Cruise Excursion to Florence with Accademia and Uffizi Gallery

The Uffizi gallery is of course one of the highlights of our tour, and here we will encounter many of the artists who made the city famous. The masterpieces of Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Caravaggio dramatically thrust us into the world of the Renaissance, and in their forms we will come to understand the era’s radically evolving relationship between man and God. We will explore the development of three-dimensional perspective and the rediscovery of the classical world, and meet the artists and patrons who gave the world around them such extraordinary visual expression.

In the museum of the Accademia, we will come face-to-face some of Michelangelo’s finest sculptures. Most famous of all is of course his magisterial David, who towers above us with a haughty grandeur. It is perhaps the greatest expression of idealized classical beauty ever carved, and was taken by his contemporaries as proof that his chisel was guided by the hand of God himself. We will also admire his series of unfinished Slaves, disquieting figures locked in an eternal torment as they try to free themselves from their marble prisons.

The religious heart of the city is the Piazza of the Duomo, with its splendid octagonal Baptistery. The Baptistery’s celebrated bronze doors designed by Ghiberti will immerse us in the artistic revolution that was gathering pace in the city. The enormous Duomo meanwhile reminds us of one of the Renaissance’s most impressive achievements – the cathedral was without a dome for 125 years, and was only successfully completed thanks to the audacious techniques and ingenuity of Brunelleschi. We are now in the city’s golden age, a time when the influence of Florence’s banks and trades were being felt throughout Europe.

That distant mercantile past is today only a memory. But the story of the city’s guilds is an integral part of the city’s history, and it will be brought vividly to life in beautiful Orsanmichele, by turns granary, market and church. The statues that ornament its façade, including Donatello’s splendid St. George, were commissioned by the guilds in an attempt to promote their image in Florence and beyond. In Palazzo Davanzati, meanwhile, we will see how the demands of the new elites changed the history of domestic architecture. In contrast to the medieval buildings across the street the palace is light and spacious, and gives us a valuable insight into the private lives of the city’s powerful merchant dynasties.

The Ospedale degli Innocenti was perhaps the first true Renaissance building, built on proportional and mathematical principles intended to create a completely harmonious whole. Designed by the great architect Filippo Brunelleschi and financed by the city’s guilds, the Ospedale was the world’s first orphanage. It was conceived in an attempt to curb the widespread infanticide of babies born out of wedlock by allowing mothers to anonymously leave their children in its care. The sober elegance of its architecture would be widely imitated in Europe for centuries to come.

Piazza della Signoria was the political heart of the Renaissance city, and here the fluctuating fortunes of the Florentine Republic is writ large in the shadow of the imposing Palazzo Vecchio. This great building was the seat of the city magistrates, safeguards of Florence’s democratic autonomy. We will explore the powerful Medici family’s ever increasing influence in their affairs, until they eventually became de-facto rulers of the city. This piazza was also the site of the apocalyptic sermons of the preacher Savonarola, who was burned at the stake here in 1498.

The 14th century basilica of Santa Croce is one of the most impressive medieval monuments in the city. Inside we will admire the frescoes of Giotto recounting the life of St. Francis, a wooden crucifix by Donatello, and Brunelleschi’s marvellous Pazzi chapel, a masterpiece of Renaissance proportion. We will pause to pay homage at the tombs of some of Italy’s most famous sons including Dante, Machiavelli, and above all Michelangelo. Though the great sculptor died in Rome, he was spirited back to the city of his birth in the dead of night so that he could be mourned by the entire populace.