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One of the most interesting discoveries of the year could be the one announced at the Opera di Santa Croce in Florence following the restoration of Christ meeting Veronica on the Way to Calvary, an altarpiece made by Giorgio Vasari in 1572. The restoration of Michelangelo's altarpiece and monumental tomb are being restored, due to the damage caused...

1860

Florence’s first U.S. Consul assumed office in 1823, his name was Giacomo Ombrosi and, curiously, he wasn’t American. Michele Amedei, a scholar and art historian specializing in the link among American artists in Tuscany in the first half of the 19th century, details his research. The Florentine: What can you tell us about Giacomo Ombrosi?Michele A...

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It was a clean-up that Marie Kondo would have been proud of. Out into the streets came paintings, statues, jewellery, clothing, all heaped into piles. On February 7th, 1497, the inhabitants of Florence had decided many of their worldly possessions were not ‘sparking joy’, but rather leading them towards the hellfires of sin. This event, known to hi...

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You might say that we’re in the middle of the journey of our life: My wife and I reached our 25th wedding anniversary last year. To celebrate, we went to Italy. We put Florence on the itinerary because we wanted to see Brunelleschi’s dome, Leonardo’s paintings, and Michelangelo’s statue of David. But we also had a special reason for traveling to Fl...

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Cinquecento gli studenti americani che si sono radunati questo pomeriggio nel Salone dei Cinquecento di Palazzo Vecchio per partecipare al "Welcome Day", l'evento annuale organizzato dalle Università americane a Firenze. Un'occasione per dare simbolicamente il benvenuto a tutti i giovani provenienti da oltre oceano che decidono di trascorrere un pe...

1934

How do you solve a problem like Maria, and unveil her place in art history? Maria di Ormanno degli Albizzi, a 15th-century Italian nun, was one of the earliest females in Europe to audaciously paint her own self-portrait. Forgoing the demure profile view that male artists customarily used in their depictions of refined quattrocento ladies, this min...

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Palazzo Vecchio is preparing to host 500 students in the Salone dei Cinquecento for Welcome Day, a celebration of the close to 15,000 North American young people who annually enroll in Florence-based study abroad programs. Presiding over the February 5 event will be Dario Nardella (Mayor of Florence), Benjamin Wohlauer (Consul General of the United...

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Empoli native Enrico Cecconi, coordinator of Italian language studies at University of Bath, UK, and my former Italian professor at Accademia Europea di Firenze, expressed this pride in Italian to me. “Speaking Italian is more than the pleasure of producing beautiful and musical sounds or using gestures and more than just a linguistic skill. It has...

602

Dante called it “the cursed and unlucky ditch.” Half a millennium later, Tuscany’s Arno river would more than live up to that title. Just before dawn on November 4, 1966, the rain-swollen river abruptly broke its banks; its waters surged through Florence at speeds of 45 miles per hour and flooded the city with 18 billion gallons of mud and grime. Y...

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This year marks the bicentennial of U.S. diplomatic presence in Florence, making it the second oldest continuous U.S. diplomatic establishment in Italy—after Naples, where we set up shop in 1796. The terminology “diplomatic presence” is chosen deliberately, as over the last 200 years we have had many faces and roles. There have been 46 principal of...

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