Coming Home

Okay, so the organization of this blog has become non-existent, but oh well.  There will be time to clean it up later.  I am sitting in the airport in Rome waiting to board our flight.  We are leaving here an hour later than scheduled, but had a four hour lay-over in Atlanta so we should be fine.  I am going to add a bit that I wrote about Florence to this post.  I know I have missed a few days in between, but that will have to come later.

April 27, 2010

Full Day in Florence

This morning we headed into Florence to see something I have been dreaming about since college. Michelangelo's David. I took a lot of Art History classes at UCSB and that is really when my desire to come to Italy began. The first few days of this trip in Rome I got to see so many of the things that first inspired me. But I had to wait until today to see David. But oh was it worth the wait!

We met a local guide at the Academia museum. I was disappointed to find out we were not allowed to take pictures, but it allowed me more time to just stare. The statue of David is over 17 feet tall. He is at the end of a room that also has some unfinished works by Michelangelo. These are blocks of marble with partial statues working their way out of them. When I turned the corner and first saw the statue my breath was taken away. The size of the statue is amazing. The longer I looked at him the more real he seemed. It seemed that at any moment he would turn his head and look me right in the eyes. As I stared it began to seem as if I could see his chest rise and fall with his breathing. The detail in that statue is amazing! His fingernails and the veins in his hands all seem so real.

I am intrigued to learn more about Michelangelo because he is one of the few artists who carved statues without making a model out of plaster first or using a live model. He was a true genius who could see the statue inside the block of marble and somehow remove the marble that didn't belong. He carved the David when he was 27 years old in only 18 months. Amazing!

After the museum the local guide walked us around Florence. It was not as crowded or busy as Milan, but it definitely had a big city feel to it. When I wandered around on my own later I found what must have been the area where a lot of the students live. There were a ton of English speaking college age kids around. I thought a lot of Nicole, who must have walked the same areas with her friends when she lived there during college.

Once the tour with the local guide was over Heidi showed us a gold and leather shop. Those are the things Florence is most famous for. The person giving the demonstration in the gold shop started talking and I was surprised by the sound of her voice. She was clearly American, but I was startled to find that her voice sounded familiar, but very odd, to my ears. I know everyone thought I would come home speaking like an Italian. It turns out however, that I am instead coming home with the sounds of my Australian tour mates and Heidi's Belgian accent rattling around in my brain.