Italian Odds & Ends

This is a short series of photos that do not fit in any specific post, but which I thought you might enjoy.
The first one is of a delivery truck bringing in bottles of Chianti, and picking up the empties. They must have a way of washing this type of bottle without having to redo their straw "jacket".

Two for the price of one

Auguri a tutti

Those who are not interested in gardening might despair of yet another post on gardens. At least it covers two of them in one post.

The first is the garden of the Strozzi Villa. It might have had a garden at one point, but now it  is mostly a steep hill covered with green vegetation and a  couple of buildings at the top. The steps taking you up the top are impressive. What you see below is only a fraction of them.

The English Cimetery

This is the graveyard where foreigners have traditionally been buried in Florence.  The diversity of monuments is amazing. The best is perhaps this one for the wife of the 19th century English poet, Walter Savage Landor, the one who wrote: "I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

We got a very funny explanation of this monument from the person in charge of opening the graveyard gate, a plump Anglican nun. I told her the woman looked very sad. "Well, not for her husband's death," she said. "She had thrown him out of the house and, as you will notice, she is buried at the opposite end of the graveyard from him and with her back turned to him."

Giardino della Gherardesca

Covering 4,5 hectares, this garden is one of the largest private gardens of Florence. Being private, it is not open to the public. Actually it is part of of the Four Seasons, a five star hotel. Without telling me, Lorne wrote to the hotel explaining that we knew the garden was not open to the public but asked if they could make an exception for two Canadian tourists? Their answer was that he was right, it was not open to the  public. However, if we could set a date, they would give us a time we would be welcome.

The Boboli Garden

We associate gardens with flowers, but it has not always been so. Before the nineteenth century, gardening was mostly about putting order in nature and interpreting that ordered nature according to classical notions of the ideal landscape. The Boboli garden is a very good example of this.

A parterre at the Boboli

San Leonardo

San Leonardo is a narrow, crooked street that snakes up a hill just outside the city.  You might not be impressed with its stone walls, sometimes leaning or even crumbling, through which you every now and then comes to a gate . Here is a typical view.