Pietre Dure Florence

If you have interest in great Italian crasftmanship and artiserty you must stop in and see the museum. The famous Opificio workshop was founded in 1588, has provided decorations in semi-precious stone (pietre dure) for many important churches, palaces and museums in Florence and throughout the world. Most notably for the Cappella dei Principi in the Medici Chapels.

A small museum displays examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as tools once used in the workshop.This is an intriguing display of Radicchio a wonderful perrenial vegetable. Humans have been using radicchio since ancient times. Pliny the Elder wrote of it in Naturalis Historia, praising its medicinal properties; he claimed it was useful as a blood purifier and an aid for insomniacs. In fact, radicchio contains intybin, a sedative andanalgesic, as well as a type of flavonoid called anthocyanin which is used for making dye-sensitized solar cells.

Categories: Facts

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