Florence: Via Lamione

I made this quick watercolour and india ink sketch while strolling the countryside just south of Florence.

Far Away

kara

more faces

some faces

Memories of a field trip to Ravenna, during an Italian art class of a few (too many!) years ago.

The towers of Siena

One April I cycled to Siena, the rose-red gothic metropolis of central Tuscany that, of all the many beautiful medieval cities in Italy, is perhaps the most beautiful.

I arrived from Florence. In that city, apparently, they have a traditional proverb about Siena:

Siena
Di tre cose e piena:
Torri, campane,
E figge di putane.

I shall leave it untranslated. Let it be a warning to anyone here who’s thinking of visiting this most charming of Italian cities. It should also be a warning about Florence. For a city that for 500 years has prided itself on speaking the purest Italian (except Siena, see below), and producing the best poets (or at least Dante, who counts as more than one), you’d think they’d be able to come up with something better.

Or maybe the point is to express maximum contempt with the least possible effort. I lived in Toronto for a long time, and it makes me wonder: are there poets in Hamilton or Windsor right now, sharpening their pens?

Back to Siena. Norman Douglas summed it up in one word: "hell." I can only say that of all cities I’ve visited, except Venice, it is the most beautiful. Now if only we could get rid of the Senese, who profit from the immigrant labour of southern italy, but refuse to speak to the labourers. Or so I was told by an indignant Sicilian I met on Via Fiorentina.

In Siena they speak, tourist books claim, the most pure and refined Italian to be found in the country, but I’m sceptical. Someplace or another has to have a title like this one, but why is it always a town full of money and visibly smug in its affluence? But this is just predjudice on my part. My command of the language is not sufficient to enable me to judge for myself. All I can say is that in Siena Italian is much easier to understand than in the Veneto, and that here all the women enunciate every letter in ciao, stretching the word out so that it rhymes with meow, like a cat. It’s an enchanting habit.

let me sleep

comfort to those who need it

Drawn from life with a Copic brush pen and a red china marker.

sit up straight

Drawn from life with a red china marker, in about two minutes each.

heavy hand

Drawn from life with the Collective in Toronto, using a Copic brush pen.

The basilica at Assisi

One fine spring day I bicycled to Assisi (from Perugia - it wasn't much of a journey) with my sketchbook and sat down to draw buildings.

So here is a fast sketch of the famous basilica of San Francesco. It's a great building, if you're into gothic architecture. It's two churches, one of them built atop the other - you can see the entrance to the lower one at the bottom of the steps on the left. Whether Saint Francis himself would have been pleased with it is another question.

Even if you're not into architecture, the frescos by Giotto make the trip worthwhile, and Assisi itself is a very charming town. Here is a sketch of the town square, complete with Roman ruins, that I did on the same trip.

have a look

two quick sketches

Amy