Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Uffizi: A Painting, A Bombing, A Restoration About this episode In 1993, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy was damaged by a car bomb. But this story starts in the 16th century with painter Bartolomeo Manfredi, and reaches all the way to the 2000s with an extraordinary restoration project.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:30 Tracy V. Wilson? The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Veev Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:58 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:09 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
2:12 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:14 Holly Frey? Oh, Tracy, I just got back from Italy.
2:16 Tracy V. Wilson? I know you did. You seemed so happy while you were there.
2:19 Holly Frey? I didn't want to, I didn't want to leave. It was a pretty great trip.
2:23 Holly Frey? And while I did actually bring materials to work on an episode while I was traveling, because, you know, long flights and stuff, I got sidetracked by something else because I saw something while I was in Italy that kind of shifted all my gears and I got really obsessed with it. So, uh, since that was the only thing I could think about, it became an episode. So for setup, if you visit the Uffizi Museum in Florence, Italy, and if you follow the museum's suggested path, which in and of itself is an adventure, there is this moment where you turn a corner into a staircase. And in the sort of transitional vaulted ceiling that's over the staircase, just as you're entering it, there is a discolored
3:05 Holly Frey? imprint of a window, like it almost looks like somebody like drew a window on the staircase. But then to the right of that staircase on the wall, there is a small plaque and the English version of it reads, "The vault bears the mark of a window blown by the force of the mafia bomb on May 27, 1993." So I was instantly riveted and I looked it up. I had a vague recollection of this event from when it happened, but I didn't remember a whole lot of the details around it. And I was not aware that the Uffizi is continually incorporating that story into its own story and the way it presents art. So I was on this long journey. It was quite
3:50 Holly Frey? delicious and that became this episode. Um, we are gonna kind of have this in three parts. We're gonna start by talking about a particular artist and his work. And then we are going to talk about the context of that bombing and then the work that's been done, some of it pretty recently, to recover from that attack and memorialize the tragedy and piece together a little bit of lost history. So we are going to start with Bartolomeo Manfredi.
4:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Bartolomeo Manfredi was born August 25, 1582, in Ostiano, Italy.
4:28 Tracy V. Wilson? That's in the province of Cremona in the Lombardy region. It's adjacent to the Mantua province and sometimes you will find his place of birth listed as Mantua. We don't know a whole lot more about his early life than that. He is said to have become an apprentice or a student to the Mannerist painter Cristoforo Roncagli, also known as Pomorancio. When he was a boy, Pomorancio lived and worked in Rome and had been chosen to create some of the decoration for St. Peter's Basilica. This also is a fragmentary piece of information. Writing in 1987 for the Burlington magazine, Raffaele Morcelli noted that Pomorancio was
5:12 Tracy V. Wilson? in Mantua in 1595. He was actually imprisoned there briefly. And that might have been where he came into contact with Bartolomeo, who would have been 13.
5:23 Holly Frey? It is unclear if Manfredi ever studied with Caravaggio, although he certainly became associated with the older artist's work. In 1603, Caravaggio was sued for libel by rival painter Giovanni Baglione after critical and unflattering poems that Caravaggio wrote about Baglione had circulated throughout Rome. I had originally been planning to include some of these poems or an excerpt from them in their translation, but they are so filthy that they made even me, a person very comfortable with salty and filthy language, that many other people would find upsetting. I gasped aloud. I was like, oh, my goodness.
6:06 Holly Frey? Like, my husband ran down the stairs to see if I was okay. They're filthy. But the important thing is that during this libel trial, a servant of Caravaggio's is mentioned as actually being the one who passed out the copies of those poems. And that servant is named in the record as Bartolomeo Cristofori. So this has led to some speculation and I think a pretty well grounded idea that this is actually a reference to Bartolomeo Manfredi and it is using the first name of his teacher, Pomorancio, as his last name. But again, this is still a detail that's very much about piecing together clues rather than something we can say with certainty.
6:50 Holly Frey? Even if Bartolomeo did study with Caravaggio, it could not have been for very long because the renowned painter famously had to leave Rome in 1606 amid murder accusations after a brawl that left Renucci Tomassoni dead. The actual cause of that brawl is still debated. There are some different versions of it you may hear. But Caravaggio was found guilty and he was sentenced to death in absentia. He died in the Tuscany town of Porto Ercole while he was actually headed back to Rome, apparently in search of a pardon from Naples where he had been living. And that happened in 1610.
7:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Bartolomeo Manfredi is often described as a Caravaggio follower, which sort of straddles the fence on the issue of whether he was his student. And he became the most well-known among the Caravagisti. That's the painters that emulated both the style and the techniques of Caravaggio. Manfredi was so studied at the style of Caravaggio that there have been numerous times that his work has been mistaken for Caravaggio's. I definitely, when Holly sent me this outline and I Googled to see what some of this art looked like, there were a couple of things that immediately made me go, oh, that looks like Caravaggio. One such example is a painting known as Cupid Chastised.
8:12 Tracy V. Wilson? This is an image of the naked adolescent Cupid being whipped by Mars, god of war. Venus, Cupid's mother, is attempting to intercede and to stop Mars. So this is a violent image with a dramatic visual contrast due to the light source being depicted exclusively from the left side of the painting.
8:33 Holly Frey? According to Alfred Moir, writing for the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985, when Cupid Chastised first hit the radar of the wider art world outside of Italy, it was in 1937. And at that point, it was touted as a Caravaggio that had been newly discovered. And although art experts quickly determined that it was in fact the work of Manfredi, that incorrect Caravaggio attribution continued to circulate. People kept saying it was by him. Today, the provenance of the work, which is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, is clearly laid out from the time the painting was commissioned in March of 1613. That more detailed account of the painting's history became possible,
9:18 Holly Frey? in part due to the discovery of two inventory lists that were in the Vatican archives that mentioned the painting. They weren't part of the Vatican collection. They were just pieces the archives had that were collections of other people in Rome. That information in those lists was then cross-referenced with other contemporary mentions of the painting in order to create this reliable timeline.
9:41 Tracy V. Wilson? By 1613, when that painting was commissioned, Manfredi was well-established. He was clearly influenced by the work of Caravaggio, but he doesn't appear to have been at all like him in temperament. He was quiet. He didn't socialize very much. He took mainly private commissions instead of seeking out important public jobs, painting mostly multi-character tableau. Some of his work is religious in subject. A lot of it is often referred to as lowlife, meaning everyday people doing things like drinking in taverns, playing cards, or making music. One such work is the painting "The Card Players", sometimes also called "Soldiers Playing Cards",
10:24 Tracy V. Wilson? which Manfredi completed sometime between 1616 and 1618. In this image, a group of men are at a table in a variety of positions. Some are sitting, some are standing. One is sitting on the edge of the table. They are betting on a card game called Zarro, which was popular at the end of the 16th century. This painting employs the technique known as chiaroscuro. That's the creation of depth and drama through a contrast of light and dark, with those elements being light and dark within the composition. This painting will become a central character later on in this episode.
11:03 Holly Frey? Manfredi died quite young. He was only 40 when he passed. We don't have a lot of information about his death, other than the date, which was December 12, 1622, in Rome.
11:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Coming up, we are going to shift our focus to the bombing that took place in Florence in 1993. First, though, we will pause for a sponsor break.
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14:59 Holly Frey? At 1:04 a.m. on May 27, 1993, the city of Florence was rocked by a massive explosion on Via de Giorgofili. That's a street that runs mostly north away from the Arno River, right next to the Offizi Gallery complex. On that side of the complex, in addition to gallery buildings, are the Giorgofili Academy, which is a historic educational institution. It's housed records and study of agriculture, forestry, and economy. And the Torre de Pulci, a 14th century tower that is used by the Giorgofili Academy for both offices and residences.
15:38 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of residents of the city came out of their homes to see what had happened, and they saw terrifying devastation. The academy and the tower were both badly damaged, as were sections of the art galleries. A theory spread that a gas tank may have exploded, but as first responders got to the scene, they found the epicenter. There was a massive crater in Via de Giorgofili. And they realized that the cause of this was not a gas explosion, but a car bomb. A Fiat van filled with an estimated 500 pounds of explosives had been parked on the street and then left to detonate. That number was initially reported as roughly 200 pounds, but that was revised upward over
16:19 Tracy V. Wilson? the years based on the intensity of the explosion. While the nighttime museum staff had not been on the side of the gallery that faced this street, there were people in the Torre del Pucci, five people were tragically killed. One was a student named Dario Capalicchio, who died in a fire that started after the bombing, and the remaining four were a family who were buried in the collapsed tower. Angela Nencioni was the caretaker of the tower, and her husband Fabrizio Nencioni and their two very young daughters, Nadia and Caterina, lived there as well, and the whole family was killed.
16:59 Holly Frey? The museum damage was extensive. In addition to the building itself, the Vasari corridor was badly damaged. It was one of the most damaged pieces of architecture. So that structure is a 750 meter long elevated enclosed walkway, and it was built in 1565 by Giorgio Vasari so that members of the Medici family could travel from Palazzo Piti to Palazzo Vecchio on the other side of the Arno River, crossing alongside the bridge known as Ponte Vecchio. This provided the Medici's a way to make that crossing without having to deal with commoners or without compromising their safety. The Via Lambartesca, the street that runs perpendicular to the Via dei Giorgio Fili, was covered in rubble.
17:45 Tracy V. Wilson? There was a lot of damage to works of art. A handful of their most famous pieces had a bulletproof glass covering that protects them from projectile debris, but the vast majority did not. An estimated one quarter of the Uffizi collection was affected. According to their website, the final count was 173 paintings and 56 sculptures in various states of damage and destruction. In addition to that, because the building had so much damage, a lot of works had to be quickly moved to other parts of the facility, leaving them where they were would have exposed them to the elements. The unharmed room, where Botticelli's Venus and Primavera are housed, became the de facto
18:29 Tracy V. Wilson? landing place for a lot of the art that needed to be moved. That led reporters to note that it became the most impressive room of art in the world. The museum staff and investigators took photos to document everything. You can see a lot of those photos online at the Uffizi website as well. That page will also be linked from our show notes. At the time, there were three paintings that were considered to be permanent losses. Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerardo de Lennotti and two by Bartolomeo Manfredi. They were The Concert and The Card Players.
19:04 Holly Frey? So, just like the Corridor, Vasari also designed the main Uffizi building. That name actually just means offices, because it was built to house the various governmental divisions that were operating under Cosimo I, Medici. Cosimo tapped Giorgio Vasari to design this building in 1560. But Vasari died in 1574, and the building was not yet finished. And at that point, Bernardo Buontalenti took up the project. Early on in the building's existence, once it had been finished, the top floor of it was used mostly to house the impressive Medici art collection. They were, as has come up on the show many times before, significant patrons of the
19:47 Holly Frey? arts, and they commissioned a lot of paintings and sculptures that are very famous today. Over time, the Medici art collection grew, and it took up more space. And really, that became the sole purpose of the Uffizi, was to house that collection. Anna Maria Luisa de Medici, born in 1691, became the last of the Medici line. And in a very famous and important move, she signed what was known as the Family Pact. And that basically left the Uffizi Museum to the government of Tuscany, and it provided for the entire art collection to remain in the Uffizi in perpetuity and to be made open to the public. So she basically made it into a public museum.
20:30 Holly Frey? This cemented the reputation of Florence as a nexus of great art, and it was also something that was designed to draw visitors to the city and keep its economy strong. So the damage that the Uffizi sustained in 1993 was something that the entire city felt very deeply because that museum is a work of art in and of itself. Like, the building is considered a work of art, and it is also the heart of the culture and the identity of Florence.
20:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times traveled to Florence to report on the situation several weeks after the fact. And his description was printed in papers around the world. One section describes a gallery that looked over the street where the car had been parked, and then reads, quote, "Through that enormous opening in the wall, the view is breathtaking and horrific. Set against the backdrop of the soft Tuscan hills and the great dome that Brunelischi designed for the cathedral, are the shattered red tile roofs of the buildings across the street from the Uffizi and the crumbled shell of an ancient tower in which a family killed in the explosion used to live. A few household belongings can still be seen on what remains of the tower's top floor,
21:40 Tracy V. Wilson? reduced to barely more than a roofless platform. Historical agricultural archives housed in the tower were destroyed."
21:48 Holly Frey? Initially, there was no real sense of who the perpetrator or perpetrators might be, why they may have targeted the museum, and even if the museum was the actual target. The Uffizi is a squared-off U-shaped building with a courtyard. So if someone really wanted to damage it, that courtyard would have been the optimal place to park the explosives. But the car bomb was parked on the exterior part of the U.
22:15 Tracy V. Wilson? The incident sparked both rumors and outrage. The day after the bombing, labor unions in Florence called a four-hour strike. During which more than 20,000 people took to the streets in a demonstration to send the message that the city was united against violence and intimidation. There were suspicions about the perpetrator being part of organized crime, or even an inside job initiated by corrupt government officials. Quote, "People might seem calm, but they're angry. This is not crime, it is politics. There is a war between people who want change and people who don't want to lose power. And the only way is to throw bombs and frighten people away from change."
22:58 Holly Frey? The prevailing theory from early on among investigators was that the mafia was involved. Just a few weeks earlier, there had been an attack in Rome against television talk show host Maurizio Costanzo after he aired anti mafia pieces on his show. The journalists survived that attack thanks to lucky timing, but 23 people were injured, including his driver, and an estimated 100 families lost their homes in that blast. But the most important details of the Rome bombing in terms of how it related to the Uffizi situation were that the explosive used in that bomb in Rome were the same as the ones used in Florence, and they had been packed into a Fiat van, just like the vehicle
23:43 Holly Frey? outside the Uffizi.
23:45 Tracy V. Wilson? The motive for the attack on the Uffizi was retaliation. In the months and weeks leading up to the explosion, Italian authorities had initiated a huge crackdown on mafia activity and had arrested hundreds of people in the process, including some very high ranking members of the criminal organization. Many of those men were made examples of. Authorities put them in solitary confinement to show that they could cut them off from the power structures that they depended on. And in response, the crime syndicate sent the message that it could strike at Italy's art and history, things that could not be replaced. That is in and of itself horrific, but could also kneecap the Italian economy, which really
24:26 Tracy V. Wilson? depends on the tourism money that museums and historical architecture generate. It took a year for authorities to conclusively tie the mafia to the bomb. And finally, in 1998, several high ranking bosses within the organization were sentenced to life in prison for it.
24:45 Holly Frey? Stepping away from the horrific bombing, the Uffizi was having some trouble already in the months before the blast for reasons that did not have to do with the criminal underworld. In March 1993, an article from Reuters ran under the title, "Push Comes to Shove at Italy's Uffizi: Too Many Visitors, Too Little Staff at Famed Museum." And that write-up reported that the museum had become so popular without the support to run it that, quote, "On average, a third of the gallery's rooms are closed during the tourist season because of a chronic staff shortage." That meant that famous works, like those of Botticelli, the things that were drawing people to the museum,
25:28 Holly Frey? were often off limits because that room, like others, was closed to manage crowd flow because no one was available to just keep an eye on the art.
25:38 Tracy V. Wilson? This was an issue that government officials were, according to the article, frustrated by. Antonio Palucci, who was the municipal supervisor over Florence's museums at the time, gave a statement to journalist John Filane that evidenced his frustration at the way people had to elbow one another just to get a look at the art. Quote, "The pushing and shoving in the galleries is a barbarity. Visiting a museum today has become a strain for museum guards and directors. It's like trying to hold a trench with fewer and fewer soldiers in the face of an ever bigger offensive." The museum had reached a point where it would sometimes borrow guards from other museums to try to keep up with demand,
26:21 Tracy V. Wilson? but that meant that those other museums often had to close. There were proposals in discussion to ban school groups as one way to try to mitigate this problem.
26:31 Holly Frey? The head of the Uffizi at the time, Anna Maria Perriolo Tofani, told the press that the problem stemmed from the fact that while bureaucrats in Rome were happy to accept the income that the Uffizi generated, they micromanaged every move the museum tried to make to improve the visitor experience and ensure proper running and upkeep of the facility. And they were not approving any kind of spending. So at the time, the Uffizi was estimated to generate about $5.5 million in income each year, and yet, they were only allowed seven curators for their massive and historically significant collection. Other branches of their staff were similarly disproportionately small for what they were trying to do. The allocated budget for its upkeep was tight
27:16 Holly Frey? enough that, according to newspaper reports, staff had to buy their own stamps and office supplies.
27:23 Tracy V. Wilson? In the years just before the attack, the museum proposed a $50 million project that would expand the museum's space by taking over a handful of state archives' offices in the building that had been empty for five years after the operations in those offices moved to Rome. The government approved it, but then insisted on hiring their own contractors for the renovation. Those contractors were not familiar with working on historic buildings and caused damage by injecting cement into the foundation, and that resulted in cracking. This project stalled after that.
27:58 Holly Frey? We are going to talk about how the Uffizi recovered from the blast and how that recovery has stretched into the very recent past, after we hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History Class going.
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29:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesse have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
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31:49 Holly Frey? In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the Uffizi was incredibly quick to form a plan of action for recovery. Curators and other museum staff started cleanup the same day as the blast, mobilizing quickly to protect the art and to assess the damage. In cases where canvases and sculptures had been shredded by glass and other debris, staff members carefully crawled the floors of the galleries to collect every possible piece. They matched them to their frames and what was left of the original art, and then they stored them all together for possible reconstruction. This meant that they were literally pawing through rubble to identify what debris was from a painting versus a sculpture versus possibly a piece of the building.
32:33 Holly Frey? And there was broken glass everywhere, so this was an act of dedication. As they worked, they sorted those collected pieces into wooden trays to try to keep the various works of art separated.
32:44 Tracy V. Wilson? It is really hard to imagine how much determination and teamwork it took to clean up the museum and reopen it. But the Uffizi was incredibly organized in this effort, and other museums in the city also helped. While the Uffizi was closed, some of the other museums extended their hours so that tourists would still have access to the city's art. 20 days after the bombing, less than three weeks, the museum was partially reopened. A lot of the paintings from the damaged part of the building were rotated into the reopened galleries so that people could still see them. And then the remaining galleries were restored and reopened over the course of the next four years. Because of the need for the museum to rebuild,
33:28 Tracy V. Wilson? the logistical problems of space it had faced before the tragedy were able to be addressed in the aftermath of the bombing. The response to the tragedy was so impressive that it became a model for how museum recovery should be managed.
33:43 Holly Frey? Yeah, I feel like that could be its own whole topic. There have been papers written about how they handled it and how every other museum should study how they handled it because their bias for action was so great while also maintaining an incredibly high level of care. It's quite cool. In the years immediately following the attack, Manfredi's painting, The Concert, was restored as much as possible. It had been shredded into fragments, but the recovered fragments were big enough that restorers were able to piece what they had together, although it is not a complete picture. Then in 2003, Gerardo Dele Notti's Adoration of the Shepherds was also restored, but the card players remained as the one piece that was believed to be beyond repair. It was
34:28 Holly Frey? so damaged that it actually remained untouched for decades. In the days and weeks following the explosion, the museum staff had carefully taken what was left of it, which was just hundreds of tiny fragmented pieces, and covered it with rice paper to protect it. Those pieces were placed in an envelope that was stored along with the original canvas and frame of the work. That particular painting had not actually been in the Uffizi for terribly long when the bombing happened. It had been in Palazzo Pitti, in a storeroom, until 1969, when it went through a restoration, and then it was added to the Caravaghesque collection on display at the Uffizi.
35:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Fast forward to 2014, when Daniela Lippi happened across the fragments of the card players. She had studied painting restoration, starting all the way back when she was 19, and from there, she had started working with sopraintendenza, that means superintendency, which is an office within Italy's Ministry of Culture that focuses on conservation and protection of important works. She described the moment when she saw the card players this way in 2023 in an interview, quote, "I was at the gallery's storage rooms for an inspection when I came across the work and what was left of it. The work, bailed on the frame, had been placed in the entrance hall, and on the table lay the envelope containing
35:51 Tracy V. Wilson? all the painting's fragments collected from the floor. Among them, the fragment with the playing cards stood out. Somehow, the identifying element of the represented subject had survived, but the fragments of painted canvas would become dust if left in that envelope." I thought that through my work, I could contribute in a small way to saving a record of that dramatic event.
36:14 Holly Frey? Lippi put together a detailed proposal describing her plan to at least partially restore the badly damaged painting. And she got approval, but then the next hurdle was money. In June 2017, the Uffizi, along with partners from the Florence community, launched a fundraiser for the project, which was called Culture Against Terror. Through crowdfunding, more than 26,000 euros were raised. So at that point, the financials were in place and then began the actual work.
36:46 Tracy V. Wilson? So keep in mind, the 615 pieces that Lippi and her team had to work with were tiny, some of them just a centimeter or two in width and height. So she was tasked with a very precious jigsaw puzzle where all of the pieces were so damaged and you could not try to match them edge to edge to find their locations. She needed a good visual reference to try to match the colors and the shadings of the fragments to. The Uffizi archive had photographs of it that had been taken after the 1969 to 1970 restoration, but those were in black and white. But then Lippi started searching the Scala archives.
37:28 Tracy V. Wilson? This is a Florentine archive dating back to 1953 that collects images of cultural history, including art, and then creates very high quality digital versions that can be licensed. So sort of like Getty Images, but for art and film. And they had a high resolution photograph of the card players from 1988. So five years before the attack and well after the prior restoration. Scala donated this image to the project.
37:57 Holly Frey? And the resulting project is this really cool marriage of technology and art because each tiny piece was scanned and then the image of the original painting was projected onto the canvas to enable the restorers to visualize placement and kind of match up pieces to their positions. Keep in mind, this painting was in the style of Caravaggio, which meant that a lot of these recovered pieces were just incredibly dark shades of brown and plums verging on black. So discerning which tiny fragment was going to fit where required incredible concentration and care.
38:35 Tracy V. Wilson? As Lippi and her fellow restoration experts started carefully comparing what they had in hand to that high resolution photo, they realized that not all of the pieces were going to be usable. Even with all 615 pieces, this would have been a partial restoration, but some of those fragments were so small or so damaged that they could not be reincorporated into the piece. In the end, almost 200 pieces were deemed unusable. Each of the usable fragments had to be very carefully cleaned. They were painstakingly stitched together and affixed to a new backing canvas with special adhesive. The ones that could not be used were affixed to panels that are placed in a custom folder
39:18 Tracy V. Wilson? on the back of the painting, so they will be available for future analysis. In the end, right around 30% of the original painting has been pieced back together. It's both beautiful and heartbreaking to see the vast blank areas in this frame. In a 2023 interview with Skala Archives, Lippi stated, quote, "The work thus recovered is not brought back to an intact state, but has become a document, a memory, and warning of that terrible affront." If you are watching this on our Netflix channel and you're wondering, why are you not showing us what this looks like? It is that artwork that is part of Italy's cultural heritage has special protections through the Italian government. So you can use pictures of these
40:03 Tracy V. Wilson? works for like personal use, but not for something like what we are doing where we are putting a show on Netflix. But you can see them on the Uffizi's website.
40:14 Holly Frey? Yeah, if you do an internet search for Uffizi Manfredi, it's gonna come up. Like, I did that right before we recorded and three of the top five results were images of this restored painting. It's a very famous effort. When the partially restored painting was set to make its debut in 2018, the Uffizi's director, Aika Schmidt, told the New York Times that this whole project was really about much more than art. Quote, "For Florence, Italy and the world, it was such an important event of terror. We can't bring back to life the people left dead or the heavily damaged paintings, but we can build a memorial for culture against violence and terror."
40:56 Holly Frey? In addition to the Manfredi painting, when this debut happened, the museum also showed a documentary in the gallery that showed the work that Lippi's team had done. And it also included interviews with rescue workers who had been on the scene following the blast in 1993.
41:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Since then, the partially restored the card players, as well as the concert, have been displayed on subsequent years as temporary exhibits, marking the anniversary of the bombing.
41:25 Holly Frey? Yeah, I'm not clear whether they do it every year. One thing that I read while I was in Florence made it sound like this is an annual thing they do now, but I couldn't find any clear evidence where they were like now in, you know,
41:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Right, right.
41:39 Holly Frey? 2020. And I don't know what happened during like the really harsh period of the pandemic, whether they were, they had just shut down and weren't doing it or not. So probably they're, you know, I'm sure they will show it again and again.
41:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
41:54 Holly Frey? It's so cool. I have a listener mail that's also kind of about art.
41:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
41:59 Holly Frey? It's about greeting cards.
42:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, good.
42:02 Holly Frey? Which I was delighted that people enjoyed our weird greeting card episode because that's one of those ones that I was like, I'm into this. I don't know if anybody else.
42:12 Holly Frey? But this is an email from our listener, Kelsey, who writes, Hello, ladies. I've been listening to the show for many years through many hosts. I started when I got my first iPod Nano when I was in college around 2008. I love your banter and hearing about your crafty pursuits. The recent podcast about greeting cards was particularly interesting. Over last summer, I got into watercolor painting through a project where I illustrated a short story I wrote. I'm working on self-publishing it on Amazon. Since then, I've been painting cards. They're a great, small unit of art. As a teacher, I'm tired after work. Thank you for being an educator. And then Kelsey mentions the plan to get back into crochet when there's more time available over the summer and concludes, thank you for your
42:57 Holly Frey? hard work. I love this email. One, because I always want to thank all of our teachers because they deserve it. And especially in this episode where we talked about museum staff needing to buy supplies. I'm like, just like teachers was how I felt when I was doing the research. But also, I also have gotten into watercolor painting recently in the last year. When I was in Japan last year, my best friend is an artist. She's also who I went to Italy with. And there was this one art supply store in Japan she wanted to go to and we went and I on a whim bought art supplies. I bought watercolor sets. I had not watercolor painted since I was a kid and that wasn't real watercolor. That's just goofing off. But these sets were so beautiful that I was entranced and I was like, must buy.
43:42 Holly Frey? And then earlier this year, I was like, I'm going to start using these a little bit. And I'm so I've been doing my own little self-directed watercolor study for the same reasons that Kelsey mentions. You can spend 15, 20 minutes and produce something kind of cute. And also I've been using it in fabric design.
43:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, nice.
44:00 Holly Frey? Where I'll do a watercolor and then scan it in and incorporate it into a fabric print. So I love, I want everybody to make art in whatever way makes sense to them because I honestly think it is some of the best therapy you can do outside of actually having a therapist. I just think it's good for your soul to make things. It makes your brain work in a new way that we're not given the opportunity to do all the time where you're just kind of playing. Low stakes art is the best for your mind, in my opinion. Anyway, that's just me proselytizing that I want everybody to please make art in whatever way they like, because I think it's really good for your soul. Kelsey, thank you so much for this email because you made me delighted
44:44 Holly Frey? and gave me an excuse to talk about the importance of art. There are also photographs of some of the art that Kelsey's done. One says, be a good plant, water yourself. And I just think that's charming as heck. And it's a painting of a sunflower, which I also love. And then there is another that has some beautiful colored dragonflies in it and another that I, I am not 100% confident, I believe it is a lion and that its mane is the rainbow.
45:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I think it's a lion with a rainbow mane.
45:21 Holly Frey? And not, my first thought was, is this a kitty that is just surrounded by a halo? Like a kitty kitty, not like a lion, although lions are kitties. Anyway, these are very beautiful. Thank you for sharing your art with us. I, I love art. There's no surprise there. But I'm always delighted when people share their work with us. So that's another thing. If you don't want to do pet tax, you can share your art. It's great. You can send us whatever you want. If you want to do that, you can do that at [email protected] . If you would like to check out our source lists and our show notes, which we've mentioned a couple times in this episode, you can do that at missedinhistory.com. If you would like to subscribe to the podcast and you haven't done that yet, you can do that
46:06 Holly Frey? on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
46:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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47:57 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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