The beauty of Rome and Florence
Rome: The Eternal City. Florence: The capital of the Renaissance
The Romans inherited the Greeks’ model of thought and adapted their beliefs and art to the Latin profile, which is familiar to us in the West.
We owe the following statement to the great art historian E.H.Gombrich:
¨The Egyptians captured what they knew; the Greeks what they saw and the medieval artists what they felt¨ Appreciating this difference is the best reward we can take from our visits to Italy, especially Rome, and Florence.
Rome is a city that invites us to walk and leave guidebooks at home. There, the forest exceeds the beauty and meaning of the trees that we find on its way. Its ruins, squares, works of art, and imperial roads are uniquely beautiful.
The eternal character of Rome was expressed very well by one of the fathers of modern Sociology, the German Georg Simmels, like Goethe, who traveled and fell in love with the Italian peninsula. In his essay on Rome, published in 1898, he writes:
¨Due to the enormous distances between the epochs that one contemplates, the point of view of time loses all relevance for details…¨Some have expressed it by saying that in Rome the past becomes present, or vice versa: that the present becomes oneiric, super subjective and relaxed as if it were a bygone era¨
In Florence, we appreciate one of the most glorious examples of art and humanity: The Renaissance. There, we find ourselves in a unique situation that allows us to stop, concentrate, and contemplate a specific era, ignoring the changes imposed by modernity.
The geography of Tuscany, the region in which the Renaissance revolution arose, greatly favors our task. Its hills, towns, vineyards, rivers, and lakes are repeated with a harmony that leads us to think that nature actively contributed to inspiring the great artists of the Renaissance, both in their work and in their philosophy of life.
It is impossible to leave Florence and Tuscany without a feeling of deep admiration for the work that we never tire of observing. The history of its art shows a continuity that allows us to follow the advancement of Renaissance painting and sculpture techniques enjoyably.
From George Simmel, who also wrote an essay on Florence, we take:
¨It is a unit that, although full of mystery, can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands; a unity that weaves the landscape, the aroma of its land, and the life of its lines with the spirit, which is its fruit, and with the history of European man, which here acquired its form, but also with art, which here seems to be a product of the earth
No matter how frequently we visit Rome or Florence, it always leaves us with a flavor of study, contemplation, and understanding of the history of Western civilization. We can always return to spin its relationship with Greece, Egypt, and the ancient.
