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Piazza Santa Croce
Piazza Santa Croce is one of the main plazas or squares located in the central neighbourhood of Florence, in the region of Tuscany, Italy. It is located near Piazza della Signoria and the National Central Library, and takes its name from the Basilica of Santa Croce that overlooks the square. Main buildings Basilica of Santa Croce The most notable features of the basilica are its sixteen chapels, many of them decorated with frescoes by Giotto and his pupils, and its tombs and cenotaphs. It is the burial place of many illustrious Italians, such as Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Enrico Fermi, Galileo, Ugo Foscolo, Guglielmo Marconi, Luigi Cherubini, Leon Battista Alberti, Vittorio Alfieri, Gioacchino Rossini, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Lorenzo Bartolini, Pier Antonio Micheli, Bartolomeo Cristofori, Giovanni Gentile, thus it is known also as the Temple of the Italian Glories (''Tempio dell'Itale Glorie''). Palazzo Cocchi-Serristori On the opposite side to the Basilica of S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ugo Foscolo
Ugo Foscolo (; 6 February 177810 September 1827), born Niccolò Foscolo, was an Italian writer, revolutionary and a poet. He is especially remembered for his 1807 long poem ''Dei Sepolcri''. Early life Foscolo was born in Zakynthos in the Ionian Islands. His father Andrea Foscolo was an impoverished Venice, Venetian nobleman, and his mother Diamantina Spathis was Greeks, Greek. In 1788, upon the death of his father, who worked as a physician in Split, Croatia, Spalato (present-day Split, Croatia), the family moved to Venice, and Foscolo completed the studies he began at the Dalmatian grammar school at the University of Padua. Amongst his Paduan teachers was the Abbé Melchiore Cesarotti, whose version of ''Ossian'' was very popular in Italy, and who influenced Foscolo's literary tastes; he knew both Greek language, modern and Ancient Greek. His literary ambition revealed itself in the appearance in 1797 of his tragedy ''Tieste''—a production that enjoyed a certain degree of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lorenzo De' Medici
Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici (; 1 January 1449 – 8 April 1492) was an Italian statesman, banker, ''de facto'' ruler of the Florentine Republic and the most powerful and enthusiastic patron of Renaissance culture in Italy. Also known as Lorenzo the Magnificent (''Lorenzo il Magnifico'' ) by contemporary Florentines, he was a magnate, diplomat, politician and patron of scholars, artists, and poets. As a patron, he is best known for his sponsorship of artists such as Botticelli and Michelangelo. He held the balance of power within the Italic League, an alliance of states that stabilized political conditions on the Italian peninsula for decades, and his life coincided with the mature phase of the Italian Renaissance and the Golden Age of Florence. On the foreign policy front, Lorenzo manifested a clear plan to stem the territorial ambitions of Pope Sixtus IV, in the name of the balance of the Italian League of 1454. For these reasons, Lorenzo was the subject of the Pazzi conspir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Giuliano Da Sangallo
Giuliano da Sangallo (c. 1445 – 1516) was an Italian sculptor, architect and military engineer active during the Italian Renaissance. He is known primarily for being the favored architect of Lorenzo de' Medici, his patron. In this role, Giuliano designed a villa for Lorenzo as well as a monastery for Augustinians and a church where a miracle was said to have taken place. Additionally, Giuliano was commissioned to build multiple structures for Pope Julius II and Pope Leo X. Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi heavily influenced Sangallo and in turn, he influenced other important Renaissance figures such as Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, his brother Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, and his sons, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Francesco da Sangallo. Early life Giuliano da Sangallo (né Giuliano Giamberti) was born c. 1445 in Florence. His father, Francesco Giamberti, was a woodworker and an architect who worked closely with Cosimo de' Medici. This proved to be help ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palazzo Cocchi-Serristori
Palazzo Cocchi-Serristori is a Renaissance-style palace in Piazza Santa Croce, Florence, Italy. It presently houses offices of a regional council of Florence. History It is situated opposite to the church of Santa Croce, in the place where the city's 12th-century walls passed. Facing the church, on the right side of the piazza is the frescoed facade of the Palazzo dell'Antella. The Cocchi-Serristori palace is a reconstruction of a pre-existing medieval edifice (owned by the Peruzzi), attributed to Giuliano da Sangallo, Baccio d'Agnolo or Simone del Pollaiolo. It has a cubic shape, built with polished stone, with three arcades in the façade enclosed in the original 14th-century piers. At the two upper floors are pilasters with finely sculpted capitals. In the interior are a frescoed private chapel and, in the staircase, 18th-century frescoes attributed to Atanasio Bimbacci, Dionisio Predellini, and Giuseppe Collignon Giuseppe Collignon (March 2, 1778 – February 10, 1863) was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Giovanni Gentile
Giovanni Gentile (; 30 May 1875 – 15 April 1944) was an Italian neo- Hegelian idealist philosopher, educator, and fascist politician. The self-styled "philosopher of Fascism", he was influential in providing an intellectual foundation for Italian Fascism, and ghostwrote part of '' The Doctrine of Fascism'' (1932) with Benito Mussolini. He was involved in the resurgence of Hegelian idealism in Italian philosophy and also devised his own system of thought, which he called " actual idealism" or "actualism", which has been described as "the subjective extreme of the idealist tradition". Biography Early life and career Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Italy. He was inspired by Risorgimento-era Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of ''autoctisi'', "self-construction", but also strongly influenced and mentored by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought – namely Karl Marx, Hegel, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bartolomeo Cristofori
Bartolomeo Cristofori di Francesco (; May 4, 1655 – January 27, 1731) was an Italian maker of musical instruments famous for inventing the piano. Life The available source materials on Cristofori's life include his birth and death records, two wills, the bills he submitted to his employers, and a single interview carried out by Scipione Maffei. From the latter, both Maffei's notes and the published journal article are preserved. Cristofori was born in Padua in the Republic of Venice. Nothing is known of his early life. A tale is told that he served as an apprentice to the great violin maker Nicolò Amati, based on the appearance in a 1680 census record of a "Christofaro Bartolomei" living in Amati's house in Cremona. However, as Stewart Pollens points out, this person cannot be Bartolomeo Cristofori, since the census records an age of 13, whereas Cristofori according to his baptismal record would have been 25 at the time. Pollens also gives strong reasons to doubt the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pier Antonio Micheli
Pier Antonio Micheli (December 11, 1679 – January 1, 1737) was a noted Italian botanist, professor of botany in Pisa, curator of the Orto Botanico di Firenze, author of ''Nova plantarum genera iuxta Tournefortii methodum disposita''. He discovered the spores of mushrooms, was a leading authority on cryptogams, and coined several important genera of microfungi including ''Aspergillus'' and ''Botrytis''. Micheli was born in Florence in 1679. He taught himself Latin and began the study of plants at a young age under Bruno Tozzi.According to a short description from the libraries of Harvard University. In 1706 he was appointed botanist to Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, director of the Florence gardens, and a professor at the University of Pisa. His ''Nova plantarum genera'' (1729) was a major step in the knowledge of fungi. In this work, he gave descriptions of 1900 plants, of which about 1400 were described for the first time. Among these were 900 fungi and li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lorenzo Bartolini
Lorenzo Bartolini (Prato, 7 January 1777 Florence, 20 January 1850) was an Italian sculptor who infused his neoclassicism with a strain of sentimental piety and naturalistic detail, while he drew inspiration from the sculpture of the Florentine Renaissance rather than the overpowering influence of Antonio Canova that circumscribed his Florentine contemporaries. Biography Bartolini was born in Savignano di Prato, near Prato, Tuscany. After studying at the Florentine Academy of Fine Arts, honing his skills and reputation as a modeller in alabaster, he went in 1797 to Paris, where he studied painting under Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Desmarais, and afterwards sculpture under François-Frédéric Lemot. The bas-relief ''Cleobis and Biton'', with which he gained the second prize of the Academy in 1803, at once established his fame as a sculptor and gained for him a number of influential patrons. His bas-relief of the ''Battle of Austerlitz'' was among those executed for the column ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lorenzo Ghiberti
Lorenzo Ghiberti (, , ; 1378 – 1 December 1455), born Lorenzo di Bartolo, was an Italian Renaissance sculptor from Florence, a key figure in the Early Renaissance, best known as the creator of two sets of bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery, the later one called by Michelangelo the ''Gates of Paradise''. Trained as a goldsmith and sculptor, he established an important workshop for sculpture in metal. His book of ''Commentarii'' contains important writing on art, as well as what may be the earliest surviving autobiography by any artist. Ghiberti's career was dominated by his two successive commissions for pairs of bronze doors to the Florence Baptistery (Battistero di San Giovanni). They are recognized as a major masterpiece of the Early Renaissance, and were famous and influential from their unveiling. Early life Ghiberti was born in 1378 in Pelago, a comune 20 km from Florence. It is said that Lorenzo was the son of Cione di Ser Buonaccorso Ghiberti and Fiore Gh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gioacchino Rossini
Gioachino Antonio Rossini (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces, and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties, at the height of his popularity. Born in Pesaro to parents who were both musicians (his father a trumpeter, his mother a singer), Rossini began to compose by the age of 12 and was educated at music school in Bologna. His first opera was performed in Venice in 1810 when he was 18 years old. In 1815 he was engaged to write operas and manage theatres in Naples. In the period 1810–1823 he wrote 34 operas for the Italian stage that were performed in Venice, Milan, Ferrara, Naples and elsewhere; this productivity necessitated an almost formulaic approach for some components (such as overtures) and a certain amount of self-borrowing. Durin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vittorio Alfieri
Count Vittorio Alfieri (, also , ; 16 January 17498 October 1803) was an Italian dramatist and poet, considered the "founder of Italian tragedy." He wrote nineteen tragedies, sonnets, satires, and a notable autobiography. Early life Alfieri was born at Asti, Kingdom of Sardinia, now in Piedmont. His father died when he was very young, and he was brought up by his mother, who married a second time, until, at the age of ten, he was placed in the academy of Turin. After a year at the academy, he went on a short visit to a relative at Coni (mod. Cuneo). During his stay there he composed a sonnet chiefly borrowed from lines in Ariosto and Metastasio, the only poets he had at that time read. At thirteen, Alfieri began the study of civil and canon law, but this only made him more interested in literature, particularly French romances. The death of his uncle, who had taken charge of his education and conduct, left him free, at the age of fourteen, to enjoy his paternal inheritance, aug ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
