Florence has started out with an exhausted bang. The city is
bang, but the students are exhausted. After staying up late to finish our
papers that were due today, most everyone wanted to sleep more than we did.
Hopefully, we’ll make that up tonight.
Despite that, we saw some pretty amazing things today and
saw a good amount of the city, which, incidentally, is much less crowded and
hot than Rome. I wore jeans and was totally fine. And the Duomo is right down
the street from our hotel.
No lie.
So we started out with a history lesson about Roman Florence
and then Medieval Florence and then the Renaissance Florence and how they all
kind of work together to create the Florence of today.
Some Interesting Facts about Florence:
- There were noble families and they lived in these 300 foot towers and living all around these towers in other buildings was the extended family. The cool thing is that they built scaffolding to connect the buildings in the air, making it unnecessary to go all the way to the street level to go into the building across the way.
- Merchants finally defeated the noble families and made them cut their towers in half to symbolize their defeat.
Imagine this twice as high
- In some streets that look like a dead end but actually have a turn to the right or left, there are carvings of the Virgin holding baby Jesus on the wall of the faux dead end. When people would go down the street, they might make the sign of the cross and say a quick prayer in front of the carving and then continue about their business.
So that's interesting.
We also saw this bridge that is occupied by shops, and
though they look like they should just fall off into the water, it’s pretty
stable. They sell jewelry on it.
The expensive kind.
We then went to a lot of places that don’t allow cameras, so
my photos become severely lacking. Let’s just say that I saw a lot of important
artwork and sculpture, and that you should look up the following to see what I
saw.
The following:
- Donatello’s David
- Donatello’s St. George
- Michelangelo’s Drunken Bacchus
- Giambologna’s Mercury
- Florence defeating Pisa
We had lunch at this little panini shop, but I had salmon and zucchini pasta instead. Not bad, but not that great either. We then had the best gelato that I’ve had here in a nice
gelateria called Gelateria Dei Neri. I recommend it. A lot.
Of course, we then went to see what everyone wants to see:
Michelangelo’s David. If you know it, then you know why it’s awesome, in the
original sense of the word. If you don’t know it…then you’re blind. There is no
way a person with eyesight has never seen this work. Not possible. And in case
anyone is wondering, it truly does live up to the hype.
It’s Professor Duclaux’s birthday today, so he went home to
be with his family for tonight. Therefore, we went out to dinner with our
History of Science professors, Peter and Kathleen, and their 13-month-old son
Niels. Who is adorable. When I asked if he was named after Niels Bohr (History
of Science professors – it’s a possibility) Peter said, “Well, his grandfather
was Danish and half of Danish boys are named Niels and the other half are named
Christian so there wasn’t a lot to choose from.”
Dinner was provided by the University of Oklahoma and I had a lovely first course of meat ravioli and lovelier second course of fried chicken and potatoes. Mixing it up was nice (notice the lack of pizza!).
Interesting Story of the Day:
- While waiting for the rest of the group outside of the Duomo, it was mentioned that today was Professor Duclaux's birthday. Some of the girls expressed their dismay that they hadn't been informed and decided to sing Happy Birthday with great aplomb. Of course, one of the boys in our group who was walking towards us at a distance of about 20 meters heard this and joined in. Loudly. Drawing the attention of everyone nearby. It was great.
It's our group!
A domani!
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