The BBC Travel Show in Florence!
Hi, I’m Keith Wallace with the BBC. I’m working on a piece for the BBC Travel Show in Florence. How about taking me around the city?
I thought about it for a second, then….Yes, sure!
The starting point for The Travel Show’s piece on Florence was the Uffizi Gallery entrance fee hike. It’s one of the most important museums in Italy. Keith wanted to show that Florence has a lot more to offer than the Uffizi. You can visit other places that are just as beautiful without paying to get in. After all…Florence is an open-air museum! He asked me to take him to a couple of lesser-known places in town that are free. I immediately proposed the Oratory of Buonomini di San Martino and Cimitero delle Porte Sante (Sacred Doors Cemetery), that were actually featured on the BBC Travel Show in Florence.
The Oratory of Buonomini di San Martino
The Confraternity of the Buonomini di San Martino was founded in 1441. It aimed to rescue “I poveri verghognosi”. They were the wealthy fallen in disgrace because of political conflict, economic upset, or other misfortunes. These people never asked publicly for charity because they were ashamed (vergognosi in Italian). The twelve brothers (the so-called Buonomini, “good men”) still help these kinds of people today. At that time they wore a black cape and red hat, as they are easily recognizable in the oratory’s frescoes. These frescoes were painted in the XIV century by Ghirlandaio, a great Renaissance painter and Michelangelo’s teacher, and his workshop. You want to see this amazing place, take a look at my Medieval Tour of Florence.
The BBC Travel Show in Florence: Florence off the beaten path
It was a lot of fun shooting The BBC Travel Show in Florence! Keith Wallace and his troupe are really great people! I confess that I was a little nervous because I had spent the last few months being a full-time mom, far away from my job as a tourist guide. It was a fantastic experience though! I hope I contributed to introducing two fairly unknown places in Florence because there’s more than the Uffizi, the Accademia, and the Duomo – the best sellers. There are many squares, markets, neighborhoods, and museums that are waiting to be seen! And with a tourist guide taking care of you….it’s a different story! And another very important thing… gelato! Keith wanted to get ice cream at a touristy gelato shop right on the main square. It was for a scene. I wasn’t very convinced because it was 9 in the morning and you don’t eat ice cream that early! On top of that, it was terrible gelato, the kind that’s artificial and not made with fresh ingredients, the kind made in a factory with bright, unnatural colors. It was definitely not good gelato, just a tourist trap! In fact, it started melting shortly after, and I had to talk with sticky hands covered in melting ice cream that was dripping onto my shoes! So, trust your guide when they tell you where to go for gelato!
The Sacred Doors Cemetery
The idea of a burial place near San Miniato church came around 1837, even though the cemetery was inaugurated eleven years later in 1848. The project was initially given to the architect Niccolò Matas (the creator of the Santa Croce façade). Simultaneously, the architect Giuseppe Poggi, creator of Viale dei Colli and Piazzale Michelangelo, was developing the new road network. This is how you can come to know a place in Florence rich in history, built on the Michelangelo bastions that surround the abbey complex. It was chosen as a burial site by nobles, both Florentine and from other regions, as well as by figures who have brought honor to the city of Florence or to Italy as a whole. Many tombs are in the neo-gothic, renaissance, and oriental styles. To give a few examples, it is the final resting place of writer Giovanni Spadolini, movie director Franco Zeffirelli,f ashion designer Enrico Coveri, writer Carlo Lorenzini (better known as Collodi, who wrote Pinocchio), painter Ottone Rosai, novelist Vasco Pratolini, artist Pietro Annigoni, singer Odoardo Spadaro, costume designer Piero Tosi, etc. Even Friederick Hart is buried here, one of the so-called ‘Monument Men’, part of an international team of hundreds of experts and intellectuals formed specifically to save and recover masterpieces of art that had been destroyed or looted by Nazi troops across Europe.