Venice, on the other hand, is one of the most magnificent places on earth. Every time I went there, I had no trouble avoiding crowds if I wanted to, because the city is like a labyrinth, and even the most crowded street has a deserted courtyard adjacent to it. The view when you walk out of that train station and see the Grand Canal for the first time cannot be described.
Security at the Pitti Palace, across the Arno, was even more lax than at the Uffizi. The Italians are so awash in great art, they can't be bothered to take care of it. Priceless Caravaggios were housed in dusty corners of old churches in Rome where you had to put coins into a metered box to get lights to turn on so you could see them...
Here, insurance companies would insist on first rate security. Big traveling exhibits, like the Matisse that made the circuit of large museums in the nineties, must have corporate sponsors to foot the insurance bill.
...within a museum-piece, for the buildings themselves, Giorgio Vasari's finest work, are a faint echo of Michelangelo's incomparable Medici chapel and entrance to the Laurentian library, who himself respects and adopts Brunelleschi's cool, austere, and restrained use of pietra serena -- for me, the aesthetic embodiment of conservatism in its elegance, restraint, and modest self-confidence.