Happy 100th Birthday, Jimmy Carter!
I went to Florence with Stella, Cristina, Claudia, and her friends, Rita & Guja, to see La Biennale Internazionale dell'Antiquariato di Firenze at Palazzo Corsini. A lot of fancy Italian words for what is basically a VERY HIGH END Antique Show in a very high end location. It was over the top! Obscenely excessive, at times. Very fine furniture, 14th &15th century antiques and more paintings than I thought possible (after all, aren’t they all in the Museums Of The World?) They even had a sketch by Michelangelo for sale. The exhibit hall was divided into small rooms, each representing gallery owners from all over Europe, all doing a brisk business. It opened two days ago, yet many things had already been marked sold. There are a lot of very rich people here.
Claudia was most interested in the sculptures of Libero Andreotti, a native son of Pescia. She is the director the museum that bears his name. I may have mentioned that she is quietly relentless. I think she needs to be if she wants to enlist rich patrons to help expand the collection and put this somewhat obscure museum on the map.
Looking around at the furniture, I realized that alot of the furniture in Stella’s house looks like the stuff we saw today. Jiminy Crickets.
As if all the ornate antiques dripping with gold and the jewelry dripping with diamonds wasn’t enough, the building itself was AMAZING. Every square inch of it was heavily frescoed, trompe l’oeil-ed, with carved decorations everywhere you looked. One room had a wall entirely sculpted with mythical figures and (real) water running and emptying into a small pool. Like I said, over the top. The building faces the Arno River so, of course, every room had a view. It was overwhelming and totally out of my league.
We walked along Via del Parione where Giorgio Biondi, my dad’s college friend/business partner, lived and worked. As a girl, I loved to visit his wildly eccentric Florentine apartment with red walls, dramatic drapes and Savanarola chairs. It’s all changed now, the little shop where he used to buy his morning paper is gone, replaced by a high end boutique with a guard at the entrance. My favorite wedding dress shop that specialized in one-of-a-kind hand-crocheted dresses, also gone.
We passed Sabatini, a restaurant on via Panzani near via del Giglio. When I was 17, my parents and I went there for lunch because my dad knew the owner. Every table faced an interior courtyard with an enchanting garden and fountain. Very elegant. I ordered lasagna verde as a primo that was so delicious I ordered it as a secondo. My parents were ok with it. The secondo took a very long time to arrive. I found out later that the waiters were so scandalized that they waited until the people sitting on either side of us left before serving it. The following summer, I saw the owner, a very refined and well dressed gentleman, walking down the street in Montecatini. I approached him and introduced myself as Dante’s daughter and he said “I know exactly who you are, Signorina Lasagna Verde.”