Ecco!

So this is the Liberty jigsaw that I first fell in love with, years ago.




View of the city of Florence from the low wall of the Prato dei Padri di San Francesco al Monte (1650) by Valerio Spada.

I kept mooning over it. But I couldn’t really figure spending that much money on a toy—and then it went out of print. Sigh.

But with the pandemic raging on, I’ve been allowing myself whatever puzzles I can get hold of. Call it a travel budget. I’m certainly not spending much on junketings. Liberty, all praise to their sense of fair play, has rationed orders, with an endless queue. So I started combing the internet for this map of Florence, and at first I found only a used one (somewhat puppy-damaged) sold long ago on eBay, and a ghost request on two guys’ exquisitely curated wedding gift registry. I hope they got it.

Then—O blessed hour!—I found one listed by a little boutique called Get the Goods in Whistler, British Columbia. The curator-manager wrote me a heartfelt email: “Thank you for supporting small business at this time. It means the world to us.”

So they got a beautiful white elephant off their hands, and I got to spend three weeks with Lynon Aksamit’s masterpiece of cutting. I just finished it yesterday.

There are hundreds of his whimsies, and I love them all. The interplay of silhouette and image is marvellous.

There are of course, the set pieces: the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio, like Prospero's stagings of themselves:











An outscale Michelangelo at work on his David:



Dante outbreathing air and fire turns out to be Dante mounting up into the heavens in Ezekiel’s chariot, on wheels and whorls of fire:





Here is Galileo gazing heavenward—but see how his look of curiosity and wonderment is borrowed from some twigs:





I am so happy with this windfall.

Nine