The life so short, the craft so long to learn

My hotel room is like the inside of a Della Robbia relief: exactly the same shade of blue. Though no Della Robbia relief comes with an en suite bathroom...

In San Marco I was looking at the statue of Savonarola and found myself face to face with the graves of Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola. How strange that the same church should contain the bones of saint Antoninus, decaying relics worshipped at a shrine, and the discreet Roman inscriptions hiding behind the statue of Savonarola which mark the resting-place of men who were so active in revolving the world away from this kind of cult towards what Pico calls in clarion tones the nature and dignity of man.

Though there was someone else looking for Pico's grave: 'era magnifico', he remarked to his companion.

Surrounded by churches, the Accademia on the other hand seems a pointless exercise in stripping art of its context and giving it a man-centred focus. In countries where you can't look at this art in situ, the galleries are crucial, but when you can stroll into any church and be overwhelmed not by the development of a new composition but an all-encompassing experience, the exercise in celebrating the colossal which is the placing of the original David statue in the centre of a large gallery is somewhat redundant. He looks much better where he was meant to be, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio.

Finally to the Badia Fiorentina, a church which really does seem a bastion of spirituality, heavy with prayer like Notre Dame but not weighted down by it with Notre Dame's gloom, and then a farewell to the tiny medieval streets of Dante, a farewell to the sun setting over the Arno, casting a delicate pink miasma over the distant hills, a farewell to the Piazza della Signoria, to the chocolate box confectionary of the Duomo... never have I less wanted to leave a place: from here to Edinburgh is not a journey home.