3 Dumb Italy Stories by Overly Sarcastic Productions | A History Teacher Reacts

hey youtube welcome back to another history teacher acts video mr terry's i continue my search for historical knowledge found here on the internet all right today's video comes from our awesome patrons over at patreon and they voted on this uh video this week which is three dumb italy stories now i hope this isn't offensive to italians i even wore my savadoria shirt which might offend a bunch of italians anyways if you're not a fan of the team but i'm trying to i'm trying to make things right preemptively before i even see this video anyway this video is by overly sarcastic productions which is i know a favorite um i've only seen a couple of their videos but it's been recommended to me a lot and i can see why they're following 1.47 million subscribers and this video just came out on uh january 8th of this year 2021 which was 10 days ago um and already has all of our quarter million views so hopefully there's some good stuff to this all right it says three dumb italy stories i don't know what exactly i don't have no idea what that means so i'll just let the video speak for itself all right if you want to vote in future videos um you can join our patreon community down below there's a link as well to other things like discord the original video link is down below so make sure you check that out and if you haven't sub to my channel i'd love to have you around as our community too i'm a history teacher love to learn more about history here and share my thoughts with you guys i do gaming streams and a bunch of other just fun usually history related things all right but let's go ahead and get started the world of academia professors are known to go on sabbatical a sponsored break of sorts that's meant as both an opportunity for rest and to conduct some new research a way to let the engine do that from the exhausting grind of teaching people all the damn time and although i am not a university professor i am overworked so i thought it'd be a lovely idea to take january of 2021 as my sabbatical i'd take a bag full of history books and jet across to italy whereupon i'd spend my days drinking apparel spritz while reading in the piazzas of some of my favorite cities and yet here i am conspicuously not in italy but still deeply tired from the year we all just had and ever more so in need of a break than i could have conceivably imagined in the merry days of 2018 when i first planned that trip so here's what i'm gonna do i am going to tell you some fun dumb stories about italy we are going to have a grand old time and then i am going to go take a week long now sound good great let's do i'm down with all this so far i also would love to i've been to italy once um went to geneva um florence and rome definitely need to get back that's where i got the shirt do some low effort history my trip would have started of course in venice historically renowned for streets made of water domes made of gold the trans-mediterranean slave trade have not been involved mercantile practices and the one time in 1204 when they did war crimes you know it's awful tough to wind up in possession of so many treasured byzantine artifacts by just asking politely and respecting boundaries and indeed by both thievery and regular old copy pasting venice became quite a pretty place i think we're talking about here if you don't know the fourth crusade where crusaders coming out of venice in italy come over to constantinople you know basically they were mercenaries hoping to get paid so they guys should go on the crusade they don't get paid so they sack constantinople the largest city in christianity and constantinople never truly recovers they loot the crap out of everything bring it back to a lot of it goes back to venice and then you're gonna get the renaissance not too long after that shame it's so damp nowadays although venice is in the grand scheme of things still somehow less problematic than some other famous players it's always good to separate the nice from the yikes historical faves are all well and fine until we start seeing them as flawless or if we shove our heads so far up our own asses that we pretend some of those flaws were actually features all right let's look nice government architecture renaissance art literary culture cool boats all true seems legit there yikes slave trade yeah fourth crusade just talked about that classicists that could mean a lot of things and copycats all right it's a very complicated place all historical faves have faults yes also that one i i know they they made such good art but look we've had some time to reflect we can be better than them now sorry that had been simmering for a while and i needed to get it out we don't have to be not gushing about it in love with them anymore interrupted 11th century string of being a republic i like to stop and appreciate the city's architecture as a consequence of how early venetians were basically created stilts buildings had to be constructed carefully with a strong base of waterproof history and marble and lightweight brick walls with generous cutout space for windows since venetians were the best glass makers in europe they had the skills and materials to actually make windows that big venice was also unique in being at the crossroads of three distinct architectural styles starting as part of the byzantine empire and they soon picked up elements of mainland european gothic and mediterranean islamic design so even before the renaissance was a twinkle in titian's eye venice had built itself a gorgeous dependency styles and it's a complete product of circumstance no other city on earth had the opportunities and constraints that would result in a style like venetian gothic which is a polite way to say no other city could fall so spectacularly ass backwards into artistic success in the century after filippo ultra diva leski accidentally rediscovered classical architecture basically out of spite venice was catching i love this building this is one of my favorite buildings i share this with my students all the time uh bruno leske this is the duomo in florence and as soon as one of the best pieces of renaissance architecture it's a giant cathedral that had um uh the biggest dome that had been built in hundreds of years in europe and took um incredible long time they didn't even think it'd be possible that's why it went through a bunch of different architects and stuff like that but you thank the medicis for this who basically funded the uh the renaissance anyways brunelleschi accidentally rediscovered classical architecture basically out of spite venice was catching on to this whole white marble frilly column vibe where the doge is the construction industry those was also constantly catching fire so there were always opportunities to build the newest and shiniest looks this whole side tangent about how andrea palladio essentially codified the genre of neoclassicism but i cut it because it was long and probably only interesting to me so before i started gossiping about the time palladio almost won the design competition for the new rialto bridge but then they gave the commission to this missile line doofus instead let's wait that's what they had they could have done this this thing's beautiful rialto bridge but then they gave the commission to this missile line dude why arc it do you need the do you need the the clearance is that what it was for i mean i guess that makes sense with this you have to put your sail down you would uh you those sails there they could um like rotate down flat i wish i had to make this taller because instead let's just let's move on midway along the journey of my vacation that's a dante reference for you i was set to take a stopover in bologna home to both europe's oldest universities inferno such interesting book i guess a comment just real quick a lot of people draw the medieval in a way like medieval image of hell to dante's inferno it talks again about this like fiery place and these inner circles of hell and all that stuff and the torturing and all that and a lot of in italian christianity there they really adopted that and you could see that in um artwork right in the medieval artwork and is used as definitely like a scare tactic in that way and you see it in other things as well like um that the duomo that i showed that they showed you inside the dome is basically depictions of dante's version of hell which is really scary especially for something inside of your church as you're at a church session seeing these people being tortured and burned you're probably going to want to although very distracting to look up at be like all right i don't want to go up there when i die so i'm going to look at the pastor or the priest and listen and try to act in a way where that doesn't happen really good lasagna place i ate at like nine years ago most tours will focus on the university but i wanted you to be aware of both on yourself is a bit of a geographical anomaly within italy right at the eastern edge of the appending mountains and directly in grabbing range for milan florence and the papal states for most of the middle ages bologna was able to dodge and weave its way to functional independence but from the 1500s it was quite firmly under the roman thumb in 1572 bologna native pope gregory xiii became uh pope not quite sure where that sentence was going uh and to celebrate they made him a nice fancy bronze statue in 1580. you can see it here before it is fancy very famous but curiously the inscription at the top says words that very clearly do not include gregory thirteen or pope so one might ask what gives and i answered dear viewer napoleon gives usually he is giving cannonballs at speed but before we can connect boy band bonaparte to this mismatched inscription we need to take a second to appreciate the fact that throughout history no one knows what people look like most citizens would only know their king or queen by the faces on coins which archaeology informs us often looked more than a little smooshy hey that's what they said about king louis the 16th when he was running away from the french revolution that he was caught at the austrian border but uh and said they recognized him because it snuck out by his image on a coin so how how far off could it actually be right sometimes we get more substantive depictions but in the case of the byzantines doesn't stop them from still looking identical but aha ancient rome gave us lifelike statues augustus however i wouldn't say that even these always made for accurate depictions of historical characters because some statues of julius caesar don't look so hot where did they hide his cheekbones and notably this equestrian statue of emperor marcus aurelius only survived because it got mistaken for constantine but dudes constantine didn't even have a beard we think i mean good work messing that one up it's a baller statue i'm glad you didn't melt it down and i say all this to illustrate my point that the wool is easily pulled over one's eyes when it comes to who is being depicted even with a statue so in 1796 general napoleon and friends were having a grand old time on campaign in italy and came through bologna now napoleon was super not a fan of the pope so the citizens thought the statue was a goner but if maybe it wasn't a statue of the pope no big deal right so a few artisans got to work replacing the papal tiara with a bishop's miter and sculpted a bishop's staff to put in his hand and carved a new inscription that identified this gentleman as saint petronius the fifth century bishop of balloons less than their patrons less popey far be it for me to question raw genius at work it did the trick i mean sure bologna got placed under france's new imperial nonsense but they kept the statue and restored it to original form a century later good thing napoleon never found out that the big statue of neptune literally right next door is an allegory for pope pius iv whoopsies let's move on the last and longest leg of my trip would have been spent in and around florence because ever since i first played assassin's creed i loved florence i did not know what to expect really from florence other than a couple things i know historically speaking but i love lawrence of the places i went so i went to an italian troupe genoa um florence and rome i liked florence the best it was so cool just it's a city that's very well aware of its history which is very cool they've preserved the old kind of downtown florence in its kind of renaissance style where the more modernized parts of florence they did elsewhere there's like a modern downtown and then like the old downtown renaissance era one which is really cool because when you walk down the streets you just have all the same stuff and roadways and architecture of how things looked like hundreds of years ago and that's such a cool thing so i really really recommend florence the scenery is beautiful because it's in the rolling hills of the tuscan area and definitely go check out i mean you're going to check out the duomo you can go inside of it go in in the church go to the top um highly highly recommended i've known what i'm about and as we've already seen thorough look at the shiny architecture i love so much exhibit a dome i want to take a second to appreciate the uffizi gallery who feeds these off it was originally built as an office complex for the medici grand dukes museum piazza delle signoria and it connects to their palace on the other side of the arno river via a wonderfully scenic corridor atop the ponte vecchio so scenic and hold on a sec let's go back the other part you gotta see is yeah um hold on a sec let's go back i want to take a second to appreciate the uffizi gallery so the fizzy yeah the fitting gallery is the big um one of the biggest and most famous art galleries and museums in all of europe so if you want to see a whole bunch of middle ages europe and stuff like that i i loved seeing it um but you also get a little tired of it because it's a lot of the same stuff it's all like you know middle-aged scary jesus stuff that i like to say a lot of it is pre-renaissance art there are some renaissance art there's a there is a at least one i believe da vinci which is always rare because he didn't really he doesn't have really have that many surviving things but a lot of that older stuff that just like pre-renaissance art so lacks the perspective and some of that but it's really cool to see the museum was originally built as an office complex for the medici grand dukes adjacent to the piazza delle signoria yeah palazzo de signoria right here um they use this this is the one up in the left this is not far from the um just a couple blocks away from the duomo and here's a big plaza they did a lot of government functions and stuff out there there's also a lot of cool renaissance era statues outside of it too is where the um original place for the for michelangelo's david was now there's a replica there because they've put the real one down the street a bit in a museum i actually didn't notice though the connection of the plaza in its building and then like they're saying here to the to the uffizi and this like wall like this is a tunnel you can actually have a tunnel but like they have these walkways um rome has them too where you can get quickly from a building to another like government buildings palaces and stuff like that so like the elite can do that without having to go through the common cities so they can kind of avoid the traffic and maybe danger stuff like that and it connects to their palace on the other side of the arno river via a wonderfully scenic corridor atop the ponte vecchio so yeah i didn't know anybody hitler categorically refused to vomit during the axis withdrawal from italy because he loved the view all the other bridges got blasted to bits but not his dear vasari corridor and so even for all its legendary power de ubement simply could not escape enslavement to the aesthetic shame as for the uffizi itself the menichi grand dukes had used part of it to house their private art collections open to special guests early on and opening up to the public in 1769. nice and the museum maintains the feeling of being a florentine's collection of florentine art it takes you chronologically through high medieval art and then shows you how the different movements of the renaissance and baroque periods unfolded in florence with some roman statuary for nice contrast you can see that yeah when you're there you can see the evolution of the art techniques because again you see a lot of the same middle-aged stuff it's all christian pretty much because that's who paid for all this stuff the church was so wealthy in italy here and the patrons you know like the medicis were christians so they they uh who pay these artists and again you're talking this is in in florence where you have the renaissance start it's it's it's the home and and and career areas of of um leonardo da vinci and michelangelo like they're they're doing um this is where they're they're going and people like the medicis this is they're the people that made this possible and why we talk about the medici families in a historical context because without their type of power and their type of funding they're probably the richest family in europe at this time there is no renaissance there's no art art art movement in the renaissance there florence is obviously somewhat rare in its ability to fill an entire museum with what's essentially a neighborhood talent show but i quite appreciate that it's not loaded with ill-gotten treasures from far-off lands oh you know that old trick where museums break in loot from the colonies and such and just pretend like it belongs to them resulting in such geographic anomalies as the rosetta stone landing in london or the curious case of the code of hammurabi in paris big swerve to say that art belongs to the world and then get touchy when the world asks for it back oh yeah i said that's been such a debate because they're like hey you took all this stuff from ancient mess like the british from ancient mesopotamia there's persian stuff egyptian stuff it's all been taken out and put into museums which courts it's safe and all but then these places are like hey we can handle this stuff we want it back and the british museum's like no we're not giving it back to you so it is um definitely controversial it's his lack of loot might not be for lack of trying because of mussolini's dream of rebuilding the roman empire was slightly less detached from reality maybe italian museums would be stuffed with artifacts loot hoard alluded art hoarded in bavarian church discovered people don't belong there but mussolini boofed it thanks to none other than mussolini so we get to enjoy the pretty paintings guild free or at least we would if i were yeah okay happy thoughts happy thoughts sorry man so this has been my attempt to substitute a vacation with thematically relevant work and i'm honestly quite pleased albeit a little surprised i somehow veered onto fascism twice and while memes are no substitute for an authentic tuscan meal i still had fun so i'm calling it a win i know it's been hard to step back and attempt to breathe amid our collective inability to take a step back to anywhere but i hope the work we do on this channel can be of some assistance or just some relief now if you'll excuse me i'm going to get back to writing the venetian republic more angry letters about how they built the wrong bridge thank you for watching continuing to trick my brain into thinking we're on holiday i'm going to dang all their patron support that's awesome mop around in assassin's creed 2. as always a special thanks to all of our patrons for supporting the work we do and i will see you next time can't thank enough what assassin's creed 2 did for me as a teacher for my own understanding but for getting a lot of my students when we begin our renaissance unit over these many years that it's been out now or 10 years now or so of being able to identify and be like hey that's from this that's from this thank you assassin's creed all right let's talk about this more one alright so the whole title three dumb italy stories wasn't something mocking italy it was just him uh saying you know how it's done that he wasn't able to take this trip because he's been wanting to do this trip to italy and see these places and unfortunately with the the times we're in right now you can't do this kind of travel and all that so that was good there was no insulting of italy going on there other than maybe highlighting some of the stuff that of course was not good in italian history with the fourth crusade and things like that but it was cool to see that i was glad to see some of this stuff because of my visits especially the florence stuff there i actually didn't go to venice and i definitely want to go but it wasn't part of my trip um that i went on but when i go back i need to do that i need to go to venice and then i need to go to southern italy because i didn't go south of rome so i would like to go down to pompeii maybe even get down to like uh sicily or something like that i don't know there's so many years of my life and i wish i could uh uh have more and more so i could travel more so anyway but that was good it was good to see some more of those things and put the historic of the history together hopefully very informative in that way of there's some things hopefully you learned that you hadn't before about some of the art and the politics and i had no idea about the napoleon story there that was cool um to see how they he did that and then like was like having artwork basically changed into changing these figures into other figures that's what i got out of that so that was kind of interesting to do but again it's kind of great in our modern era that you know although travel is hard even in good times uh when we can actually travel times are hard because it's you know expensive and it's so cool that here with the internet we can you know visit all these places if you're like me you and especially recently i've been going down these like rabbit holes of google earth spending nights on my bed on google earth just looking around the planet and looking up historical places and what the heck is this thing and all that and it's it's always fun to do that sort of thing so you can always do your own little foreign travel the best that you can in uh this digital world that that you know that we live in there so all right well another good one from overly sarcastic productions um if you ever see this blue guy hit me up um we'll we'll uh we'll go over to italy together and chuck all this out make some content or something so hit me up all right my dms okay all right anyway um the original video link is down below make sure you go and support that by giving it view time like sub all that kind of stuff um because this is a a really good channel and i want to look at some more things in there saying they've done some stuff where they they cover i think video games i think one of the videos i might have covered yeah i i i'd seen and covered um i have so many and it has been so many now i lose track but um like covering assassin's creed odyssey i remember uh doing that might have done on the gaming channel actually trying to keep those uh straight together on my gaming channel mr terry gaming but with that stuff being there too anyway definitely do that links to my other stuff down below if you want to join our community come on over to discord so we can hang out and talk about stuff all right and with that we'll see you next time bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Mr. Terry History

Views: 24,169

Rating: 4.9554849 out of 5

Keywords: react, history, italy, renaissance, crusades

Id: iCsaeIksq9A

Length: 22min 37sec (1357 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021