Today is a travel day. We’re taking the train to Rome and then catching the train to a hotel at Fiumicino airport for the night. Tomorrow we head home. We had a lovely, if brief visit to Florence. Jan booked a great room in a central location, overlooking a piazza.

We had wondered about the building at the end of the piazza, but hadn’t looked it up, until today. Our train didn’t leave until 12:48 and we were only a five minute walk from the station so we were looking for nearby things that might be of interest. I can’t believe we almost missed this.

The art works in the basilica date back as far as 1285. We spent 45 minutes looking around and left wishing that we had more time. Another reason to come back to Florence.

I’ll start with a closer view of the area behind the altar.

I’m going to show a number of pictures from the basilica without much explanation, to show the range and quality of the art. Most of these are from 1285 to 1550.

The next mural shows heaven and the one after shows purgatory and hell. These were painted a few years after the plague of 1348, which may have influenced the depiction of hell.

The basilica also had a table listing the exact time for solar noon for every day and mention of a camera obscura. There were brass meridians in the floor with markings for the astrological signs. I was curious, so I did a little investigation. A small hole in the wall casts a shadow that shows the discrepancy between the calendar date and the true solar date. When this was built, the Julian calendar was still in use, and it was causing problems with the date for Easter. Data from this device was presented to Pope Gregory XIII and influenced the adoption of the Gregorian calendar that we still use. That alone made it worth the visit.

I’m writing this on the train to Rome, so probably won’t post later today. And I’m definitely looking forwards to high speed trains in Canada.