Florentine Thursday 

Ksenia Prokofyeva
5TH YEAR STUDENT.

The program of the fourth day of the seminar included visits to the Bargello Museum and the Uffizi Gallery.  Both museums are situated in the historical centre of the city, so we had a chance to enjoy the beauty of this flowering city once again.

We were amazed by the magnificence of the ancient building of the Bargello museum. The palace built in the middle of the 13th century preserved the atmosphere of that time.  So when we found ourselves in a small courtyard of the museum, our attention was attracted by the medieval sculptures, which we found very interesting. Then we noticed two lions guarding the entrance to the ground floor of the museum, and we realized that a lot of interesting things were waiting for us.

I was impressed by the statue “Florence victorious over Pisa” by Giambologna.  It’s quite interesting that Florence is represented as a woman and Pisa as a man.

Then we went to the Uffizi Gallery – the place that we all wished to visit once we arrived in Florence.  This ancient museum deserves special attention. We were amazed by the number of works of art in the museum, namely the collection of paintings of the Renaissance. There we saw the great works of such masters as Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian and many others.

During the work of the seminar we were to gather as much information as possible about one of the famous people, who once lived in Florence, so that we could contribute an article to the Multimedia Dictionary which is the aim of the  whole project.

This fourth day in Florence was very important for me because Herbert Horne (a person I was writing an article about) was connected with the museum work.

During his lifetime Horne  made a great collection of paintings, sculptures, drawings and decorations. So he housed this collection in the old Corsi building, which is Horne Foundation Museum now. There he wanted to recreate the atmosphere of a house typical for Renaissance. I had a great chance to visit this place, talk to the people working there, get the information I was looking for and finally feel that atmosphere that Horne wanted us to feel.