Ringling Museum in Sarasota showcases Circus plus cultural arts, Gilded Age

[Travel Features Syndicate]

At the Circus Museum, see the most incredible miniature circus, carved over 50 years by Howard Tibbals. Among the tens of thousands of individually carved pieces are identifiable characters.

Photo: © 2011 Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com

Among the many wonderful beach destinations along the Gulf of Mexico, Sarasota, Florida, stands out, but not because of sand, surf and dolphins.

 

The Circus.

 

Since the 1920s, when John Ringling made Sarasota the winter home of his famous Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus, Sarasota has been identified with the circus. Indeed, it is where the circus performers - that most vagabond of breed - have laid down roots.

 

Sarasota, it turns out, is to the circus word what Nashville is for Country Music.

 

Going through the Circus Museum - which turns out is only one element of an incomparably culturally rich Ringling Museum campus - is very much like going through the Country Music Hall of Fame, in that your appreciation is so enriched by being immersed in a fuller context of how all of this came about and what society was like at the time.

 

You may have been delighted and been thrilled by the clowning and death-defying stunts - who hasn't? - and you may even have marveled at seeing a circus parade and wondered how they moved about with all those elephants and such, but here, you more fully appreciate what the circus meant to countless millions of people in thousands of communities across the country, for whom the circus was their only real link to the outside world, and an exotic one, at that.

 

My reason for coming to Sarasota, in fact, was because of its links to circus - it is what makes Sarasota unique among a string of lovely Gulf Coast beach resort destinations.  What I hadn't realized was the role John & Mable Ringling played in putting Sarasota on the map and making it a cultural hub for central Florida. In fact, when they first arrived here, Sarasota was a quiet little fishing and farming village of just 800 people.

 

And it wasn't until I entered the new John M. McKay Visitors Pavilion that I realized that the Ringling Museum is this most extraordinary campus of culture - in one place, you not only have the most fascinating museums dedicated to circus, but performance venues for theater, ballet and opera including the historic Asolo Theatre which dates from the Renaissance, the Ringling's own Gilded Age mansion, Ca D'Zan, now magnificently restored with the Ringlings' original furnishings, the Ringling Museum of Art, housing their collection of European art - Reubens, Halls, Velasquez, Coptic (Egyptian) antiques; Baroque and sculpture - acquired during their trips to Europe to recruit new circus acts, and magnificent formal gardens (Mable established the first rose garden in Florida).

 

 Be prepared to stay the day, walk a lot, and be enthralled. Read more. and see slideshow.