I love a good and a bad museum, me. Preferably one like the Oxford Story where you get to travel round on a mechanised desk looking at waxworks recreating select moments from a townÂ’s history. But if not, just a museum dedicated to pencils will suffice. I canÂ’t resist having a look.
So when I was aimlessly walking around the back streets of Florence and passed a museum that promised to recreate the conditions and diseases of the medieval city I was never going to be able to resist. Even though walking round the actual city of Florence today can not be that dissimilar to walking round medieval Florence (the town is almost entirely composed of buildings from the Middle Ages), I still wanted to go inside and walk round a false view of what I could walk around in outside for nothing. Because unlike the real Florence, this false Florence had waxworks and had a warning that those of a nervous disposition should not come in. It was clear that this museum was going to make the Keswick Pencil Museum look like a load of old shit (something ironically also wonderfully achieved by the Pencil Museum itself).
So I stumped up my 8 euros (only fifty cents less than the Uffizi gallery. This just had to be fantastic) and was given a CD player by a surprised looking Italian man (it was almost as if he never had visitors to his museum, so astonished was he by my arrival. But that couldn’t be it). Somehow, although I had asked for my ticket in perfect Italian, “una bigletto, per favoure” (I’ve been learning off a CD created by a man with a bad wig, from the picture on the box, and badly fitting dentures, unless speaking Italian also involves lots of random clicking noises that I seem unable to recreate), the startled man gave me the English version of the tour. I thought about saying, “Me dispiatcho, sono Italiano” (hey I can say it, but they don’t tell you how to spell it), but then I realised that the best that could happen is that I would have to listen to a CD in a language that I can so far only say “a ticket, please” and “I’m sorry, I’m Italian”. The worst that could happen is that the man could start to quiz me about my claim in Italian and I would only be able to respond by saying “I would like to buy the thing.”
So I took the English CD and prepared to be transported into the world of Medieval Florence. If the museum had been clever, they would just have opened the back door and sent me into a different street, where a couple of students dressed in rags would throw faeces at each other for half an hour and I would have thought it was the most amazing museum ever. “The way they recreated the daylight!”
But behind a raggedy curtain (deliberately so, made of Hessian, to look all medieval) was a very small room with a few boxes and waxwork heads and pictures and another couple of bemused looking tourists listening to CD players. No wonder the man had looked shocked. He had had three visitors in the space of five minutes. This was probably more than heÂ’d had in a week before.
The man came in with me and explained that I should wait by a number one on the wall, until the CD told me to move on to number two. As number two was literally less than a foot away I didnÂ’t think this was going to be an amazing interactive experience.
By the first number was a drawing of medieval Florence. I was asked to look at this drawing as an Italian man speaking slightly stilted English, over a mournful choir of monks, told me what medieval Florence had been like. This wasnÂ’t all I had been hoping for. But the lengths to which the man went to try and get across how much Florence had smelt back then were quite amusing. If only because of the way he pronounced faeces.
The tape was very long and detailed, but the museum was light on actual exhibits and there was so little space that often I found that the other two people were standing in the way of the thing I needed to look at. There were a few looped videos, and waxwork heads and arms that initially showed us how criminals had been punished and killed in days gone by. Then as a break there was a market stall showing some of the food that people used to eat. The voice reminded me that there was no coffee or chocolate or tobacco back then, as these all came from America. It was hard to imagine how the Italians had survived without these staples of modern life.
The room then looped back on itself and the next few exhibits were waxworks heads that showed the devastating effects of medieval illnesses like the plague and leprosy. It was a good job I wasnÂ’t of a nervous disposition or the waxworks might have made me very slightly uncomfortable.
However, it did give one pause for thought, to consider how cheap life was back then and how much was the constant risk of painful death. We may have the spectre of biological warfare hanging over us, but for our ancestors this was a fact of life, and they had no idea where these diseases came from or why. Let alone having anything to cure their buboes and sores and festering skin. The plague killed one in three people (amazingly some people managed to get better. I suspect they spent most of their time criticising other people who were taking time off work and making a big deal, just cos they had a bit of the Black Death) and the average life expectancy was 40. Though if I lived in the faeces lined streets of Florence where I had a 50/50 chance of catching a spot of leprosy then IÂ’m not sure IÂ’d want to live that long. It is easy to fail to appreciate how lucky we are to live here and now. And just how many people living on this planet donÂ’t have the incredible good fortune that we enjoy (or rather spend most of our time complaining about).
The museum ended, not with a ride on a mechanised model of Leonardo da VinciÂ’s face, but with a look at a typical dwelling of a medieval Florentine peasant. The tape warned me to mind my head, as during these times people had been smaller. Men grew only to about 1.7m and women to 1.6m. I may be wrong, but I think that I am round about 1.7m. If I had lived in medieval times I would have been a giant. People would have looked up to me. How great would that have been? But being comparatively tall would probably not make up for the ever present danger of contracting leprosy. Nowadays the only advantage of being 1.7m tall is that I can walk around a representation of a medieval Florentine peasantÂ’s house without having to bend down. You know, which IÂ’m grateful for.
So although a bit low-tech and slight I am glad I chanced across the museum as it gave me some stuff to think about and also had a couple of slightly gross waxworks to look at and go “eurgh”!
As I walked back on the streets on Florence, not longer a giant whose head almost scraped the ceiling of the medieval living quarters, I looked at all the tall people around me and considered how much the human race has grown in the last five or six hundred years. I had a vision of the human race in another million years being forty or fifty feet high, with wide lumpen faces. A bit like those giant kangaroos and mice and gerbils that once ruled the continent of Australia. And thinking of that made me wish that those giant rodents had survived into the modern day and developed super-intelligence, opposable thumbs and weapons, so that when Captain Cook had discovered the continent he would have inadvertently precipitated a massive inter-Mammalian world war. I would pay good money to see an army of giant gerbils (possibly with thermo-nuclear capabilities) take on an army of eighteenth century men. Probably as much as the entrance fees to the Uffizi and the medieval Florence museum put together.
I may be wrong, but it is my guess that I am the only person for whom a visit to the Florence museum of medieval life has led to such a fancy.
