Firenze

I've decided that my photo album of Florence is not quite enough. It requires explanations, insights and a commentary that's longer than a one sentence caption. So.....

Last weekend, Sept. 22-24, I went to Florence with Liise. Ok, now imagine this- an art history nerd (me) and a European history nerd(Liise) let loose in Florence, Italy. Craziness! Instead of listing off the things that we did- boring- i'll tell some fun stories and interesting bits of information that we learned.

Palazzo Ritti- Residence of Cosimo de'Medici after he lived in Palazzo Vecchio (not called vecchio-"old" until he left it for the other palace), now houses several galleries full of amazing art that I pretty much drooled all over (obviously not literally, they would have thrown me out). The Boboli gardens are also located within the palace walls, we only saw them from inside the galleria but they were still beautiful from afar. Funnily enough, on the last day we were in Florence, we were taking a walk and happened upon the back entrance to these gardens. So, something really intriguing about this palace is that when Cosimo lived here, he had a passageway built from Palazzo Vecchio, over the Ponte Vecchio into his residence here. Dude didn't even have to walk outside to get to work in the morning (which I assume was the point). He also had all these cool secret rooms, staircases and corridors in Palazzo Vecchio that Liise and I took a tour through (In Italian, with an adorable guide)! Probably the coolest part of Florence, in my opinion. Although i do have to admit, David was pretty rad.

David- Okay, so after one walks into the Galleria Dell'Academia, there are tons of people, you waited on line with some of them for about an hour. Pretty much, even though one tries to pretend they are interested in the multitude of medieval religious art filling the anterior gallery rooms, everyone is really there to see one thing. David. The shining star of the gallery...actually no scratch that, the shining star of all sculpture ever created by anyone. Extremely tall, about 25 feet or 7.6 meters. Perfection, absolute perfection. And I snapped an illegal photo! Ill put it below the text. Our time here was definitely well spent, we plopped ourselves down and pretty much stayed there for an hour. I sketched a little bit, but overall, the major activity was staring at the beauty that is Michelangelo's David.

That's all for now, but I will add more on Florence later!!

Below are David (i cant figure out how to rotate him) and Ponte Vecchio