L'auttuno arriva

Fall officially arrived this weekend, and after lying on the beach last weekend, it feels a little bit more like winter to me. Yesterday I stood in line for four hours after deciding it was about time I saw the Uffizi. Florence’s most popular museum, the Uffizi is 45 rooms of artwork once owned by the Medici’s. This four hour wait sounds like it would just be boring, but instead it was boring and freezing, two of my friends and I took turns standing in the cold and running to get coffee or tea, or just find someplace to stand that was warmer for a couple minutes. Katherine called it quits after two hours, but Hanna and I were both too stubborn to leave, and we were rewarded in the end with an amazing collection of art, housed in another of Florence’s most beautiful buildings. I saw Botticelli’s original “Birth of Venus,” and “La Primavera,” two that I was really looking forward to, along with a lot of other historically significant Italian art. It’s amazing that one family used to own all of that, and more, it’s really incredible that I have only been to one actual museum so far in Florence, I feel like everywhere I look is art.

I spent Saturday in Siena, another adventure dampered a bit by the frigid wind, but we got to see some beautiful architecture. Siena reminded me a little of a miniature, cleaner version of Florence. With a duomo and a Piazza with a really similar looking building to the Palazzo Vecchio in Piazza della Signoria. We mustered up the courage to pay the six euro entrance fee to the duomo (we are all feeling the terrible exchange rate and curse of being students with no income living in Europe) and were extremely glad we did. An older American woman leaving the church when we first arrived was rambling to herself, and us, that the nearly ten American dollars she just spent definitely wasn’t worth it to see just another church! But I think she may have been blind, or just crazy, because the interior of the church was one of the most intricate I have ever seen, the entire structure is striped between the green and white marble that is usually only on the outside of Italian churches, every floor tile was a different beautiful design, and their were sculptures in every spare corner including a bust of every single pope that circled the entire thing, it was incredible. The church wasn’t very big but we spent over an hour just walking through it, taking pictures, and trying to get them to turn out without a flash, it was so hard to capture, it was all just too much.

After lots of sightseeing this weekend I’m pretty wiped out before the second week of my first semester classes, but I think I can manage with three day weeks, and I already have “fall break” next week. My first real solo traveling European adventure to Sweden, it should definitely be an experience. I should be starting to audit my University of Florence class sometime soon as well, I am going to see if I can audit a mass communication course, something I would never have the chance to take at Smith and I think would be incredibly interesting given the state of the Italian media.
Un abbracciano a tutti!