572. The Medici: Masters of Florence (Part 1)

In the distant plain lies Florence, pink and grey and brown, with the ruddy huge dome of the cathedral dominating its centre like a captive balloon, and flanked on the right by the smaller bulb of the Medici chapel, and on the left by the airy tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. After nine months of familiarity with this panorama, I still think that this is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and the spirit. To see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of colour, that make all the sharp lines dim and faint, and turn the solid city into a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature. and make a sympathetic one, drunk with ecstasy.

So that Dominic was Mark Twain, I think the friend of the show, and for once he's not being rude. He's actually uh in engaging in extravagant praise because he's writing from a house in the autumn of eighteen ninety two just outside Florence and he is gazing at this famously most beautiful of cities and I guess there he is capturing the romance and the poetry and the glory of the place that many people would say is indeed the most beautiful city on the face of the earth. Yeah, City Tom, that I think has become the embodiment of elegance, of beauty, of human achievement, I guess. So every year, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of people go to see its cathedral and its churches and museums.

The artworks in the center of Florence, things like Michelangelo's David or Botticelli's Birth of Venus, the great treasures of the Offizi, they're seen as high points, aren't they? of human culture. So you chose um Twain for the introduction, but I think I would have gone for maybe some lines from the second greatest film ever made, which is of course A Room with a View, in which the character Eleanor Leviche is talking to Helena Bonham Carter, who's gone there as a tourist. And Helena Bonham Carter has fallen in love with Julian Sands, of course now very sadly dead, and she she cries out, a young girl transfigured by Italy. And why shouldn't she be transfigured?

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