A Few Days Later

Buongiorno!

Update number two! As I have learned Italy is a very noisy place, even at night. There is a constant sound of street cleaning going on and then the occasional police siren. (The sirens are quite different from those in the States, more wooey...) Anyways, I managed to get a pretty haunting picture of the Duomo from the roof of the hotel that I'm staying in. I don't know if I mentioned this in my first post, but the view from our hotel's roof is ridiculous. You can see so far out through the city as well as the majority of the major landmarks.

The past few days have a been a blur of wandering, drunken roommates, sleep deprivation, and learning pretty much. Today was a pretty good day though because I had a solid amount of time to go and visit some places with my camera that I had not yet been to. I first ventured over to the Piazza Della Signoria which is one of the Medici's big ass palaces that they ruled in while they were such a big influence in Italy. Here's a good idea of how massive it is:

Now, right next to the Piazza Della Signoria is the Uffizi. It's this sort of sheltered area that has something like nine statues inside. What's nice about the Uffizi is that one can sort of stop and have a seat inside and admire the works of art as well as get some pretty decent people watching in. And people watching in Italy is pretty fantastic. I can't name all of the statues by name exactly, and by can't name all of them, I mean I can't name any. But, I did take some pictures of them so here are those:

The only one that I kind of know is the last one, but I can't remember the exact name. It's the rape of someone...which is great, but hey sculpting and the Renaissance...weird. Anyways, there is actually another statue right by the building Signoria and I believe that it is supposed to be Poseidon. It's actually a fountain with spraying water and lights and fanciness at night. It's got a lot to it, but I only captured Poseidon:

*Sexy look off to the side* Now, if you venture past the fountain and down past the big palace you come upon another ornate building. I believe it is some sort of museum, although the name of it escapes me now. What really caught my eye is the sculpting and the figures on it. They are all very detailed and cover a lot of the building.

Obviously a lot of influence on Italian art is religion, considering its massive catholic population. So you can see some cherubs and crosses in a lot of art all around Italy. Now however, what has really caught my eye in the city is the amount of street art there is. One cannot venture down a street without seeing some sort of graffiti on a building, vehicle, or whatever the tagger thought would work. Some of my favorites though are what they do to Do Not Enter signs. Here are some examples, but there are a lot more:

The Pacman guy is probably near the top. Now the final picture I'll upload today is probably the one that I'm most proud of at the moment. It's of the San Lorenzo church, one of the oldest churches in Florence. It was created by the help of the Medici obviously, seeing as how they usually had a hand in everything that went on Florence at the time it was built. We actually took a tour of it today for my Renaissance class, sadly no cameras are permitted inside really any historical building in Europe so I couldn't capture any of that. The inside though is full of wonderful arches, Corinthian pillars, and a whole bunch of other fancy architectural terms. Here it is:

That's all I got today. I gotta run off to see an Italian movie!



Ciao!


Grace