The Uffuzi Gallery in Florence Italy is one of the most extensive and beautiful museums you’ll ever visit, with works by Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Rembrandt, as well as important paintings from luminaries such as Vivalderi, Papposcoopa, Ricadanaldo, and Memoraldi. It is one of the most famous art galleries in all the world, as well as one of the most visited, including the top gallery draw in all of Italy. Also, the last four names listed above I totally made up. I like to punk the skimmers.

Every piece in the gallery is a genuine Florindian, or whatever you call “being from Florence.” Florencial? Fluoroscopian? From the Flo? Anyway, more than seventy percent of the paintings were painted by Florentine masters. No word on how many slaves were forced to paint too.

We used a tour guide, which is a really good thing to do in a museum like this because if you spent even just five seconds looking at every piece of art you’d be in there for months, and then find yourself arrested for eating a painting just to survive, especially if it was a Papposcoopa.

Our guide is pictured here next to a portrait of Galileo Galilei (who was born in Pisa but didn’t have anything to do with trying to topple the tower) and lived most of his life under house arrest by the church for being a really awesome astronomer, physicist, philosopher, engineer, mathematician, and occasional Mel Gibson impersonator.

The conflict between science and religion continues to this day, as evidenced by how thoroughly disdainful religionists often are of the findings of virtually every climatologist on the planet who are convinced that climate change is human-influenced. I think it’s amusing (if it wasn’t so dangerous) that many conservative politicians’ talking points have evolved from, “There is no climate change” –the mantra from just a few years ago– to “Sure, there’s climate change, but we don’t know what’s causing it, so let’s pump even more coal and oil into the air just in case it’s not that!”

The science-y people have always seemed pretty smart to me, especially in comparison to people like Mel who thinks it’s all the fault of the Jews. Mel. What a weird name. Sounds like what you’d say about a bad odor when you have a cold. “Wad dat mell?”

Anyway, our guide hailed from Russia –where their science is very hard to understand because it’s all in Russian– and was very informative (thankfully she spoke in English). One interesting bit of trivia she taught us was that the word “bankruptcy” comes from the Florentine dialect: banco rotto, which means broken desk (this is all true btw). Bankers typically just set up desks in offices, and when a banker couldn’t pay for his debts, soldiers would arrive and break the desk. If you don’t have the desk, you cannot continue your business. Today in America when someone goes bankrupt we say, “he’s broke,” or “too bad he got sick.”

I won’t comment on each piece of art below, but will instead simply let you gaze upon all their beauty in literary silence, except to say that I was particularly excited to see Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” which was made popular by Adobe Illustrator’s use of the image on the cover of their software. She’s not a bad-looking fetus even if I do say so myself. Which I just did.

Now Adobe is using a logo that’s just “Ai” instead. Oh, how that Ai logo inspires me! Not.

They didn’t even get the capitalization right on the “i.” Bring back the adult fetus!

Anyway, without further ado, the Uffuzi Gallery:

I read that during the summer the wait times to get into the Uffuzi Gallery can be as long as five hours. It was still very crowded, but I’m glad we didn’t try visiting it then!