Word: piazza
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more than a joke for him when he proposes renaming Harvard Square "Piazza Leprechauno." And he has a deadly serious point in mind when he suggests that Harvard should secede from the rest of Cambridge...
Moreover, Jones was adaptable. When he was designing the piazza of Covent Garden with its integrated church of St. Paul, the Earl of Bedford (who was paying for it) told Jones he wanted the church to be "not much better than a barn." "Well, then! You shall have the handsomest barn in England," Jones answered, and produced it. He never delegated a design or failed to transform what he copied. He thought -- and drew -- in terms of large volumes, generous spaces, exalted plainness relieved by lucid, ingenious detailing. Later Georgian architects would owe him an immense debt...
...Piazza della Signoria is in a state of upheaval these days. The piazza that has been the center of Florentine life since before Medici times, the space chosen by Michelangelo for his exquisite statue David, has been ripped up and fenced in. The current David, a copy, stands forlornly in front of a partially scaffolded Palazzo Vecchio. Cosimo I, the young Medici ruler who sits mid- square atop his bronze horse, gazes down on an ugly, corrugated plastic roof covering a third of the square...
...tourists at ground level who poke their noses through the chain link fencing and peer past the scaffolding and sandbags are rewarded with a wholly different, riveting view of the famous piazza: underground. There, some 30 Italian archaeologists are digging through a cross section of history from the Bronze Age to medieval times. Exposed now is a Roman thermal bath with its frigidarium, or cold room, almost intact. And smack on top of that are the remnants of a tower dating from the 13th century era of the Ghibellines. With 86,000 sq. ft. of past at his feet, archaeologist...
...know what they're looking at. A tour group of Soviet emigres glanced briefly at an intact medieval basement and walked away, thinking they had come across some urban renewal project. Francesco Nicosia, the feisty archaeological superintendent for Tuscany who battled for permission to dig up the piazza, hopes to mount a midyear show to explain the history unearthed: a medieval city of giant towers sitting atop an important Roman city dating from the 1st century; Greek objects imported as early as the 8th century B.C.; even obsidian tools and pottery fragments probably imported from Sardinia around 3000 B.C. Nicosia...