Florence

This year’s GE Oil & Gas University’s training group had 28 engineers from 18 different countries, including China, Russia, Iraq and Kazakhstan. The Middle East was particularly well represented, with participants from Saudi Arabia and Oman; two each from Kuwait, Qatar and Egypt; and three engineers from the country most well represented, the United Arab Emirates. This year’s visit included a nice little side trip to Lucca, the ancient walled town and birthplace of Giacomo Puccini; Pisa, home of the famous Leaning Tower; and, of course, time in Florence itself.

Birth of VenusBirth of Venus

Perhaps you’ve heard about the ‘Stendhal Syndrome’? This is a condition where people become dizzy, with rapid heartbeats, often becoming faint, when they are exposed to art of great beauty in concentrated settings. Not surprisingly, it has also been called the ‘Florence Syndrome,’ and is often associated with the Uffizi Gallery. And I can certainly see why; we spent several hours wandering the halls of this magnificent museum on this visit, with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus a particularly memorable attraction.

On our stroll over to the Uffizi, we walked by the Palazzo Vecchio located right next door — and I was extremely surprised to see a sign there announcing their current exhibition. Yes, it was none other than Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God – this time the real thing, not the print I had seen in Paris (see last summer’s Paris posting below). The setting, like the work itself, was more than a little strange. You can get a sense of the Museo de Palazzo Vecchio’s stunning grandeur from its website, and to get to the Hirst exhibit we first had to pass through the Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici, which the museum itself describes as the Medici Palace’s ‘room of wonders,’ and a masterpiece of Florentine Mannerism (created between 1570 and 1575). It was a tightly enclosed space covered floor-to-ceiling with amazing art – before passing into a small pitch-black room, with Hirst’s diamond skull virtually floating in the center. If you didn’t get Stendhal’s Syndrome in the Studiolo, I suppose the incongruous shock of a grinning, glittering skull could nonetheless lead to similar symptoms.