girlsdontcry's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Florence = sublime, London bus ticket machines = ridiculous I'm sort of torn between ranting about the terrible state of bus ticket machines in London and telling you that Florence really was amazing, but I always hear it "you're so negative", so it's Florence first. But to start on a negative note (hurrah!), I was finally forced to take hayfever medication because it was even WORSE over there, my nose was bleeding three times before I'd even gone outside, so I learned a new word in Italian, "allergia", and went off to the "farmacia", and I'm only mentioning this because of Pollymagoo's (happy birthday, by the way!) wanting me to have Stendhal Syndrome (click back a page and read the comments if you want to know) and be overwhelmed by something because it so beautiful, but I think that the hayfever medication kind of makes a wall that prevents you from being overwhelmed. Not that I was underwhelmed, I think I was just, well, whelmed. My first stop was the Bargello, and that was all about the puzzling nipples. Firstly in a Cellini bronze of Cosimo de Medici, where his nipples are being "tweaked" by the beaks of either falcons or eagles. Here's a link, if you click on the image you can just make it out. So, I don't know what that signifies. "Don't mess with me because I'm so hard I can stand having falcons bite my nipples"? Lordy. Then out in the courtyard where there are some marbles (that word, I mean for so long I wondered why the British Museum was so concerned about these Elgin marbles, I thought they meant the children's game). And one of them had a woman squeezing her breasts, with holes where the nipples should be. So then it was like she'd squeezed too hard. But I realised that it was part of a fountain at some point, so I guess that she was squeezing her breasts and water came out of the nipples, and you know, that joke has lasted for 500 years and it's still funny. To me, anyway. A bit later at Palazzo Strozzi, where the Botticelli e Filippino exhibition was on, and at the beginning there was some blurb about the two artists spanning the spiritual and sensual worlds, or some such guff, and the thing is, nearly all of the paintings were religious in some way but there was this one drawing, by Leonardo da Vinci, of a (female) angel with an erect penis, which you can just make out if you click on this link (hey, your boss isn't going to fire you for looking at obscene images if they're by da Vinci!) I don't know how it was supposed to fit in, but I'm glad it was there anyway. So Florence was great, London bus ticket machines suck cocks in hell, but it's kind of satisfying when you've been swearing and kicking them and then suddenly, against the odds, you do get your pound coin back (that's happened twice, it may not have anything to do with the swearing). 12:25 p.m. - 2004-06-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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