The secret of the Roman brazier

In Florence, lies a very special brazier, you see in the picture, it is not a born brazier to heat a home, but to heat a tent on the battlefield. A beautiful object of the period corresponding to the second Roman Empire, around the sixteenth century. The secret? An oddity, the “pear” metal adorning the edge along with two lions on each side. Ornano, then ornamental, this is the thought which first emerges observing it, the same thought that had Luigi Bellini in his museum in Florence where it is kept. On second thought Luigi Bellini however, is different, is the fact that a brazier was used on the battlefield is so improbably decorated with ornaments is that these “pears” appear hollow and open on the side. A mystery that you can not clarify the historical and artistic knowledge.

This remained for a long time, a mystery. One day at the Museum came a friend of the Bellini family, a name Zichichi sir, yes exactly, the physicist. During the visit of the Museum Luigi Bellini also he showed the brazier pointing to the strangeness of the ornaments. Zichichi has stopped and candidly explained the mystery that lies in the physical and non-art. In practice these metal pears quarries warmed by thermal transmission through the metal and heating the air inside them created a vortex of hot air which greatly increased the heating of the environment up to a radius 6 times higher compared to a brazier of equal size . This allowed to warm 6/7 men but not many more people spreading the heat inside the big tent. In this commingling are the beauty of art and the wisdom of science.

This one of the anecdotes related to the Bellini Museum, one of the wonders that this magical place holds. Maybe in the near future we can talk about a young Donatello or a Savonarola table or a font Templar.