Meeting with the driver and the guide in hotel.
Lorenzo the Magnificent fostered the artistic genius of Michelangelo Buonarroti. He took the 15 year-old artist into the Medici family palace so that he could supervise at close hand the young Michelangelo’s artistic and social education. Michelangelo’s boyhood home - in sight of the Basilica of Santa Croce that now houses his tomb - provides the starting point for this tour [exterior only]. Some of the master’s earliest drawings reproduce figures from the frescos painted by the great Giotto at Santa Croce. After a visit to the Opera del Duomo where the sculptor’s haunting, unfinished “Pietà” is displayed, the tour continues on to the Medici Palace and then to the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo. Here Michelangelo carved the famous Medici tombs with their enigmatic, reclining figures of “Dawn, Dusk, Night and Day”. Our tour ends in the vestibule of the Laurentian Library for which Michelangelo created a magnificent stone staircase with all the plastic qualities of a gigantic lava flow.
Return to hotel. |
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