Back to Florence for five days. Lovely in the winter sun. Does it perhaps seems a little busier with groups of Chinese tourists than this time last year? But of course there are still nothing like the dire crowds of summer. One high point has been seeing the restructured Botticelli rooms in the Uffizi which were opened in mid October. The improvement on the familiar Room 10-14 is simply stunning. The old large square room has been partially divided, to make more wall space. So now the Birth of Venus and Primavera are both beautifully isolated and quite wonderfully well lit too. They can never have looked better.
Here though is a painting from the Uffizi that we’d never noticed before, the Madonna of the Well (c. 1510). Not Raphael as you might think at a first glance, but by one Francesco Cristofano Guidicis, known as Franciabigio. Lovely though.