We spent last week sharing thoughts on whether you should go on tours when you’re out and about. Looking back at it, we seem pretty down on the idea which, while not entirely inaccurate, obscures the fact that we’ve been on some tours that we absolutely loved and have stories about to this day. Here’s a look back at a guided tour we took of the the Uffizi in Florence, Italy.
We almost always prefer to take any sort of tour as early in the day as possible. The tourist crowds get denser as the day goes in so we want to see the sights with as little traffic as we can manage. (Yes yes, technically we are tourists at that point, too, but that’s different because… oh hush.) Thus it was that in the spring of 2014 we made our way through the relatively quiet streets of the city at around 8am and met up at the pre-arranged spot at a statue just outside of the museum. Our day began with a tour of the Uffizi Museum from Context Travel. As usual, our guide was knowledgeable and interesting, full of lesser-known facts about everything we saw. She started us in the plaza outside the Uffizi, with the trio of well-known statues in the Loggia. Cellini’s Perseus and the Medusa, Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women, and Fedi’s Rape of Polyxena are a disturbing group of statues that are nonetheless beautiful and striking.
Our guide (whose name, alas, is lost to antiquity for us) was a degree’d art historian with a day job that wasn’t in her field, so she kept her hand in via this work; we’re old enough to know that “degree” doesn’t automatically mean “expert”, but she was very informed about – if nothing else – the collection at the Uffizi. She plotted a route that had essentially no backtracking (one or two galleries were cul-de-sacs so no help there…) and took us on a chronological walk forward in time from the late medieval period. The highlights that she chose included some obvious candidates (many of the Botticelli’s that you think of when you hear that name are in this collection), but she managed to point us at some real gems. For example:
Caravaggio’s Medusa is an incredibly intricate work on an unusual medium, and on top of being a mythological image it is also a self-portrait. Both of us are art appreciation amateurs and this was our first experience with Caravaggio; he remains a favorite and we’re always smiling like we ran into a friend when we find his work in a gallery. Speaking of running into art and getting excited, the Uffizi is also where we began our love affair with an obscure Biblical-era story and, more to the point, depictions of the murder at the heart of the story. (So, you know, Old Testament.) Briefly: Judith’s home city was besieged by Assyrians led by a general named Holofernes. She was a beautiful widow, and she was able to finesse her way into Holofernes’ tent because, you know, man. She proceeds to get him drunk and then beheads him. His army scatters, Judith saves the city, hooray! Early depictions of Judith often portrayed her in a virginal, even praying, position, or else demurely alluding to her story. Then, the transformational artist Artemesia Gentileschi came along. It isn’t sexism to point out that she was a woman; it’s kind of the point. Gentileschi has what you might call a different lived experience that led her to portray the comeuppance of a drunken, lustful man. Once you know these depictions exist you can find them all over the place, and we call out to each other when we find one.
But I digress.
The tour guide acknowledged up front that even three hours was barely enough time to get an overview of the collection, but we certainly didn’t feel like she shorted us. She knew the place well, and was able to layer in a mixture of facts and anecdotes to keep everyone engaged. She even went to the trouble of explaining what we weren’t seeing and, guided by that we decided not to leave the museum when the tour was over. Instead, we decided to pause and refresh within the museum before making a second circuit through.
Tucked away on the gallery’s rooftop, the Uffizi Café offers breathtaking views of Piazza della Signoria, Palazzo Vecchio, and even Brunelleschi’s Dome. It’s perched right above the Loggia dei Lanzi, so the people-watching is superb. The food is even good! Eating in museums is hit-or-miss and has varied wildly over the years, but this was a genuinely good meal. So now, when you visit the Uffizi, instead of exiting the museum you can step onto the terrace, order an espresso and a sandwich, and soak in Florence from above.
After we ate, we basically ran a second tour through the Uffizi on our own, following the advice of the guide. That’s one of the reasons we rate this tour so highly in our memories; it was so good we actually made two tours out of it. Of course, this kind of information is basically impossible to get about a tour ahead of time; it may be that we’ve set our standards too high based on an exceptional experience. These days, barring a strong recommendation or an intuition that the tour subject is too involved for us to study ahead of time ourselves, we’re more likely to read up on a place and prepare to guide ourselves.
OH. A quick note about the top photo. Lisa took that from a window in kind of a breezeway between two parts of the Uffizi. Absolutely no photography is allowed in the gallery itself. As a result, I have been in more than one person’s home who had this exact image displayed somewhere – the window you take it from it fairly small so you can’t play with perspective, and it’s the only time in the whole gallery you can snap a pic, so many people have got this view of the Ponte Vecchio as their photo “of the Uffizi.”
