Florence: Introduction: Why Go Now

Florence, famously dubbed the “city of stone” by writer Mary McCarthy, regards itself as a living museum. And considering it has counted among its residents the likes of Michelangelo, Raphael, Dante, Donatello, Brunelleschi and the entire Medici clan, it certainly has the cultural cachet—and monumental works of art—to substantiate the claim. Change is slow to come by in the small Tuscan capital, as seen in the anticipated—and some say long-overdue—expansion of the Uffizi Gallery, which began early in 2007 some ten years after the project was first announced (a new modern exit area designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki remains a major point of contention, recalling the controversy caused by I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid addition to Paris’s Louvre in 1989). But travelers hardly come here expecting the cutting edge. In many ways, visitors—particularly art lovers, who could spend a lifetime exploring treasure troves of architecture, paintings, religious artifacts, sculpture, furniture and objets—still sense something in Florence that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe noted more than two centuries ago: “In the city we see the proof of the prosperity of the generations that built it,” he wrote after a trip in 1786. “The conviction is at once forced upon us that they must have enjoyed a long succession of wise rulers.”