Florence, Italy

Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance. Renaissance greats like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, Botticelli, Galileo, Dante, and Machiavelli were born there, lived there, or worked there.

The Duomo (Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore) is Florence’s main church. The Duomo was started in 1296 and finished with Brunelleschi’s dome in 1436. The white octagonal building left of the Duomo is the Florence Baptistery, built between 1059 and 1128.

Ghiberti's north doors for the Baptistery, finished around 1422, are considered the start of the Renaissance.

The gold-colored east doors were Ghiberti’s second commission for the Baptistery. Ghiberti considered the east doors his best work, and Michelangelo called them the "gates of paradise," which is still their name. The current east doors are a copy, with the originals nearby in the Duomo museum.

Florence's museums include Michelangelo's David, Donatello's David and Mary Magdalene, and Botticelli's Birth of Venus. This is Donatello's St. Mark at Orsanmichele.

Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli's remains are in Santa Croce, Florence's Franciscan church.

The Medici banking family ruled Florence. The dynasty’s founder, Cosimo, is shown in the Piazza della Signoria.

The Palazzo Vecchio -- Old Palace.

Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin

In June an old friend and I visited Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, where the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers meet. This is the spot where the French explorer Jacques Marquette first discovered the (northern) Mississippi River. In my picture, taken from Pikes Peak State Park in Iowa, the Mississippi is in the foreground and the bridge in the background crosses the Wisconsin.

The United States build two Fort Crawfords on this spot, much like Fort Snelling at the intersection of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers further north. Chief Black Hawk fought against the United States during the War of 1812 and the 1832 Black Hawk War, and ultimately surrendered at the second Fort Crawford. William Beaumont performed some of his famous digestion experiments on Alexis St. Martin, a man with a hole in his stomach, at the second Fort Crawford. My picture shows the rebuilt fort hospital, which is all that's left of the second fort.

Effigy Mounds National Monument is also there. Prehistoric American Indians built mounds here in the shape of bears, birds, and other animals between 1,400 and 850 years ago. My picture shows the Little Bear Mound, although the shape isn't very clear -- Wikipedia's picture is better.

Atari ST, Starglider

The Atari ST is the next computer in my retro gaming spree. Atari introduced the 520ST in 1985 to answer the Macintosh, but the ST's main rival was the Commodore Amiga, introduced later that same year.

My picture is a 1040ST, which had 1 megabyte of RAM and an internal 3.5” floppy drive. The green desktop is GEM, the ST’s Macintosh-like desktop environment.

I wrote a lot of Pascal programs on the ST in the day, but it also had great games like Jeremy San's Starglider.

You fly over the landscape attacking targets drawn with vector graphics. Starglider is reminiscent of the Star Wars coin-op game, and the targets include walkers and stompers like Star Wars' two-legged walkers.

Shields and fuel are the keys to survival. You repair your shields by entering a dock on the battlefield, where you can also pick up another missile.

To refuel, you fly between the charging towers.

Starglider One is the main target. You spend most of the game flying around hoping to see it, but when you start on level 1, it's right behind you flying away, so you might be able to turn and catch it easily. Here, we're catching up to it.

You need to use a missile to bring it down, and here we're about to hit in the missile's view. If you fly your missile directly behind it, it will destroy your missile with one of its own. Instead, come in where the wing attaches to the body.

Destroying it gives you 7,500 points, which is most of the 10,000 you need to advance to the next level.

TI-99/4A, Tunnels of Doom

The Atari 2600, the Apple II, and Kevin Kenney’s Tunnels of Doom on the TI-99/4A first got me interested in computers in grade school. Most TI games were coin-op type games that you’d play for maybe half an hour, but Tunnels of Doom was hugely more interesting, and I’ve been hoping to revisit it and beat it since the 80’s. Well, now the deed is done.

Here’s the TI-99/4A. You can load programs and save games using a tape recorder.

This is the iconic TI welcome screen.

Here's the Tunnels of Doom splash screen. The game's endearing theme music plays while the splash screen is up.

To win, your party of four characters has to descend ten dungeon levels, rescue the king, and find the Rainbow Orb. You spend most of the game navigating with the automap and 3D tunnel view, and fighting monsters in each room. It took me about twenty hours to reach the tenth level.

You have 100 time steps to find the king. Here I'm rescuing the king from the vault where he's trapped.

You have a little more time, 120 time steps, to find the Rainbow Orb. Here, I'm fighting arch-devils for it.

You win when you return the king and the orb to the surface.

Here are my party's final character reports. Beowulf reached level 20! They found some good items listed there as treasure in the dungeon: Beowulf and Conan's Dancing Shields, Conan's Hero Mail, Kasskar's Bow of Strength, and Tim's Cloak of Hiding.

Paris

The obelisk marks the Place de la Concorde, formerly the Place de la Revolution where Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and Robespierre were guillotined. The gold dome is the Dome Church, which houses Napoleon's sarcophagus.

The Louvre.

In the late 18th century Paris's cemeteries overflowed and became unsanitary. So, their remains were moved to former mines under the city, which are now a creepy tourist attraction. There are remains of 6 millions people there.

French gothic cathedrals

The Eglise (Church) of Saint-Germain-des-Pres is the oldest church in Paris, originally built under King Childebert between 550 and 558. It is pre-gothic but shares many features with the gothic cathedrals, including the radiating chapels at the rear. My picture shows the Chapel of Saint Germain at the rear, which "gives an accurate idea of the original construction of the radiating chapels."

The Chapel of Saint Benedict in the same building, and includes Rene Descartes' tomb.

In contrast to earlier Romanesque cathedrals, the gothic cathedrals moved the building's structural support from the solid walls to a skeleton of pointed arches and ribbed vaults inside and flying buttresses outside. So, the ceiling could be raised and large (stained glass) windows added in the walls, creating height and lightness inside. The Saint Denis basilica/cathedral was the first gothic cathedral, built on the site of a previous abbey starting in 1135. It's in a suburb north of Paris -- I took the metro there.

In addition to being the first gothic cathedral, Saint Denis was also the main necropolis for French kings and queens, and many queens were crowned there. 42 kings and 32 queens were buried there, including nearly all from the 10th to the 18th centuries. (During the French Revolution, the remains were exhumed, dumped into a mass grave, and probably lost, although the Saint Denis ossuary now purports to hold them.) Pepin the Short, the first Carolingian king, was anointed by the pope there in 754.

My picture is the recumbent statue for Clovis, the first French King (Clovis ruled 481-509, statue is from around 1263).

The cathedral in Laon was started in 1160 and is another example of an early gothic cathedral. The walls of the nave (central corridor of the interior) is distinctive for its four levels: nave arcade, gallery, triforium, and clerestory, "...all features found in Romanesque architecture but never together in the same building...." It was pouring rain when I got to Laon, so I had the cathedral almost to myself.

The cathedral in Amiens, begun in 1220, is the largest in France.

The interior of the Amiens cathedral: "The High Gothic style...reaches its climax...in the interior of the Amiens Cathedral....The breathtaking height...is the dominant achievement both technically and aesthetically....[the height of the nave arcade] alone is almost as high (70 feet) as the entire four-story elevation of Laon (78 feet)."

The impetus for building the Amiens cathedral was to house a relic taken from Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, the supposed head of John the Baptist.

The first king of France, Clovis, was baptized at the site of the Reims cathedral in 496, and French kings were crowned there, with Joan of Arc famously attending the coronation of Charles VII in 1429. The cathedral has thousands of sculptures: "Gothic classicism reached its climax in some of these Reims statues. The most famous of them is the Visitation group, which was carved between 1230 and 1233. It depicts the Virgin Mary announcing the news of her pregnancy to her cousin Elizabeth." The Visitation group are the two figures on the right in my picture, while the two figures on the left are the Annunciation group, the angel Gabriel and Mary again.

The Rouen cathedral. Although the gothic cathedrals are all similar, the Rouen facade is more complex and irregular than the others I saw. The site was visited by Charlemagne in 769 A.D.; captured by the english Henry V in 1419; Joan of Arc was burned by the English a few blocks away in 1431; Monet famously painted the cathedral facade more than 30 times in 1892-3.