I decided that my goal for today would be to view Michelangelo’s David sculpture. After a delicious breakfast at the convent and no nun nightmares the night before as I had feared, I asked the hotelier for suggestions for buying tickets for the Accademia where the David is located. He gave us brilliant advice. The line to get into the Accademia can be several hours long. He told us to go to the less crowed museum of San Marco and have the ticket agent there set up a reservation ticket for the Accademia and the Uffizi Gallery. Without waiting in a single line we had our tickets for both. With our reservation ticket we were able to bypass the long line and go straight into the museum. In addition to David, the Accademia contains several of Michelangelo’s unfinished works: The Prisoners and St. Matthew. It also contains a number of paintings, and a lot of historical artifacts from Renaissance Florence. The main hall where David is located is stunning. We walked out of a gallery and down a long hallway with a sky-lit dome illuminating the 17-foot statue. It was impressive. The statue was carved from a single piece of marble and took him more than two years to complete; he was 26 when he started carving it. We walked all around the statue and both agreed we were not expecting it to be so impressive. A smaller gallery contained many plaster busts and smaller statues that were used to create larger marble ones. The smaller statues have many nails in them used to measure the depth of the piece to build the larger marble sculpture. In the gift shop Steven talked me into purchasing a mini David statue for my desk at school. It’s a marble to-scale replica and will always remind me of the awe I felt looking at this sculpture.

After lunch at a pizzeria with misting sprinklers to escape the heat (we felt like vegetables in the grocery store) we went to the Uffizi Gallery for our next ticket reservation. Again we were able to bypass long lines and get right into the gallery. (We felt like traveling pros). This museum was much larger than our guidebook led us to believe and took longer than expected (partially thanks to Steven, my dear reader of every sign in a museum). The highlights of the museum included viewing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Allegory of Spring, two paintings by DaVinci, many paintings by Lippi, several Michelangelo paintings, and Caravaggio, Giotto, and Titians as well.

I could not get over the lines to get into these museums. I kept thinking that people wait in line in Italy to see artwork like people wait in the US for amusement rides.  I also thought a lot about being an art teacher while looking at these works. My students comment quite a bit about not understanding why a work of art is so important. Usually they have just seen it via computer, if I’m lucky they’ve seen it in a book. Some of the pieces I saw today were just incredible and you have to actually see them in person to understand. I guess that is why tourists worldwide flock to these museums in the summer for that experience. I just feel incredibly blessed to have to have had this experience myself. My final thought about this. It is amazing that with all of the advances humankind has made we have stopped valuing artists as was done by society. There are not workshops and artists studying under masters. There are not great artists like Michelangelo who paint, sculpt, draw, and write poetry.

Enough of my thoughts. After a long day on our feet we went back to the convent for a little R and R. After feeling somewhat rested we went on our food hunt. We ended up at my favorite restaurant in Florence (so far), Trattoria Gargani. Unlike some of our other stops it was not overrun with tourists.  Steven had a pesto pasta dish and I had a spicy tomato sauce with spaghetti and tiramisu for dessert. While we were eating one of the waiters asked us where we were from. When we said the US he replied that he thought we were Northern European. He told us we were so lucky to live in a true democracy. It has been mentioned to us by our cycling guides that Italy is very corrupt. One guide mentioned that Rome is called the black hole where all the money goes. After having been in Germany the difference between the two countries was evident.  Italy seemed much more run down. Our waitress gave us two limoncellos while we paid our bills. I toasted my dad, the great maker of limoncello, and sipped on the digestivo.

After dinner we walked around town and found that in the cooler nighttime temperatures everyone is out and about. We made notes of places to visit during the day and called it a night.

On a side note- our convent has a very particular convent type smell. Not the incense church smell more of a moth balls and enclosed smell.