not have much one can just wander into, free and half ignored, and can have to yourself. Even though there is plenty of legendary Florence art socked away in churches and cloisters and side aspses and whatnot, they've done a fairly serious job of monetizing the lot of them, and making a little mini museum out of everything. 

But there is one exception.

The Deposition. 

By Pontormo. 

Yep this one, here it is, in situ:

Now, amazingly, this little chapel, the Capponi Chapel, was designed by one of the most important architects ever, Brunelleschi, the same guy who designed the Florence Cathedral Dome, one of the greatest feats in the entire history of Architecture! 

But we don't have time to go into all that. 

We'll just say Pontormo was asked (hired?) to decorate it.

This Capponi Chapel is in Santa Felicita, a modest church in (sort of) the heart of Florence. I say "sort of" because Santa Felicita really is pretty central, right near the Ponte Vecchio (the famous bridge) and just down the street from the Pitti Palace. 

But it is on the "wrong" side of the river, in the neighborhood called Oltrarno. So, "sort of".

Anyway, nice place, convenient location, free admission. I mean, one can just walk right into this church, Santa Felicita, and see the greatest painting ever made. That's how my wife and I saw it. It was crowded outside, but we were all alone with the painting. It's a pretty amazing thing. 

But you might be able to pick out a problem.

Yes, it's behind a cage. 

So that's kind of too bad.

Pontormo's Deposition is a picture of when Jesus's friends and family take him down from the cross after he's dead. That's why everyone looks pretty gobsmacked in the painting. Like:

I think that's Mary. And then there's this guy:

God I love their strange, almost elfen rounded faces, but I mustn't get sidetracked. Because my point is that even with all the weird, wild, Mannerist craziness in this painting, it is fair to start with this:

1. It is full of feeling. 

The Messiah guy, who was supposedly super nice and generous and wise, was institutionally murdered in an unbelievably brutal way, God on Earth was killed, and these people are brokenhearted! They are wandering, almost lost with grief, with his body, and with nowhere to go. It's terrible.

Remember how I said Mannerism came after The Renaissance and it was like they already mastered anatomy and naturalism and space and rendering in the Renaissance, so the Mannerists were like: 

Let's mess with it?

That doesn't mean they hadn't mastered all those things too. Remember Michelangelo's hand of David above as my example of perfecting representation? This painting is full of warped laws of physics, strange elongations, crazy colors, and twisting poses, but, check out, for example, this hand by Pontormo:

When Pontormo paints a pink lobster 9-foot crouching carrier of Christ it's not because he doesn't know how to do the perfect normal version at full on Rembrandt level. 

What I'm saying is: This painting is full astonishing rendering. 

It's just got some bigger fish to fry too.

Oh, and by the way. Do you know how many hands I counted in this painting? Eleven.

That's also the number of people in this painting.

It probably means something.

So what all is in this painting:

11 people with 11 hands visible

Some featureless ground that sort of disappears

A tiny cloud in the upper left

Enough pretty, colorful fabric that one could probably wrap up the moon in it.

That's all. 

No hill.

No strangers.

No cross.

Fun fact:

Brunelleschi, who designed this chapel, is generally credited as being the person who described and articulated the rules for linear perspective. This may have done more to change western painting than anything else ever. It ruled painting for 500 years and created the naturalism of space in painting according to scientific and mathematic principals.

But get this: Pontormo, painting said chapel many years later, fully versed in linear perspective, is nevertheless having none of that. Figures are floating in air, rising up (maybe that's why he put in a cloud, though it's a sad little gray one). There is no ground. No horizon. Not really even sky. And no linear perspective!

 Here, look at this guy again:

He's carrying the larger part of a dead Christ, crouched awkwardly, and it's like he's floating on his toes. Feet rise away from him on cloth, off the ground, into nothing.

He curves, he floats, he grieves. He's resplendent in gold and pewter and pink and sadness.

But look at it: everyone is floating, rising, lamenting, twirling, grieving, swirling. It's like a dance with everything curving and curling into everything else. The curve of the pink back. The curve of Christ's torso and thighs. The curve of Mary's head through her reaching arm, the curve of the leaning figure above her, and on and on.

Christ has died and they are lost, in space and time and purpose and grief.

It's pretty neat.

They are burdened with a dead god and it's beautiful and terrible.

It's a good painting.

Museum review: The Bargello

Name of Museum:

Bargello

or

Museo Nazionale del Bargello if you like



Tagline:

If they kept The David by Michelangelo here The David would be more improved by it than the Bargello.

or, similarly

Oh shit, Bernini actually is better than Michelangelo!

or even:

The best sculpture museum.

No, that's all, just... the... best... sculpture... museum, you know, on Earth.


Overall rating (not a strict average of the below) out of 100:

100, but I'm being pretty nitpicky to score it so low. Sorry. I'm working on being less critical.


Hours:

Okay, these are a bit weird, and though I'm usually pretty organized about things like museum times, we for some reason decided to assume this would have fairly normal museum hours and approached it casually. So even though I had their hours in my pocket, we had to go here three times before it was open because we never bothered to consult them. Still, the Bargello's extraordinarily central location made this hit and miss approach the sort of thing we were content to indulge.

Also I'm pretty sure they love to change and have special hours regularly so take the below with a grain of salt. There can be better or worse hours at the drop of a hat. It's also cute how when they are closed they look kind of like they've never been opened and will never open again. They look positively boarded up!

Closed Monday.
Tu-Th: 8:15 to 1:50
F: 8:15 to 5:20 (Wooo! Live it up Bargello!)
Sat.: 8:15 to 1:50
Sun.: 8:15 to 1:20 (you can't possibly expect them to keep those late night party hours on Sunday like they do on Saturday!)


Quality of building architecture:

Oddly... perfect. Some of that is simply a tribute to it being 750 years old, which is the kind of thing that improves nearly any building. Basically (from the outside) it's like a single great castle tower, plopped down charmingly in the middle of town.


Quality of interior design and display:

Oh. Am I supposed to score this? Er, many stars! Twenty? More than everywhere else? I'm not sure I've ever enjoyed a museum layout/interior more. Compact yet deceptively large, it's built around a courtyard and it's not like anywhere I've ever been, except maybe it's a little like a ruined castle? Except it's not ruined and it's full of wonders. I kept thinking: well, that must be it for the museum, when suddenly there was a whole other warren of rooms, another floor, or a hallway full of bronze animals, including a turkey. A turkey!


General location in the World:

Where, as the fable goes, Europe woke up from the dark ages: Florence. In The Bargello go ahead and believe this as you will. It's easy enough to do.


More specific location in city:

800 feet from the best gelateria in town, Dei Neri, as the crow flies. But giving you directions between the two would take hours. Just look for the crenelated tower with a crenelated tower. No, not that one. That one.


Cost and entrance fees:

8 euros. This is probably the most unreasonably cheap thing in Florence. The sort of thing that causes the director of The Met in New York to wake up in the middle of the night with a feeling of burning shame.


Ease of access:

I think by this I mean more "How hard is it to get here?" The answer is sort of: get to Florence and you're done. So, pretty easy.


Best work:

Despite actually working as a portrait painter, and loving portraiture in painting, I've never entirely taken to it in sculpture. The sculptural bust has generally been of passing interest to me, but perhaps the best sculptors have some responsibility for that feeling. When the giants of the field wanted to make their mark they've tended towards grand figures, magnificent, affecting tableaus, and dynamic, twisting compositions. There are plenty of those in the Bargello, some of them astonishing.

But I heard they had a Bernini here. So we dutifully checked it out because, you know, Bernini.

It's a portrait bust, of Costanza Bonarelli.

Yes, it's the best work here, and maybe the most magical turn of sculpture I've ever seen.


Signature collection:

I guess the sculpture? I probably should have mentioned this somewhere earlier?


Revolving collections and shows:

It actually seems like they might do stuff like this in some rooms, but it's pure gravy.


Ambiance:

Quiet, cool, castley, mellow, firm, and curiously uncrowded.


Staff:

Er, unobtrusive? Works for me.


Cafes:

Nope. Oh well. Oddly I feel tolerant of this since the space seems so fully and well used.


Gift shop:

Yes, at the entrance. It's about average as far as museum gift shops go, which is a shame really because they could sell some... stuff. If only it weren't all the same... stuff.

Gelato withdrawl

I was thinking I'd pretty much covered every aspect of me and my wife's ten days in Florence. I mean, I remember coming home and writing furiously about it, in a fever, covering every last aspect of the storied city. Every event of importance was tabulated, referenced, evoked, measured, and indulged. And when the dust settled I turned to my bread and butter blog post subjects: like how the pen supply is holding up at the library I work at, or how that time walking along the river I saw a bird.

But even though I was pretty sure I covered everything in Florence, I had this sudden thought today:

"Wait." I thought (this was the sudden thinking part). "Did I write about the Bargello?"

"I'm pretty sure you wrote about everything." I replied to myself.

"That was my impression too, and yet I can't remember saying anything about The Bargello. What did I say about The Bargello?"

I became suddenly thoughtful at this. "I can't remember either." I said quietly.

So we decided we'd just... check.

After all, there were two of us.

Although strangely we only seemed able to do one thing at a time.

Still. 

It turns out we hadn't written about The Bargello.

In fact, it turns out that all I wrote about Florence, since our return, was gelato. Nothing else. 

I wrote 297 blogposts, over the course of 19 days, strictly about the gelato of Florence. That's it! No cafes, no museums, no shops, no ruminations about tourism, population density, cappuccino, wealth, or the surrounding hills. I didn't talk about Spritzes, smoothies, Saints, Savonarola, or street markets, good or bad. No. It was all gelato, 297 times over.  In almost three weeks after our return from Florence I wrote a post about gelato for, on average, every single one of my waking hours.

So I guess I still have a few things to talk about regarding Florence in the days ahead. Stay tuned! Bargello review incoming! And, like, for instance, did I mention the coffee gelato at Dei Neri?

Oh. I did?

Wow.

That's a lot of times.

Who wins Florence

As much traveled visitors to Rome, the great Baroque city if ever there was one, my wife and I received many hints there of the Renaissance. They seemed increasingly appealing the more we looked. So we thought we'd go to Florence. We thought we'd see a little bit of the footsteps that led to the flourishing of Rome, the best city we've ever seen.

There is a lot of great art in Florence. After all, 600 years ago Europe woke up there; The Renaissance, don't ya know, with all the burning energy of a thousand year sleep. With so much amazing art to see I wondered who, above all, would blow through my soul. So we made the rounds.

Filippo Lippi, of whom we had seen precisely one intensely captivating painting in Rome, all angels, grace, and gold, was every bit as good as the promise of what we had seen in The Doria Pamphilj. Botticelli was like a refinement of that grace, and his paintings, well known to us, and to most people on the planet, were a whole other world of loveliness, one that was never apparent exactly in the reproductions, which were all I'd ever seen of him before. The Da Vincis were fascinating, but no real match for what hangs in the Louvre. Raphael seems to oscillate in a tiny fraction of an inch between sheer genius and mundanity, mostly wonderful, nothing better than what is in the Barberini in Rome, but plenty remarkable. Giambologna was ridiculously good, with statues more baroque than I dared hope or imagine, every one a thrill to see. Donatello was fascinating. Pontormo's Deposition was a painting I've always longed to look at in person. It is a mad and ridiculous painting, an absolute joy that sums up everything anyone might ever need to know about Mannerism in a single work of art, all graceful and nearly purposeless poses, lurid, wonderful Sistine Chapel colors, and skill almost just for the sake of skill. There is our bizarre bridge from the Renaissance to the Baroque.

And of course there's Michelangelo, towering over it all. Influencing everything with his touch and magnificence. 

And yet...

The amazing David is exquisite and almost unbelievably monumental in a way that nevertheless feels a little emotionally flat to me after the excruciatingly moving Pieta. Maybe if they put it outside where it belongs? All the masterpieces of the Medici Chapel are better, but renovations there, and obscuring scaffolding, may have hampered my enjoyment along with his weird version of breasts and a sense that he didn't quite finish his plan for it all the way he wanted to. His early work kind of... sucks, up to Bacchus, which is more proof of talent than an epiphany.

Which, maybe I should have known all along, left us with three Caravaggios, of all things. 

The Sacrifice of Isaac, a story I've always found a touch ridiculous, made me tear up. The Medusa, a demonstration of gloss and perfection like I've never seen before, and sleeping cupid, a painting I'd only barely looked forward to, which is a picture of love sleeping by an artist at the height of his magical powers in full, shuddering expressive force.

Sleeping Cupid. No pretty child. Apparently Caravaggio used a dead child as a model. Yellow light. Flesh. Love lies sleeping. A picture is worth an entire language.

I suppose there are best current artists.

And there are artists of their generation.

And there is the greatest artist of their age.

And then there is the most brilliant artist of an entire era.

And then there's Caravaggio.

The gelato diet

A bit less than a year ago I restructured the way I eat. This was for a variety of household and health reasons, and to make a little more room for my hobbies of cocktails and coffee. One thing about the restructuring meant that I eat less. Sometimes it seems like a lot less. I don't use sweeteners. I don't eat or drink after seven. I have very particular meals and mealtimes, and not that many of them. And I can't complain. All of this has largely done the job. I still have my middle age issues, but I feel pretty much healthier and less inclined towards physical breakdowns, back injuries, colds, and some other miscellaneous ailments, than I had before. Plus I look dashing in my vests.

But when I went to Italy I decided, for my two weeks there, to set all that carefully to the side. As my wife and I tramped all over Florence and Rome I ate and drank whatever, and whenever. I had as much coffee as I could manage. I drank regularly- a bottle of wine, Fernet Branca at night, cocktails on piazzas, afternoon Spritzes like it was a religion. I consumed great quantities of cheeses, finding our first great cheese plate at Pitti e Gola where I had three glasses of sparkling wine and one of something called Orange Wine. I ate plates of raw meat. I had pastry every morning stuffed with creams and chocolate. I bought porcini mushrooms and swordfish and fried them in olive oil. I ate all the potato chips they brought me with my Spritz.

And I had gelato.

I had gelato every day. I had gelato in the morning. I had gelato in the evening. I had gelato in the afternoon. I would get gelato, eat it, and go back to order more gelato. I ate gelato walking along. And I ate gelato sitting down. I ate planned gelato and I ate spur of the moment gelato. I had whipped cream on my gelato and I had gelato plain in a cup. Sometimes I had espresso over my gelato. I ate a lot of gelato.

Outside of one unpleasant night early in the trip which I blame on an injudicious nightcap of Fernet Branca and possibly a questionable panini, my health was excellent in Italy. I felt good. A few weird home ailments ceased to bother me in Italy. I came home well and whole and I might have even lost a pound or two while I was there, or so it was suggested to me.

Now surely one could say that our near constant walking in Italy wiped away all the other sins. Or that for all I ate it turned out we were too busy for me to actually eat all that much. One could argue that the joy of Italy helped me out, the lack of stress, the complete cessation of anything remotely comparable to a sedentary lifestyle.

And those would be good arguments. Very sensible.

But wrong.



It was the gelato.

Gelato of Florence

We've spent a couple days leading up to this survey of the gelato of Florence. The cat's already out of the bag as regards to the best gelateria in Florence; Dei Neri. And as much as one might like to be the great gelato sleuth of Florence, ferreting out some miraculous hidden gem, the fact is that if, from my research, I had to guess what would have been the best gelateria in Florence I would have guessed Dei Neri.

This is not bad news! Dei Neri is centrally located, easy to get to, and never, as far as I can tell, besieged by any serious lines. If you want just one gelato in Florence, go to Dei Neri, and if you want to experiment, start with Dei Neri. Simple.

But the other good news is that all these runner up finishers to Dei Neri are so close in quality to Dei Neri that it's just not that big a deal, unless you're an absolute gelato fanatic, to miss Dei Neri and instead end up at them, mostly. Especially towards the top of my list.

Which brings me to my ranked list of Florentine gelaterias:


1. Dei Neri

The best flavor I had was coffee, which, unlike any coffee gelato or ice cream I've ever had, both tasted exactly like coffee and tasted better than coffee, both true to coffee, and the ideal of coffee. They had one of the best pistachios I've had here too, matching Come il Latte's remarkable version in Rome.  Once I got a four flavor cup all of fruit flavors, raspberry, passion fruit, mango, maybe clementine? All the flavors were reliably pure and straight from the fruit, the gelato fresh and impeccably smooth, and the sweetness quietly pitched.


2. Della Passera (tied)

A sweet little place in the Oltrarno (but not the far away Oltrarno like the one it's tied with, more just across the river from the main parts of Florence). I had a two-flavor cup of clementine and vanilla and the clementine was an eye opener, fresh, sparkling like a really good clementine, and the vanilla was a smooth perfect foil. I wish I could have tried more from here, but this was so nice and felt so right!


2. Pintucci (tied)

Here, alas, is the wonderful gelateria pitched maybe a bit too far from the center of town and from where most travelers will be to be worth the extra trip. As a reader of gelateria reviews and blog posts I find these kinds of places particularly irksome as they're immensely interesting to me, but usually, in the end, not quite worth the very specific journey. So for you I'm glad this wasn't the very best of all gelato, per se, even if it was fantastic. That it was fantastic was great because my lovely wife, who so kindly indulged my frequent gelato diversions, and I just so happened to be staying out here for part of our trip, just beyond the Porta Romana. I had a lot of gelato here! The flavors were very pure and only the slightest step off of Dei Neri. The high water mark for them was the best hazelnut I've ever had. It was brilliant. It tasted like, get this, hazelnuts! They had a really good passion fruit here too.


4. Strega Nocciola

They have a couple locations here, one practically on the river in Oltrarno, and another just off the Duomo. They also have one of these in Rome, in the Spanish Steps neighborhood, which is where I first encountered them and the utter glory of their lavender gelato. I tried their bright, brilliant strawberry this time around too. This is my fourth best in Florence and I'm still splitting hairs really. If you only had gelato here and nowhere else you won't really have missed anything. This is amazing gelato.


5. Perche No, Eduardo, and Sbrino (a three way tie for fifth)

Any city would be proud to host any of these gelaterias and there would be awfully few of those cities wherein any one of the above wouldn't be the absolute best ice cream of any kind in the city. 

Perche No is maybe the most famous of the Florence gelaterias and I found their chestnut fascinating, hazelnut extremely close to Pintucci's above, and their caramel delicious but short of amazing. As with any singular visit to a place as good as this I can only wonder if, in a different mood, or having chosen different flavors, I might be ranking them even higher than my already high regard.

Sbrino I don't have to wonder about all that with Sbrino as it was small, charming, and also (maybe unfortunately for you) out across the street from Pintucci, in the distant Oltrarno, so I did a more thorough survey of their gelato. Their quality was unmistakable, most compellingly in a rather amazing Fior Di Capra, which was a plain goat milk gelato. Don't knock it til you try it. Grape with all the skin bits in didn't quite work, and a signature flavor with maybe hazelnut and white chocolate was good but not as good as it sounds. Nevertheless I kept pulling for the place, and when they got it they really got it.

Eduardo, right on the Duomo, was, well, my notes fail me! Sorry. I loved it but cannot for the life of me remember anything about it. There goes the curse of eating too much fantastic gelato!

The best gelato of Florence

Dei Neri.

The best gelato of Florence is at Dei Neri.


There. That wasn't so hard was it?

Every study you might find on the Internet of the best gelato of Florence, or Rome for that matter, will include two things, one useless and one useful.

The useless thing is lots of pictures of prepared gelato from the gelateria in question, which will be all pretty and enticing, giving life and appeal to the Internet page, but offering absolutely nothing extra in the evaluation of gelato.

The useful thing will be a warning description of commercial gelato so that one can avoid it. The warning signs are bright colors not natural to the flavor in question, fluffy piles towering magically in their refrigerated counters, and pretty, sugary drama, often all glossily located in a heavily touristed part of town. Well, fair enough, I'm down with that warning cry, though it's maybe not always quite as easy as they make it sound. There is certainly commercial gelato that is more quietly presented, and what after all is the real color of pistachio gelato, or strawberries, or clementines? At my favorite gelateria in the world, Fatamorgana (sorry, in Rome not Florence) I had a bright green mint chip gelato a mere week ago. Nothing like the mint chip ice cream of my youth, it was full of a pure, intense spearmint flavor, the chocolate firm, gentle, and unsweetened, and when I got to the bottom of the cup I only then noticed all the tiny bits of ground up mint leaves flavoring and coloring my exquisite gelato.

So as we go forth here are some extra tips for spotting this real gelato, in an honorable gelateria, without any one of these necessarily being a guarantee, but a couple of them should be enough to do you. Remember, these are the good signs:

1. Nothing rising above the surface of the bin.

2. Covered metal bins where you can't even see the gelato.

3. Claims like "Organic" or "Artigianale".

4. Strange flavors, but of real things, like avocado lime, or fig ricotta.

5. More chocolate flavor varieties than strictly seem necessary (not necessarily my thing, but still...)

6. Lines (the public isn't always right, but it often is enough so in this case).

7. And yes, slightly more muted colors.


If that sounds still a bit tricky here's the easy part: The gelato standard in Florence is supremely high. If you can eliminate, through the above tips, the slightly or very dodgy bad half, you're home free. The good half of gelato in Florence is uniquely wonderful and of a standard higher even than Rome. So dig in.

On the other hand, Florence is not exactly a teeming metropolis. One could just write down my list of gelaterias, and only go to ones on it, not worrying much about which, and all should be well. Walk around a bit and you'll hit a few.


So now that the gelaterias worth considering have been separated out from those to avoid, what are the good ones, I mean, after Dei Neri, the best of them?

Let's save that for tomorrow. I need to rest up. There are quite a few, all of them almost as good.

The preamble to the best gelato of Florence

Am I the greatest gelato reviewer on the Internet?

That's a problematic question. Without humbleness my immediate reaction is... no, of course not. 

But as a person who has long poured over the reviews and blogger accounts of gelato on the Internet, concerning the gelato of both Rome and Florence, I am less disinclined to proclaim myself "The Greatest Gelato Blogger on the Entire Internet".

This is because the systematic, deep, and thorough investigation of gelato in Italy and Europe that one would hope for, and even expect, does not happen. Or, if it does, because the Internet is really terrible, we can't find it. A case in point is that even though my work on the gelato of Florence is easily in the top echelon of thoughtful, informed analysis, you probably won't find it.

Which is weird, because you are reading this now.

But this only means one of three things:


1. Somehow you know me, and fell into reading this, a gelato post. Your interest in gelato is idle, at best. You're actually probably lactose intolerant to be honest. Thanks for bearing with me.

2. This post isn't really about Florence gelato, that's tomorrow's post, which you're currently not reading.

3. You are not actually reading this now, which, trust me, thousands and thousands of people who have searched "best gelato Florence" are also now not doing, at any give time.


The best gelato reviewer in the world would be a systematic obsessive, probably living in Italy somewhere, focused completely on the thankless evaluation (well, the gelato would be some reward) of gelaterias, wherever they are. The fantasy is that the Internet is full of weird stuff like this. The reality is that unrenumerated obsessive geniuses are the amazingly rare exception that proves the rule of the Internet.

Oh, what is the rule of the Internet?


The rule is:


Everything good on the Internet is an accident.






But that's okay. We here at clerkmanifesto like to make as many accidents on the Internet as possible. If we're lucky maybe the right people can get hurt. If we're lucky we will accurately describe the best gelato of Florence. It may even end up being one of the all time great guides ever written about Italian gelato!


You'll never find it.

Romaphiles

As you most likely know, my wife and I went on a trip to Florence, then Rome. We have been to Rome many, many times, once for a month even, but we have never been to Florence. So there we were. And it was lovely. First staying on the outskirts of the Oltrarno neighborhood we learned how good all the food can be there, how beautiful the countryside is, hedging in, how glorious are the vistas of the fabled city. We saw astonishing art in the Pitti Palace. I got the lay of the land on their extraordinarily high level of gelato.

Then we moved in, deep into the heart of the city, across the street from the Duomo. The thronging life of the place, its soul and essence! More beauty, more art, more food and markets.

This is lovely, isn't it? We said.

Yes, we had to answer. 

We compared. This thing is better here than there. This market is easier to use. I like how there is less traffic and big streets. I like how you can walk to every single thing.

This is lovely, isn't it? We asked again.

Yes, we had to answer.

Could we live here? 

Yes, if we could afford it this would be great, a thrilling place to live. We would live here in a second. Maybe we should live here. It's lovely, isn't it?

Yes, it's lovely, we had to answer.

It is lovely.

We had a lot of fun.

We saw extraordinary things. It was great. We ate delightful things. We shopped in charming shops. We saw miraculous art and architecture. We saw history. What a town this Florence is!

It is lovely, isn't it?

Yes, we had to answer.

Very lovely.

And then we got our train and went to Rome. And we stepped out into Rome. And we said:


"Oh."

Lines

If you are ever so inclined to travel to a world famous tourist destination you will have to answer the question of lines.

What is the question of lines?

It is myriad questions in one:

1. How much of your vacation do you want to stand in line for?

2. Is the length of a line any indication of the quality of that which is at the end of it?

3. What commitments and reservations are you willing to make to avoid or lessen lines?

4. Are you willing to chance leaving and coming back in hopes of a shorter line?

5. Is exhaustive preparation worth it to learn secret end runs to avoid lines?

6. How much will you pay to avoid a line?


The answers to these question can define a great deal of one's trip to a place like Florence, but they are personal answers. What is right for one person is wrong for another. Nevertheless I believe there are some general truths to be found in the answers to the question of lines. And so in that spirit, fresh from a lovely trip with my wife to Florence and Rome, I will take my stab at answering the above, blurring the personal with what is generally true. It's a specialty of mine.


1. How much of your vacation do you want to stand in line for?

As little as possible, as much as necessary.

Lines are inevitable, starting with the very process of flying to Europe and all that the cruelties of modern airport travel bureaucracy entail. And these Disneylandish destinations (meaning no offense, though some offense is inevitable), like Florence, Paris, Rome or Venice, have an awful lot of things that an awful lot of people want to see or do or eat, all at once.


2. Is the length of a line any indication of the quality of that which is at the end of it?

Yes! And no. One might have to take one's lumps to stand in front of Botticelli's Primavera or The Mona Lisa, but really, if you open your eyes, they are beautiful, extraordinary pieces of art. However no one on earth is making a 6 euro sandwich in Florence that is worth an hour wait in a clogged street (Vinaio at lunchtime), especially when there are roughly four equally excellent panini shops in Florence that only rarely have lines (and ones easily avoided). In short, lines in great European cities almost always mean something really good, but they may or may not mean something inimitable. My Italian travel specialty is gelato and the biggest lines are not at the best gelaterias, even if they are at good gelaterias.

3. What commitments and reservations are you willing to make to avoid or lessen lines?

Us? Almost none. We don't like to be fenced in. And some of those reservations aren't as line-free as one hopes. But if one doesn't mind a bit of structure it can be worth it for something dramatic or essential to one.

4. Are you willing to chance leaving and coming back in hopes of a shorter line?

Yes. The great secret we learned for ourselves is to go to places for as long a time as possible, always better one city than three, advice no one I have ever advised has ever listened to. Oddly it turns out the more time you have to waste the less time you have to waste.

5. Is exhaustive preparation worth it to learn secret line end runs?

Yes, though it can take a lot of research. Ferreting out the secret of being able to buy an annual pass to the combined Uffizi and Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens, something mentioned in no guide book I have read, produced serious joy and convenience and added some serious linelessness into our trip.

6. How much will you pay to avoid a line?

Not much. I like to squander all our money on swanky rooftop bars and exotic apartment rentals.

From the school of...

My first day back from our trip to Florence and Rome (it was lovely, thank you so much. Oh, you'd like to hear about it in exhaustive detail? Well, I mean, if you insist. Visit here daily for the next month or two then and that should do it) I was shelving some James Patterson books in our teeming James Patterson section of our library, when i noted that he collaborates, a lot. Scads of people are constantly writing with him, dozens, maybe hundreds. I suppose one needs a bit of help if one is going to churn out a couple of books every month (or is it a couple of books every week?). But he is by no means alone in this. There is a whole vein of bulk bestseller authors, like Janet Evanovich or Clive Cussler, who constantly team up with people you never heard of to keep their writing empires churning along.

Of course this has been going on for awhile in publishing, and I have been aware of it. But two weeks in Florence and Rome suddenly cast it in a new light: This is not remotely new to the arts! Back in the 1400's and 1500's and so on, many of the big time artists whose work my wife and I were seeing in churches, palaces, and museums (sometimes a bit of all three at once) were running their own little private art industries. They called them workshops and as far as my limited understanding of them goes they were probably a combination of apprenticeship schools and maybe a decent living for less entrepreneurial and less brilliant artists. One of the most uneven excellent artists I have seen ran a large workshop in his successful career: Titian. The huge quality variation on his paintings I suspect stems from how much he painted on a painting. I'm pretty sure there are more than a few "Titians" that involved him coming on to an almost finished painting, worked up by some stalwarts of his studio, in order to do a few final highlights. He might be a bit of an exception in terms of how good he could occasionally be though. The exception that proves the rule. Ghirlandaio might be a better example, a very fine painter with a thriving workshop in Florence, who produced much wonderful work that, despite having just seen several million examples of in Florence, I can't for the life of me remember any of. For the most part the really great artists, burning up with creative energy, have a slightly smaller body of work, and it's pretty clear that geniuses like Leonardo and Michelangelo (briefly apprenticed to Ghirlandaio!) not only have that more modest body of work (with loads of it unfinished), but they're also the sort of people who simply can't abide help. These Van Goghs and Caravaggios of the world tend to work alone, very, very alone.

So I use this to explain the James Pattersons of today. He's not working with people exactly. I figure he's more like throwing his "co-authors" a quick outline, maybe a few guidelines, and a couple characters. Then these sort of studio assistants are writing the books according to it all as best they can. Then ol' James comes in to add a few highlights, some signature flourishes of the master, so to speak. 

It pays the bills. Many, many, many, many, many bills.

But it's not the kind of thing you'll see Kafka doing. 

Florence generic panini place review

By the time you read this my wife and I will be in Florence.  I am reading a lot of reviews in preparation for this trip. I find these compelling, occasionally useful, contradictory, truly pointless, and addictive. Along with the travel vlogs I watch I feel I have a sense for the collective tone and quality of these reviews as a kind of ur-review, the ultimate review that sums up each category of establishment. Today we will continue with the generic panini place review.



Generic Florence Panini Place Review


5 Stars


This is an absolutely legendary panini place. Just look at its review average. I have never seen such a high average of reviews. They are through the roof. Some people say this is the single greatest sandwich shop on the face of the Earth. I have never been so excited to eat at a place as I am to eat here. I can hardly believe that this afternoon I will be eating one of their paninis! If I could give them six stars I would! 

I hope they're good.