My Writings. My Thoughts.
Florence Tours by Fantastic Florence
Are you tired of big groups and lightening visits? Are you interested in the history of Florence but also in its modern and thrilling life? Would you like to discover all the secrets of one of the most beautiful cities in the world? Then Fantastic Florence is definitely what you are looking for! Fantastic Florence aims to show you not only the places of historical and artistic interest (in Florence there are plenty of them), but also, and above all, it aims to let you know the real spirit of the city by telling you its history and adding amusing and funny anecdotes. We provide extremely high quality, yet fun and informal, fully guided tours of Florence, designed for small, independent and open-minded travelers. We would like our visitors to get familiar to the city and feel at home: the tourist is a guest, the guided tour is a nice and pleasant walk and the tour guide is a caring host. We pride ourselves on exceeding the expectations of our guests, having a professional but relaxed approach and ensuring that every tour is entertaining, informative and utterly unique.
The historical cinemas of Florence
In this video I talk about a glorious page of Florence: its historical cinemas. I don’t mean the new multiplex cinemas we are use to think about when we say “Let’s go to the cinema!”. I mean the many many historical cinemas of Florence.
The first one was the “Reale Cinema Lumiere”, from the name of the Lumiere brothers, first inventors of the picture house, opened in 1899 in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. If you think you don’t know where it is, no worries, it is just Piazza della Repubblica, called “Vittorio Emanuele” in honour of the king of Italy until 1946.
The second one was the “Edison”, always in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, it was a competitor of the Lumiere. It doesn’t exist anymore today, but there is a library with its name. Then we had the Odeon Cinehall, opened in 1922, the only one which is still a cinema today. It was a luxury place and if you will go to watch a movie there you will understand what I mean: golden plaster sculptures, stained-glass dome, little bronze statues, … In the ‘50s it was also a concert hall, so in vogue that in 1952 Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong played there together: I’d love to be there! In the same Piazza della Repubblica, where today there is the brand-new Hard Rock Café, once we had another symbol of Florence: the Gambrinus. It was born as a cafe for the highest Florentine society in 1894, inaugurated as a cinema in 1922. If you were born in Florencin in the ‘60s or ‘70s, the Gambrinus billiard room was a must-place to go to spend the evening or the afternoon, depending on the age and your parents!
Now we move to the MelBookStore, in Via Panzani. We don’t want to buy a book, but just to remember the beautiful Excelsior (the last movie I watched here was “Seven years in Tibet”, a 3 hours movie sitting on uncomfortable chairs, but Brad Pitt was divine in the monk-version!).
Few steps towards the train station and we stop again, this time at the Astra Cinehall, today changed into a conference center.
The last one we have mentioned in this video is the splendid Apollo, in Via Nazionale. It was restored in 1936 by Nello Baroni, architect of the Gruppo Toscano, a staff of young architects in charge of the construction of the train station Santa Maria Novella (in rationalist style). It had the biggest screen in town and it was really gorgeous!
So, a walk on the traces of the XIX century in Florence, because we are not only Renaissance, Botticelli, Michelangelo & Co. Florence also is something more modern…
Now, lights off, silence please, and let’s get the movie started!
Lights, camera, action! The Vinaino Tour on TV…
The original “Vinain
o Tour” got famous. And I went on tv! Saturday 21st of January, the Italian channel Rai 2 broadcasted Sereno Variabile, one of the most popular programs in Italy that deals with travel and tourism. The Sereno Variabile troupe came to Florence in November to shoot the documentary and interview some “native”. I had my 5 minutes of fame! The video was made in front of the “Antico Vinaio”, a winery in via de’Neri, really close to Piazza della Signoria. I talked about the “Vinaino Tour”, i.g. the tour of the wineries of Florence, together with Andrea Buzzegoli, member of the De Gustibus Network Association. With a glass of red wine in one hand (I just drunk it at the end of the interview!), I explained what the tour is about: a pleasant walk, that aims to show the most popular and local life of Florence, discovering the curiosities and the anecdotes of the city, disclosing some hidden corner, such as the Buonomini Oratoy (the first seat of the Winemakers’ Guild which houses some unique Renaissance frescos, really worthseeing…) and the wine hatches, the old street wine vendors, as big as a mail boxes!
I was asked to tell a funny story and I told the origin of the Italian common saying “a tutto spiano”, that is used to indicate the 
action of making something at full stretch, like working at full stretch, as hard as possible. Under the “Loggia del grano”, i.g. the grain market (just in front of the Uffizi Gallery exit and few steps away from where the interview was done), worked the so-called “Magistrato della Grescia”, a magistrate in charge of controlling the purity of the grains sold in the market and responsible for giving to the bakers the meal necessary to make the bread, issue managed by the Florentine government. The unit of measurement for the corn was the “spiano”. In rich periods, without any wars or famines, the magistrates allotted big quantities of wheat , using the hole “spiano” unit. So the bakers could make the bread like there was no tomorrow, “a tutto spiano”!
Unfortunately, the video is in Italian, but you can have fun watching me talking with the anchor Osvaldo Bevilacqua without knowing in which camera I had to look into…completely lost!
So, lights, camera, action!
The Serie Gioviana at the Uffizi: a Renaissance social network…
If you say Uffizi Gallery, your mind goes to the Venus by Botticelli, the Maestà by Giotto or the Tondo Doni by Michelangelo. Maybe, you don’t even notice the series of small portraits on display in the three corridors of the museum. This is the socalled Serie Gioviana, a collection of portraits of illustrious men and women ever since: popes, kings, emperors and sultans, cardinals and noblemen, saints and ecclesiastics, scientists and literary men, artists and leaders of mercenaries.
There is Pope Alexander VI, Saladin, Leon Battista Alberti, Vittoria Colonna, the Medici’s, Anne Boleyn, the Conqueror Tamerlane of Samarkand, and many more. Continue Reading
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