This city has a Bacchus obsession
Maybe the Renaissance wasn't the rediscovery of classical architecture at all. Maybe it was the rediscovery of the joys of going out, getting drunk, casting off the shackles of morality and generally having a good time. No wonder they needed Savonarola.

Because this city is obsessed with Bacchus. Everyone sculpted him. Well, him and David, about whom, in Renaissance Florence, there seems to have hung a certain ambiguity of gender. Of course Donatello feminises him, but even Michelangelo is at it.

So. Did I mention that my appartment is in a street with a C18th sign carved into a wall saying that prostitutes need to stop hanging about or they will be whipped. There don't seem to be any here any more, so it seems to have worked.

Today, the first day, the class finished early so I hurried to the Bargello. Oh no! It's a Monday, so surely it'll be shut. Oh yes! It's the 5th Monday of the month so it's open. Surely the best 4 euros I'll ever spend. Being in Florence and not really liking Michelangelo that much is like being in America and not really liking hamburgers. But my lovely Donatello, even with the David in the middle of restoration and hence having a nice lie-down while beautiful white-coated assistants lovingly tended him like manicurists, was sublime. St George is now my ideal man. I've never seen a figure manage to be so heroic without being overbearing before.

And what to say about those panels for the Baptistry doors? To stand looking at them, and see exactly what every Art History panel 101 says about the difference between the two styles... and yet to form one's own opinion. Yes, Bruneschelli is so much more dynamic than Ghilberti - and yet... there's something about the angel so daringly leaping out of the background in Ghilberti's picture that I think the judges perhaps did not make the wrong decision.