C’era una volta. . . once upon a time. . . Max (Massimo Melani) met Wally (Walter Sanders) in Firenze. Here’s the story in their own words.

The Basilica of Santa Croce holds priceless artistic and historic treasures.

Massimo
First, a few words about the Leather School: Workshop, Laboratory and Show Room of the finest leather goods situated in the old Franciscan monastery of the Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. It was a marvelous place, as were the splendid people working there.

It all started with the Patron Marcello Gori, the owner and director of the Leather School.

Those years in the early 1970s were characterized by a kind of elite tourism. And the Leather School attracted many of these well-traveled, wealthy tourists from around the world. Marcello Gori ensured that his sales and service personnel were first class as well. The staff was multilingual, elegantly dressed, rather good looking and with long experience abroad. I was one of those.

One day in 1972, the owner presented us a colleague, an American boy from Chicago—a certain Wally Sanders, very smiling person, who looked like a survivor from Woodstock or San Francisco–absolutely the first foreigner who was going to work with us.

More about Max, Wally and Lampredotto

Treasures of Florence fly to Bucks County on the wings of angels.

Imagine possessing so many gems that there’s no more room in your jewelry case for a flawless gold and radiant-cut diamond necklace. You’re forced to stow it in a box in the attic.

No space, either, for the marquise-cut ruby bracelet. Upstairs it goes.

Those pear-shaped sapphire ear drops set in silver filigree? No spot for them in the case. A shame they’re out of sight.

More Offering of the Angels

Sandro Botticelli, (Florence 1445-1510), Madonna with Child (Madonna della loggia), circa 1466-1467, oil on panel, Collection of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.

So how, you might ask, did the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA manage to snag “Offering of the Angels,”one of the most prestigious exhibitions of the new millennium?

The triumph involves the Association of Museums Conference, an empty bus seat, and a fortuitous question.

Bruce Katsiff, the Director/CEO of the Michener related at the media launch event, at the Italian Consulate in Philadelphia, how a chance meeting with a representative of Florence, Italy-based Contemporanea Progetti led to this exciting exhibit coming to Bucks County.

“There was one empty seat left on a bus going to a special event at the Getty Museum in LA three years ago,” said Katsiff. “I introduced myself to the woman next to me and we talked a little. I eventually learned that she was seeking four U.S. museums to host a spectacular exhibition of Italian art from the Uffizi in Florence. She told me that she had already booked three of the museums.”

“Does the exhibit include a Botticelli?” Katsiff asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

Katsiff jumped at the opportunity and the brilliant result is the Michener hosting the exhibit which will run from April 21 through August 10, 2012. This will be the only venue in the northeastern United States. (Look for a future post about the works in the exhibit after SimpleItaly attends the preview.)

From left, Bruce Katsiff, Director/CEO of the James A. Michener Art Museum, Dottore Luigi Scotto, Italian Consul General, Philadlephia, and Jerry Lepping, Executive Director of Visit Bucks County, announce the "Offering of the Angels" exhibit.

Renaissance Italian art lovers, rejoice! An incredible exhibit and value priced at $15 per ticket which includes the exhibit, an audio tour and parking.

One in an occasional series of conversations with those who try to “live Italian” wherever they are.

"La Principessa" in Perugia

Linda Dini Jenkins is a freelance travel writer and photographer and the author of Up at the Villa: Travels with my Husband (more later on how to win a free copy!). She also blogs regularly about travel and travel writing at Travel the Write Way and teaches creative writing and journaling. She enjoys taking small groups of friends, to explore what Italy has to offer beyond the Florence-Venice-Rome triumvirate, and she can pack her suitcase in 15 minutes.

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Q: Living “Italian”. . . Is it a great way to live or the greatest way to live?
A: Well, I think it’s the greatest way to live. When you take into account the slower pace of life (outside the big cities!), the immersion in history and art, the fantastic cuisine, the love of design and music, the respect for taking time out to enjoy the simple things . . . whether it’s Italian or Mediterranean or European, it’s how I want to live.

Q: Why?
A: Are you kidding? Start with the food, the design sensibilities, the language, the arts, the vino, the pausa, the passeggiata . . . need I go on?

Q: When did you discover your Inner Italian? What is your Inner Italian named?
A: I always knew about my Inner Italian but, like other children of first-generation Italian-Americans who desperately wanted to assimilate, “being Italian” was something that just happened and was never really encouraged. In fact, I’d heard stories growing up of how hard it was for my father to be Italian in a New York suburb in the 1930s and ‘40s; even being Italian in my first job in New York in the 1970s was something of a liability. And I was always a little ashamed after that of being part Italian (my mother’s side of the family was English/Irish/German) until I met my husband and he took me to Italy in 2000. Since then, I have been a proud and vocal Italian-American. If my Inner Italian has a name and it needs to be something other than Linda, I suppose it’s Principessa . . .

Q: What does “living Italian” mean to you?
A: My grandparents came over from Italy in the late 1890s and they were anything but rich. So for me, living Italian has to do with cooking and eating together, always having crusty bread and wrinkled olives and green olive oil on the flowered oilcloth-covered table. It means not being afraid to be emotional—even if that involves fists and things flying when you’re angry. It means loving music and feeling the arts very deeply. It means trying to have a sense of style—of la bella figura—even if the clothes or table settings come from Target. And it means being a storyteller and a traveler and something of an adventurer.

Legge piu qui

The Money-changer and his Wife (Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello)

What were the 1 Percent of quattrocento Florence doing with their gold florins?

Buying exquisite works of art by Botticelli, Beato Angelico, and the Della Robbias.

The current, and timely, exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence through January 2012 shows how the modern banking system developed in parallel with the most important artistic flowering in the history of the Western world.

Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities is co-curated by art historian Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks, writer, translator and author of Medici Money – Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-century Florence.

I know of Parks through his entertaining books on the expat life Italian Neighbors and An Italian Education. I’m intrigued to learn he’s a scholar of Italian art history.

According to the program notes, “the exhibition is conceived as a ‘duet’, in which the two curators present different – and sometimes opposing – views of the exhibition’s content. [They] aim to provide the visitor with an opportunity to look at art from a cross-disciplinary perspective involving economists, politicians and diplomats. It examines the story of how the Florentine Renaissance grew from the supposedly open, but more often actually hidden, relationship between art, power and money.”

The Florentine bankers practiced usury on a scale the world had never before witnessed. But, unlike today’s 1 Percent, they at least left us with The Birth of Venus and countless other treasures.