Florence (finally!)

Alright, I guess it's been over a week since I went to Florence, so I ought to write about it now!

We left Rome bright and early Wednesday morning and caught a Eurostar train to Florence. Again, it was a lovely ride through the countryside! :) It only took us a couple hours to get there because it was one of those super fast trains.

Zipping through the scenery

We got there around noon and checked in to our hotel (pretty nice!) and got some coffee. Lisa told us a lot about the Medici family and the Renaissance. We went to see the Duomo (a huge, gorgeous, ornate church that towers over everything) and the famous bronze doors by Brunelleschi and Ghirberti.

The detailing is just incredible. The closer you look, the more ornate it gets. Gilded, tiled, painted, carved...so much decoration!
Then we started touring museums and churches. Man, we saw SO MANY museums in Florence! We were all pretty much museumed out by the time it was over. We also toured some cool old Medici palaces and town houses of the nobility. Lisa's connections got us into some floors that aren't normally open to tour groups, so that was cool!

That first night, we all went out to dinner at Trattoria ZaZa. It was delicious! I was tempted to get something exotic like truffle ravioli, wild boar, or rabbit, but I just got some fettucine with walnut sauce and eggplant parmasan. Mmmm!

We also had lots of homework involving long written responses to make sure we were paying attention to the lectures on the Medici (deceptively called "the Quest") but that is boring so I won't go into it!

Our hotel was right in the middle of a leather market and next to this cool church (of San Lorenzo)

That afternoon, Jackie, Cat, and I explored the leather market and I took a ton of colorful close-up pictures. It was really fun--we did a bit of bartering with the vendors and had some interesting conversations with them.


There were so many leather bags! All that leather made the market smell wonderful.
Trying on a mask!

On Day 2, we went to the Uffizi! This was an AWESOME gallery which used to be a government building. I had no idea how much famous art was in it; around every corner was a painting I recognized. We saw a LOT of Boticelli art, including La Primavera and Birth of Venus (!!!), a few paintings by Carravagio, Raphael, and Rembrandt, and Titian's Venus of Urbino!!! I was SO excited to see this one, I had no idea it was here and it is pretty much one of my favorite paintings ever! And it was enormous. So, so cool!

However, it was an enormous museum and I was really tired afterward from spending so many hours looking at art. I basically went back to the hotel and slept from about 6 pm to 8 am. I felt kind of lame the next morning because everyone else had been out exploring the city and I was just konked out on a hotel bed...oh well. Probably needed the sleep.

The next day we went to another famous museum, the Accademia. The line outside went on for blocks and blocks in the hot sun but, as usual, we were able to skip it and go right in! This museum housed Michelangelo's famous David..

Pretty epic!!! There was also a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit right next to it.

One of the churches we went to had this big statue of Dante out front:
..and some tombs of famous people inside, including Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Galileo.

After lunch one day some of us watched this creepy mime for a while...he kept following people around and imitating what they were doing, and just running up to people and being weird. It was oddly entertaining...

That evening, some of us hiked up a big hill to look over Florence at sunset. It was so pretty! We got there at a perfect time, when the sun was just about to go down, and we just watched the city and the darkening sky for a while. So relaxing after all those museums and assignments.


After a museum one day we went to a cool temple or something that was all decorated with ocean-y stuff.. lots of blues & very calming.

We had a bit of a photoshoot there :-)Here's a quick sketch of one of the reproductions of David I did while sitting in the piazza and waiting for my roomies to finish their Quests. The piazza where this one is has a big clock tower, some other famous statues, and is where Savonarola was hanged and burned back in the day!
Another cool church we went into..

Friday included a leather bag shopping expedition. Lisa took us to one of her favorite shops and was able to get half-off pretty much everything. A lot of people bought beautifully made leather bags for way better deals than you can get in the US, and I was definitely tempted to buy one--but couldn't quite bring myself to spend 70 euro/over $100 on a purse!

On Saturday we went to an olive oil/vinegar tasting. The family running it was super nice and gave us all kinds of delicious samples. My favorite was the truffle honey...so rich and delicious, but so expensive! I did buy a tiny jar of truffle salt, which smells wonderful and garlicky...can't wait to use it!

And then we went back to Rome.. Florence was great but it was nice to go back to a more familiar city and be able to do our own cooking rather than eating out all the time. This week was pretty stressful though--lots of presentations. I have my biggest presentation tomorrow, so I've been working on that a lot. We went to Orvieto this weekend, so hopefully I'll write something about that soon.