Oh Florence, where do I begin? We got up extra early this morning and took a private bus to the train station. Unlike other public faculties in Rome, bus drivers do not mess around if you are late! Luckily we were not. We then took a train to Florence. More on the train later on the way back, as I did not have a window seat here. One of the poorer experiences was at the station, where you had to pay a euro just to use the restroom.
However, Florence, otherwise known as Firenze, was one of the best experience! It’s much more lively and modern than Rome, and it is the home of Early Renaissance. The churches are much more lavishly decorated to the point that they were nearly Gothic. There was one with a huge dome known as the Santa Maria del Fiore. Many artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael, and Da Vinci intermingled here, sometimes even in competitions with one another. One notable contest involved Brunelleschi (rediscovered 3D perspective in 2D art), Ghiberti, and Donatello. Ghiberti won, and designed beautiful bronze doors to the Florence Baptistery, creating a relief of New Testament scenes on the north doors, and later Old Testament scenes on the east doors.
My favorite thing to see in the main square is the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s main hall where major executions were held. Savonarola, who falsified prophecies, was burned in front of it and Fransisco De Pazi, who staged the assassination of the Medici family during mass, was hanged naked off of the Palazzo. Many statues also decorated the area, including a copy of Michelangelo’s David.
The Basilica of Santa Croce was where we went to after the Palazzo. We got to see the tomb of Michelangelo and Dante! Dante Alighieri is one of my favorite authors with Inferno, so it was so cool to see his tomb, even if he is not yet buried there. When we continued our walk after this we saw a church without its facade. I can’t believe how plain it looks without all the aesthetic details!
We then went to the leather market. Markets like these highlights the mass immigration coming into Italy, and many of those immigrants were of African or Middle Eastern descent. They all speak a lot of languages, which I suppose is necessary to make a living in a tourist-heavy area. The leather came from cows in Tuscany, and many of the food in Florence, as we found out during lunch, are Tuscan specialties. Also during lunch, we realized American 70’s music was not only popular in Rome. It is a very strange penchant of modern Italians.
Now it’s time for my favorite part! The Medici Summer Palace, the Palazzo Pitti, was simply fantastic. Later used as a base for Napoleon, this palace has a lot of Baroque and Rococo influences. So many paintings lined the place, and Professor Hesting confessed that this was even better than the Uffizi! Many people can say they saw David, but we can say we saw Napoleon Bonaparte’s bathroom!
We had free time for ourselves after this, which was spent looking at very expensive stores that lined Firenze. There was one sweets store with a chocolate waterfall behind the counter! We had dinner once we got back together, then it was time to go back to good ole Rome. The train ride back was insightful. I noticed many small communities along the way that were fairly spaced out. I wonder what it must be like to live in such rural areas between the bustling cities of Rome and Florence, and what sort of lifestyle the inhabitants conform to. I wonder if there are schools in the small towns or if students need to take the train to another town. Once there was a shack in the middle of nowhere, and I pictured the thought of someone down on their luck having to live there, or perhaps choose that lifestyle as a form of religious devotion, or perhaps it was simply an abandoned stable… Sometimes the most thought-provoking things can be found in the minute details of this world.
