I just got back from Florence which is, as you'd expect, more than a little special. It's not somewhere I immediately fell in love with like I did when I found myself in Copenhagen, but it's certainly up there in the list of good places to die. The people are wonderful. Even the junkies in the park waiting for their Daily Dope Delivery were politely helpful in giving pointers to a decent eatery. There wasn't as much time as I would have liked to get off the beaten track though but I made time to check in with one of my literary heroes, this man:
Here's a close-up of his face...
That's one stern face. Stern and focused on the task at hand. A little research tells me he had at least two children and we can probably all agree, that's not the face of a man you want to come home to when you've had a shitty day at school. Then again, he also looks like the kind of man who wouldn't notice when his kids got home from school anyway... unless perhaps they went over the top with their Playstation13C.
If you haven't already, you should read Divine Comedy - preferably an illustrated edition, but only if illustrated by Gustave Dore:
There's not many laughs in it but it's nothing if not the greatest story ever told.
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What's not the greatest story ever told is the number of people - I'm talking hundreds upon hundreds of them - who hit the the square armed with selfie sticks and take pictures of themselves in front of these monumental sculptures without stopping to look at exactly what it is they have in the background.
"Any art will do so long as it looks vaguely like art and I can prove I've been there."
The world becomes more broken every day. Is it too much to ask that sometime soon, a James Bond styled super criminal will figure out a way to launch a global data blocker just for a couple of days of the week to keep the magic of the world alive?
Probably.
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I also found some time to show my face at Le Macchine di Leonardo and discovered this fine piece of advice, though I can't quite wrap my head around DaVinci ever using the word 'stuff'...
