A room with a view

This Italian trip was truly an embarrassment of riches – over & above the Bologna visit noted below. I was originally supposed to go to Italy during the Chinese National Day celebrations, but an unforeseen schedule modification required changes. And so, instead of my usual haunts in the city near Santa Maria Novella, I ended up staying near Santa Croce…. at the Plaza Hotel Lucchesi, in a “room with a view!” On the very first page of that E.M. Forster novel of the same name (noted earlier in the October 2014 posting), Lucy was very unhappy with her pensione room, lamenting: “I want so to see the Arno”…. a wish granted by the gallant Mr. Emerson. My own river view overlooked both the Piazza Poggi & the Piazzale Michelangelo.

Michelangelo’s ‘Florentine Pieta’

A second fortuitous result of the schedule change was that I was still in the city for the opening of the new Opera del Duomo Museum. This spectacular new sculpture museum is located immediately adjacent to the Duomo, at the site where Brunelleschi had his offices when he was building the dome (see the April 2012 posting); and where Michelangelo actually carved ‘David.’ The new museum has some truly memorable pieces: the original Ghiberti’s doors to the Baptistery; Brunelleschi’s wooden models; a full-scale model of the façade of the medieval church that preceded the current version; and another Michelangelo work, The Deposition (often called the ‘Florentine Pieta,’ the artist’s penultimate work of art, and one that he himself damaged, unhappy with flaws in the marble).

Over and above these (unexpected!) treasures, I had a follow-up from my Venice visit earlier this year. On that trip, I mentioned reading Henry James’ The Aspern Papers – a fictional work based on a real-life story about an individual who became a boarder in a pensione in order to obtain some literary papers hoarded by its elderly landlady. In real life, the landlady was Claire Claremont, stepsister of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein); stepsister-in-law of Percy Shelley (Mary’s husband & a famous Romantic poet); mistress of Lord Byron, another well-known Romantic poet; and mother of Byron’s daughter, Allegra.

James set his story in Venice, but the real-life saga had played out in Florence, at No. 43, via Romana – just adjacent to the Boboli Gardens (with an entrance on the left in the picture). And so I’ve just read Emma Tennant’s Felony, a ‘second order’ novel – yes, a novel about Henry James writing his novel.

via Romana, 43

Tennant is pretty harsh on James, but the real-life cast of characters in her book is really quite remarkable. It appears that Claremont might also have had an affair with Shelley; James had a complicated relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, a best-selling novelist of the 1870s & 1880s (& grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper of The Last of the Mohicans fame), who soon after committed suicide in Venice; and both poets – after rather adventurous lives — flamed-out quite young: Shelley at 29, Byron at 36.

On this trip I decided to check out the Florentine location of all these machinations, using the nearby via Romana entrance as an excuse to wander around in the Boboli Gardens for a bit as well.

Boboli Gardens

But finally…. yes, I did in fact do some work on this trip too! The GE group was a bit smaller in this session – 20 participants, from 14 countries. But given the considerable changes ongoing today on the international front, I completely revamped my four training modules. We began by comparing this group’s views about climate change and mitigation mechanisms with those of other persons in the oil & gas industry. (This group was more pro-active, and a stronger proponent of carbon taxation). After going over theory & Kyoto Protocol results, we considered the numerous markets now being developed all around the world (focusing primarily on Europe, the US & China); considered items being addressed in the upcoming Paris COP meeting; and then discussed future challenges, including complementary technology policies; ‘stranded assets’; and future normative measures (such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals).

Obviously a truly memorable Florence visit!