Firenze

So I decided at the last minute to go to Florence, and Ashley, one of the more spontaneous and willing Centristi said she’d go too. I’m really glad I had her with me. I might have done a lot more things the hard way rather than the smart way without her.

I’m going to write about it a bit before class starts.. maybe add pictures later when there is more time.

We got up super early to get to the train station in time to leave on the 7:14 train. We made it just fine and purchased the tickets from little electronic carrels, all very smooth and easy. We had elected the “slow train” for its cheapness, so the entire thing took about three and a half hours, two longer than if we had taken EuroStar. But I enjoyed the views I did get to see, when I wasn’t dozing out because of the sleep of which I had deprived myself by getting up so early after going to bed admittedly two hours later than I had planned to.

The train was a bit sketchy and it made a lot of stops. First it was pretty empty, just us and this cute couple who made out and snuggled the entire time right across from our line of sight. Then our car got flooded with noisy German girls and I had to talk myself down from being pissed off. It wasn’t their fault I wanted to sleep.

Finally, we rolled into Florence at 11 or so. This is where Ashley became more than a friend, but really an asset. She used her cell phone to call the others already in Florence and find out how to get to the hostel. We wandered around til we found the correct bus (I wish I had taken a photo of the graffiti that said “I love you four ever.” but I did not) and bought a one-day bus pass, and made our way to the hostel where we dropped off our stuff and started meandering around Florence.

We walked around for a long time, visiting the Duomo first, touring the inside, and walking down a lot of streets and looking at stuff in the street markets for sale. We decided to go back to the Academia Galleria later in the evening because the line was so long (free museum day, remember) when we first found it.

We also went to this park next to a fortress wall that was really cool. All day I took a ridiculous amount of photos, of streets and buildings, the river and its bridges, and a few peeks of the hills around Florence.

We did go back to the Galleria and found the line much more manageable, and got to see Michelangelo’s David, among other things. I really liked the half-finished statues by Michelangelo as well, because they give some idea of how this stuff is made.

David is absolutely beautiful. I never really got what the big deal was, or what all the fuss was about until I was standing there staring up slack-jawed. I think his right hand is my favorite part of the whole thing.. so much emotion in that curled hand. There were other works, paintings and things on the second floor too, but mostly we walked around a plaster cast exhibit, and tried to go back to the musical instrument exhibit, but the museum was closing, almost time for dinner.

Ashley and I took a bus to nowhere we knew and ended up in a cute little park where the cutest dog we’ve ever seen was playing with a little toddler. Finally, we decided to go back to the hostel and meet the others.

We finally found the other group (whom we’d eluded all day.. they were participating in a Florence Wine Event, a city-wide wine tasting on our side of the river) and went to a lovely dinner with them. We weren’t done with dinner until about eleven that night, so we just went back to the hostel, full and happy and in Florence.

I met some Japanese girls in our room who I surprised by busting out with “Where are you from?” in polite Japanese. They gave me their e-mail addresses and I gave them mine after a brief whispered conversation, as many of those in the room were sleeping already.

The next morning dawned pale and grey and like the one before, I woke wondering “what am I doing, and why am I doing this?” I guess I am less a morning person than I like to pretend. But after getting up and pulling my stuff together, taking the sheets off the bed, and getting a tart and caffe latte in a nearby pastry shop, I was ready to go and so excited that I had gotten up at like 7 on vacation. The morning air was delightful, and the sun on the river a real treat. We went to the Uffici, the Offices, which is a museum of a lot of the stuff owned by the Medici family.

I was thinking, sweet. Renessaince paintings on free museum day in Florence. Can’t go wrong with that I suppose.. we got there at like 8:10 when the museum opened at 8:15. There was already a line, but it wasn’t nearly so bad as it would later be (our friends who had planned but did not execute a similar get-up-early course of action stood in line for roughly three and a half hours). We waited for about an hour before entering. No photos were allowed in the museum proper, but we took a few in the stairwell without flash. Ashley’s emperor name is Commodus, and her wife’s bust was in the hallway.

So we get to the top of the stairs and I am totally expecting some cool Renessaince paintings, which are lovely and about which I know little, when I turn around and am face to face with Marcus Agrippa. In marble, of course. I stop and stare and realize he is flanked on either side by busts of Tiberius and the man Augustus himself. I had seen photos of these very busts in my textbooks on sculpture. I rather like Agrippa, as it is. And for a moment I felt close to crying.

We look at some info plaques to find out that these busts are in fact original and ancient, and have mostly just been restored. Some of the statues that line the entire hallway of the floor are copies. But most of the emperors are not. We did look at some of the more famous paintings, and I really liked Botticelli and some of the other amazing, amazing things I saw there, but Ashley and I worked our way patiently and lovingly around the room of classical antiquities while so many visitors glanced at them and kept walking.

Some of the Christian suffering paintings are a bit disturbing. Others are really lovely. I especially liked the ones where Madonna and Child look like a happy family. It is in a way a crying shame that we weren’t allowed to take photos, but it did in a way keep me from spending the entire day behind the lens of my camera, overfilling my memory card, etc.

Okay.. that’s all for now, gotta go to class!