haha where on earth has the time gone.... and now i have so much to catch you all up on! I think i'll go in order and talk about one city per post, so hopefully in the next two weeks i'll have talked about most of my travels!
Today i'll start with Florence. (Firenze)
For the third leg of our journey with the class
(first was pompeii, second paestum), we jumped on a bullet train from rome to florence, and arriving at our hotel (hotel medici, highly
recommended) found ourselves right in the heart of the city. We were literally two blocks away from the d
uomo and we had a roof terrace that gave us an incredible veiw.
Florence was a great city to walk around in. As far as city planning goes, i'm sure you'll all be interested to know that it was the first entirely Roman city, founded in 1100 ad, so the romans laid it out on a specific grid. This was such a change from the maze of Rome i'm used to!
While in Florence we hit all the major sites in two days. It
was exhausting but we climbed the duomo to get an amazing 360 degree view of the city, saw michaelangelo's David, the uffizzi, castel vecchio, palazzo dei innocenti, ponte vecchio, San Laurenzo and about ten thousand other churches
including Santa Croce which housed the tombs of Michaelangelo, Dante, and Galileo! We also almost got into the Laurentian Library but got chased down by some lady who told us it was closed. I got the closest... i actually saw the front doors ;-)
One evening, after a lecture with our professor he l
ead us up to the top of one of the Florentine hills surrounding the city to one of the last remaining
Bennedictan Monestaries (the monks that never leave) We made it just in time to
catch the end of the evening mass and hear the monks singin
g- the church was huge, dark, dingy, and mixed with the gregorian chants coming from the basement under the altar was really haunting. And to top it off, when we walked out we got to watch the sunset over the city. What a sight!
Another funny part of the trip is worth mentioni
ng is the end of carnivale. We were there for tuesday (mardi gras) the day before ash wednesday, and Florence celebrated big time. There were crazy parties and parades going on in the streets with costumes and floats and madness. The parade passed right outside our hotel and a few of us decided to join in. It was about 11:45 at night, and 15 minutes later in the piazza outside San Laurenzo when the clock struck 12, a man with a megaphone told everyone to 'put out their cigarettes, put away their beer, and go home and pray' and sure enough, the music ended, noise went down, and everyone went home!
All in all Florence was great, tiring but gave us some great street-side pizza experiences and lots of leather options ;-) End of the weekend came too soon and we hopped in a bus to start our three city tour: San Vito- Verona- Venice! More tomorrow!
WOW!
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