Today in Firenza (Florence) we didn't have any rain, some sunshine and lots of wind. It was blustery and chilly still.
This morning our group was out the hotel door early to get to the Academia (which is the Academy of Art) where Michelangelo's David and several un-finished works are. The museum part of the Acadamia opens at 8:30 and our group went straight in first thing. There are 4 statues that weren't completed by Michelangelo in various stages. They weren't finished because Michelangelo was comissioned for them, but didn't get regular payment for work accomplished. Apparently this happened rather frequently, where a piece was comissioned and then the artist didn't receive payment or was short changed. Michelangelo would just quit working on local pieces. The original David is now housed inside to protect it from pollution, graffiti, vandals and pigeons. David is not proportional is some parts of his body, but anatomically correct with veins and muscles. His head is too big, as are his hands and feet. It was against the law to dissect the human body, but that didn't stop several of the great Rennaisance artists, including Michelangelo who was known to rob a grave or too. There are absolutely no pictures allowed in the Academia.
After the Academia we went to the big three piazzas in old Firenza. Of course we also saw Florence's Cathedral which is made of three colors of regional marble-- green, pink, imperfect white. (Perfect white was used in art works, so there was plenty of marbled white to use for building. Iron veins in white marble made the stones considered imprefect, although David was carved out of such stone and Michelangelo just incorporated the verticle streaks into the legs of David to look like hair or veins.
The city of Florence is trying to encourage cleaner air, so all electric cars get free electricity for charging. Roger stood by a Twizzy to give you perspective on the size of the most popular vehicle.
After seeing the piazzas, our group went to Peruzzi leather factory. Peruzzi makes all of the big expensive named brand purses that are made in Italy. You can buy an unmarked purse for 1/3 of the cost of a marked purse. By putting Gucchi, or DG, or Coach hardware on the purse the cost triples. I did not buy a purse. Peruzzi also makes beautiful leather jackets, belts, and shoes. When we were there around 1100 it wasn't all that crowded. Roger and I went back a little before 2 (for a pit stop and nothing else) the place was packed by Asians with money to burn.
We had time to ourselves a from around 11 to 1400. I had asked where the fashion shopping area was, so we wandered over in that direction. First we walked down to the Arno River, to see the old bridge, which is now Via Oro. The bridge is the only bridge across the river that wasn't destroyed by the Nazi's. Today there are a lot of gold shops in the ground level of the street over the bridge. There were a lot of people window shopping. After the bridge, I went into several stores looking for a "mother of the Groom" dress and was only seeing things that were too young for me or too trendy. Roger got bribed with gelato, and was able to find "man chairs" in a few of the stores. I stumbled across Luisa Spagnoli and was helped by a very nice sales lady. I tried on about 10 dresses. There were two that both Roger and I liked. Roger couldn't make up his mind which he liked better, so he told me that he wanted me to buy both. So I bought a navy blue dress and a coral dress. Both dresses are very different from anything I've previously owned and haven't seen anything like them in the USA. Of course I haven't been looking in the USA, but I know they'll both be fine.
We made it back to the hotel, unloaded our rain gear out of the backpack and headed back out for a stroll. In the lobby of the hotel there was a map that showed that there was an Ice Cream festival in a different piazza, so we sort of headed in that direction. The piazza was extremely crowded and seemed like where we were there just happened to be a vortex of high speed wind. The festival required tickets for the gelato and the line was extremely long (similiar to some of the museum lines we've seen) so Roger decided that he could skip the competition gelato. Instead about 2 blocks away he had shop gelato. So he had gelato twice in one day. We also had pizza for supper, which is generally a good option for us.
Tomorrow we are going to Bologna and then on to Venice.
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