London/Florence Adventures

4/2/12-4/5/12
Mondays seem like they are going to my easier days. I have two classes, but they are my Italian class and my class with Professor Caldwell which includes a lot of reading but its really not too bad. Tuesdays and Wednesdays I also have only 2 classes, but these days include my class with Professor Mariotti, which I am pretty sure will be my favorite class but it feels like we do a whole lot more just because most of the classes includes tours all over Florence. On Tuesday we went to the Opera del Duomo (basically the workshop of the Duomo and we got to see a little museum behind the Duomo that at one point was basically just a storage area. Now it is filled with beautiful art that I had the pleasure of learning about last semester in one of my classes and so when I actually saw the pieces close up my heart kind of started racing out of control. It was an amazing day!

Donatello's Mary Magdalene

Finger of John the Baptist

Made by Michaelangelo for his Tomb (that's Mikey there in the hood)

Later this day we also had a tour of the Pergola Theater where we found out that this week a showing of Breakfast at Tiffany's will be! And we are going!! This Wednesday, I am so excited!! In honor of it here is on of my famous music videos!

Deep Blue Something- Breakfast at Tiffany's

Wednesday was another tour with Professor Mariotti, this time to the San Croce Basilica. It was marvelous and I was so excited to see that there is a huge statue dedicated to my main man out front!


That is me with my dearest love, Dante.

And inside was even more awesome things to see!

Front of the Church

Crucifix by Donatello-Called by Brunelleschi a peasant on a cross. Kind of ticked off Donatello until Brunelleschi made his own crucifix that Donatello admitted was much better than his. (I still like Donatello's)

A chapel paid for by Cosimo de Medici

A side chapel built by Brunelleschi


Crucifix by Giotto, beautiful but heavily damaged by flooding of the church.

Thursday was another tour with Mariotti, after Italian class with Luigi and our class with Caldwell. This tour was at the Brancacci Chapel, another beautiful one and I was so excited to see the art work in this one, I recognized quite a few of the paintings! We sadly could not spend too much time in the chapel, but it was enough.

A byzantine painting not original to the chapel (as you can tell from comparisons to the paintings surrounding it)

Jesus being Baptised

Adam and Eve expulsion from the garden

The artists liked to put themselves into their paintings... this one is actually the artist's mentor though.

And this is the painting I was excited to see! Adam and Eve obviously, but you see that snake there? That is Lilith (according to some art historians) who was the basis of my research last summer!!

This week was very educational and so much fun, as you can tell in this short time we have already seen so much! We all were very excited though to have a free weekend to ourselves!

4/6/12
Some of us were very good on Friday and (attempted at least) to do some of our homework before the official start of the weekend. A few us met at Linguaviva with our books and laptops and while we all said we didn't get a whole lot done I feel we actually did get quite a lot accomplished in that most of us were able to outline our papers that are due Wednesday for Caldwell's class (see we really do work on this trip too!). After a little while though we needed to get away from work and we went out to lunch, and when we were totally done with work for the day we went out to reward ourselves with pretty trinkets from the market (Jenna got a really pretty scarf) and I scoped out some potential items I may try to purchase later on. I also was successful in that I was able to finally find a cheap enough suitcase that is big enough to carry my massive amount of stuff back home! That's one less thing I need to worry about! Yay!

4/7/12
This was kind of a slow paced day. Jenna Hannah and I all just wanted to get out and see some of the city, sadly by the time I left my apartment it was raining out pretty bad, which I didn't mind but by the time I found Jenna and Hannah they had purchased quite a bit of chocolate to try to make themselves feel better about the rain. They were happy about the chocolate, not so happy about the money they spent to get said chocolate... We met outside of the Duomo and just kind of wandered for a little while. I was able to buy a new umbrella and we found a cute little market that sells all sort of organic products. We walked as far as the river before we decided to give up on hoping for better weather and just headed back to our places to attempt to do homework.

4/8/12
Well Happy Easter! I was pretty sad to not be with my family, but the celebration and parade that I was able to see was pretty enjoyable and kind of made up for it.

All took place outside of Santa Maria del Fiore

Hehe, silly costumes

There were flag throwers!!


This big box here was pulled in by 4 HUGE oxen. And guess what? It blows up! Not the oxen, the box!

To be honest this morning kind of sucked. I was waiting for two hours for this whole thing to start because if I didn't get there early I would not have had a decent enough spot to see the whole show. It was fine at first but then it started raining, which started pouring, and basically became a waterfall. It was really wet and cold and just uncomfortable (made worse by the creepy guy who kept pushing his way onto Hannah, Jenna, and I). Eventually though, the show started and we got to see what turned out to be a 10 minute firework show!! I got the whole thing on video, and I will try to load it to my blog but no guarantees. The rest of the day was pretty slow. I went home and had a nice Easter lunch with my host family and then basically took a nap until dinner :)

[I will try to upload the video again later]

4/9/12
Today was so great! A group of us finally took a trip up to the hill town of Fiesole, the most beautiful place ever with an amazing view of Florence and the surrounding areas! We had tremendous views, got to explore another adorable market, had a nice lunch, and visited an archeological museum so that we could see the ruins of early Etruscan and Roman people in the area.