Do places have a nature that outlasts or influences the people who occupy them? I have had this impression in the past. I certainly felt this visiting the Uffizi Galleries in Florence recently. Uffizi, of course means "offices", reflecting their past as the center of the Medici bureaucracy. We felt that the ghost of the bureaucrats must influence the way the facility is run.
The Uffizi is a very beautiful museum. The long corridors on the second floor, filled with statuary and bathed in a soft Tuscan light, are unforgettable by themselves and the rooms off the corridor are filled with a succession of masterpieces. One could spend days and weeks there.
But, the staff of the museum has the bureaucrat's tendency to hold on to information for the sole purpose of holding it over patrons. We rented the taped tour from an officious young woman who took our passports in exchange. There was no explanation on how to start, but we assumed we would be able to figure it out from signage. We found no clear signs. We looked around us. Everyone that rented the tour was in the same quandary as us. It did not matter the nationality. The Italians were as puzzled as we were. Eventually we did figure out that the tour was keyed to room numbers and learned how to find some, but not all, room numbers. During our visit we were chewed out by museum staff for a number of offenses, all entirely unintentional. We tried to go down the up staircase, though the prohibition was not clearly stated in Italian or English. We tried this because the signage at the down staircase implied it lead directly to an exit, bypassing other exhibits. We were yelled at in the cafe for standing in the wrong place, although we could not see why.
In the end, the art was worth the bureaucracy, but it was a bit maddening.
- J
Image from Wiki Commons and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License
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