“Upper Belvedere,” or, “I, too, use gold foil and hypnotoad as my decorating theme”

It’s been a while since my last post, but the weather has been getting colder and colder, and my focus has been more and more on writing the various final papers for my classes. Which is, y’know, not the most exciting thing for people to read about.
But we’re still going for the occasional tour: this week, we spent some time in the Upper Belvedere, one of the many palaces the city has to offer.

The Belvedere gardens are fairly famous, though the November fog means that its a bit hard to see the view.

As compensation for the gloomy weather,1 one of the gardens has a little Christmas market in it. I’m told you can get some good hot chocolate there, though I didn’t have the chance to try it.2

Inside, the palace is… palatial. Why the pillars all need to be statues of what I assume are mythical figures holding up the ceiling, I don’t know.

It’s a “living museum,” as well – not just a bunch of old art, but some modern things, like this ‘christmas tree.’

Unfortunately, they’ve got a fairly well-enforced ‘no photos’ policy within the museum, so I didn’t get many pictures, but I did sneak one of this room, because I quite liked their decoration style – rumpled gold foil over a fireplace where, instead of a looping video of a burning log, they’ve got a looping video of an amphibian, blinking occasionally.

Which, to be honest, I actually quite like – my policy on weather is that colder is better, because you can keep adding layers until you’re just an enormous ball of fabric, but when the weather is too hot you can only take off so many layers before the public decency laws start to become relevant. ↩

As a form of forced self-control, I am deliberately terrible at remembering to take my wallet with me when I’m going to places where I could spend money. ↩