One Last Weekend

This is our last weekend in Florence. We finished the day today by touring the Alinari Archives, perhaps the most intense archive that I have ever been to. They have rooms where literally millions of photographs have been archived from all over Italy and Europe. Included in the archive are over 300,000 glass negatives that were taken by the Aliniari Brothers in the very same studios that we toured. They also work on photograph restoration and have begun a digital archive that is made of hundreds of thousands of photographs from every point in history.

We also got to see a Collotype machine which is a print making tool that works off of glass negatives that can be anything from photographs to etched reproductions of works of art. There are only two of these machines in the entire world and this one has never left the room it was in, from the time it was built over 100 years ago.

Walking through the archives was an amazing experience. We also continued to make our own prints today and I finally was able to get a Albumen print that I am happy with. I haven’t had the chance to begin to work with the negatives that I have taken here, but will get the chance next week. I will have to spend a good portion of one night down at the lab just printing new ortho negatives to get the prints made, but it will be worth it. I am quite excited to finally be creating art.

This weekend we actually have off and with our rail passes, we will get to travel. Saturday we will be taking the short train ride to Pisa and then Sunday we will take another trip to Venice. The train to Venice is quite a bit longer but, from everything I have been told, we can easily do Venice in an afternoon. So, long story short, too late, I’ll have lots of photos to post on Monday but none over the weekend.

Hope things are well with all of you and thanks for your comments.

Ciao,

Shaych