Florence

The fourth & final leg of this month-long, round-the-world trip was a visit to Florence, Italy, for my annual Oil & Gas University sessions at GE’s Florence Learning Center. Like the Jakarta cohort (see previous posting), this year’s group seemed particularly strong, and included 28 participants from 18 countries around the world (including China, Pakistan, Iraq and Nigeria).

San Gimignano

On this year’s visit I took the opportunity to spend some time outside the city at a number of favorite Tuscany haunts, making trips to a few new places as well. First on the list was another visit to Siena – this time on a warm Springtime day, rather than the freezing, multiple-sweater November weather of a previous visit. The Piazza del Campo was a bit quieter than that scene in the latest James Bond movie – and I stayed firmly on the ground & didn’t climb the tower this time. But I did do a bit of hiking in San Gimignano, the hilltop town of towers, and recovered from that with some nice wine tasting in the vineyards of Chianti.

I saved my climbing for the 462 steps in the cupola of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore – Florence’s well known Duomo. I was reading Ross King’s absolutely fascinating book, Brunelleschi’s Dome, on this trip, describing the incredible engineering feats necessary to build this structure, still the largest brick dome ever constructed (and larger than St. Peter’s in Rome, or the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC). In addition to designing the hoists necessary to lift the 37,000 tons of materials, Brunelleschi chose to build the structure without the internal wood supports normally employed for arches and such curved structures. And he did all that without any knowledge of statics (that bane of engineering students that I suffered through in sophomore year!) or analytical approaches and techniques that still lay a few centuries in the future. The climb up between the two shells of the dome made me all the more appreciative of the amazing architectural and construction feat that he accomplished!