Photoprint for Sale: Michelangelo's David, Palazzo della Signoria, Florence, Italy

This is an original photoprint from my personal collection

Size of image is 46cm x 30cm (18" x 12").

Price is $NZ 50.00 inc. urban p. and p. in NZ.

Please contact me at donovan@ihug.co.nz or 09 4159 701.

© DON DONOVAN. donovan@ihug.co.nz 
www. don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
.

Fazzoletti - Special Kinds of Handkerchiefs from Italy

These are a few of the colourful handkerchiefs I bought in Italy some years ago. They're almost worn out and as it's impossible to buy such magnificent fazzoletti in New Zealand I thought I should never get the opportunity to replace them.

I chanced to mention them to a friend who is going to Italy and he kindly said that he will try to buy some for me in May 2012. My old ones came from either Florence (a shop near the Ponte Vecchio) or Lucca.

He's not going to Florence but he is to visit Lucca where, I suggested, he might come across some fazzoletti in that serpentine street the Via Fillungo. I sent him a 100 Euro banknote.

Here's hoping he comes home with a pile of hankies that might see me out. I hope he doesn't shop too hard, though, I wouldn't want to erode his holiday.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

My Books: Antipasto

 

I have recently published this book which is a collection of random samplings from various writings, watercolours and photographs made over a few years of visits to Italy - particularly Tuscany. Among many other things, it touches upon Florence, Lucca, Barga and the hill villages of the Garfagnana, that area between the Apuane Alps and the Apennines that is drained by the Serchio River.

It also includes visits to Umbria: Carsulae, Terni and San Gemini.

The book is available from Blurb.com. Go to: www.blurb.com, enter 'Don Donovan' in the search box and my book will appear.

donovan@ihug.co.nz

Il pranzo, passero and spongeing bimbos

From La Rampa: the Jewish Temple

Below the Piazza Michelangelo, Ristorante La Rampe is a haven. Uncrowded. We are given a table on a shaded loggia with a million-dollar view across the Arno, the whole city open to us. A cool breeze carries a mixture of the better smells of Florence: aromatic greenery and flowers below the terrace, pasta sauces, oregano, coffee, maybe something from the river. Sounds waft in, too, those of a big town; underlying murmur of traffic punctuated by a distant car alarm in counterpoint with a police siren and a the measured melancholy monotone of a church bell.

***

Sparrows, the world’s best mendicants, know the loggia and beg for crumbs. (Italian for sparrow is passero. In English, the order to which sparrows belong is passeriformes - perching birds - which also includes jays, blackbirds, finches; half of all the members of the bird kingdom. Passero comes from Latin: sparrow from old English. You never know when you might need this sort of information for Trivial Pursuit.)

***

Two girls at the next table, a fat blonde American, and a slim Iraqi with raven hair and olive-skin, offer to photograph the four of us with my Olympus mju. The Iraqi says she’s ‘in movies on the production side’ but despite that and having told us that she also has a mju just like mine, she has no idea how to set the fill-in flash. I wonder what her movies are like? The blonde, the Iraqi tells us with that broad confidence all boy-racers have, runs an advertising agency in the USA. She looks about nineteen - the Madonna of Madison Avenue. I wonder what her ads are like? They each bum a cigarette from Valerie and we quietly drop them from the conversation. Give me older women anytime - have I said that before?

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

Florence, dog shit and Donatello

Distance, of course, lends enchantment. There was never a truer saying - especially about big cities. Florence is one of the cities I like least. Its atmosphere is clogged with traffic fumes eating inexorably into crumbling masonry. The pavements are traps of dog shit. The crowds press, bug-eyed and weary. The shopkeepers and restaurateurs fleece like skin-nicking shearers. The centro storico is so old and tired that it’s impossible to get a whole shot of most of the notable buildings because they’re in constant states of repair, clothed like seaweedy rocks with green mesh netting or corseted by scaffolding, some of which looks as if it’s been in situ longer than the buildings themselves.

By rights I should like cities. I should be in awe of them: repositories of great art and architecture. But the potential joy is destroyed by the numbing wait in serpentine queues that lie in tight folds outside the galleries. It’s simply not worth that pain to see Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’, or Michelangelo’s ‘David’. (I wonder about David - his hands are too big). My indifference to cities comes from being a Londoner, growing up in a metropolis that one wears like an old overcoat - no awe, no fear - total familiarity. The flip side of the country boy who’s dumbfounded by the city, I am forever astounded by the country.

Not that I care nothing for great art. One of my most memorable confrontations was in Florence, at the Museum of the Fabric of Santa Maria del Fiore, the ‘Opera del Duomo’, where I gazed, disturbed, at the 1450-ish ‘The Magdalen in Penitence’ by Donatello, a free-standing, life-sized wooden figure of a woman in rags - enduringly poignant. But oddly, for some sort of an artist myself, it’s art in engineering that impresses me most: especially that marvellous dome of Brunelleschi’s which was finished in 1463. Double-skinned, the substantial inside supporting the shell of the outside, it was built without steel scaffolding, high-rise cranes, electrical hoists, reinforced concrete, chemical solvents or adhesives, or computer-aided design: just art, experience and inspiration. Timeless.

No, not timeless, nothing lasts for ever, as Osymandius’s statue discovered, and in a country where earthquakes (terremoto) are common and many national treasures have been pulverised into history, the dome of the duomo could topple any time (as could the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I wonder how many cameras will capture that event? Perhaps it’ll happen at night. It will happen. I can’t think of any other country in the world where the Leaning Tower would have stayed upright for 650 years; only in Italy…)


From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

Florence and The Arno River

I want to go to Florence for one photograph which I missed in 1992 and 1995, a view of the city and the Ponte Vecchio from across the Arno River. From the map it appears that at late morning, with the sun very slightly east of south, the best vantage point will be the Piazzale Michelangelo.

For once in our lives the traffic jam is on the other side of the autostrada - all Florence is heading for the beaches. It’s marvelous to be able to travel at 130 km/h without having a speed camera hidden in the bushes; the wonder of it is that even at that speed we are constantly overtaken by smart machinery doing well over the ton (160 km/h) - big Mercedeses, Alfas, Lancias, the occasional Jaguar, Ferrari, Lamborghini or even the odd Saab 9000 like mine. Fat chance I’d have of doing 160 kays in New Zealand. Italian motorway discipline is superb, everybody stays to the ‘slower’ right hand lanes except when overtaking, and if there is somebody in your way they move over if you flash your lights to let them know you’re behind them. At home that would induce road rage!

We arrive at the north bank of the Arno River and cross on the Ponte della Vittoria to wind our way up the leafy avenue of the Viale Michelangelo near the Boboli Gardens. For some strange reason the Viale Michelangelo becomes the Viale Galileo only to revert once it leaves the Piazzale Michelangelo - our destination. (I think the Italians like changing all these names because they like saying them. This is the most treasured language I’ve ever heard and everybody seems to luxuriate in its pronunciation; it’s the language of people born to poetry).

Piazzale Michelangelo is one damned great car park with hundreds of people milling about. A monster replica of Michelangelo’s David glares at peasants licking ice creams and wearing stupid hats. I get the feeling that it wouldn’t take much for him to suddenly come to life and piddle all over the crowd. Souvenir stands abound selling maps of the city, guide books in Italian, French, English, German, Japanese; straw hats, cotton hats, plastic hats; tee-shirts; ‘David’ pencil sharpeners; paperweights of Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome in snowstorms; brass or plastic ashtrays; buttons, badges and patches. Tired looking stallholders with cancerous suntans have the shifty, narrow-faced eyes of old shafters. Every race under the sun is here with point-and-shoot cameras, flashes going off in all directions in direct competition with the sun; videotape recorders… I hate the place instinctively and, what’s more, the shot I want isn’t here, there’s too much foreground, I want to get over it all and see the Arno, the bridge and the city without a cluttered foreground.

On a terrace below the piazzalle we find an open air café. I walk to the edge of the wide viewing parapet. There is The Shot - it’s got everything, good foreground with a gorgeous jumble of terra-cotta tiled roofs, deep angle into the river, bridge and city all in excellent light. I set up the camera interchanging telephoto and wide angle zoom lenses to take a series of pictures; happy that I’ve got what I came for.


From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’
© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz
.