World Wanderings

I'm on a regional train heading to Siena at the moment, and just passed some amazingly beautiful ruins of old brick buildings. Just thought I would mention that. I've always had an affintiy towards ruins, there is is just something the comes through in the destruction and deterioration of old buildings. It's a good thing that Europe is filled to the brim with such structures. Again, as I've said a few times before, Europe has the wonderful broken in feel. The only city that I've been to that gives a similar feeling is Boston.

Well I'm finally out of Florence, I ended up staying a few more nights thanni originally intended. One was because I couldn't find a hostel in Siena and the other night was because the hostel I was staying at was offering a wine tasting tour in the Chianti region. It was a good place to spend a few extra nights at, as the hostel offered not only two full bars (one on the roof terrace with a great view of the city and sunsets), but also a restaurant, a pool, and sauna. The latter two of which I took advantage of the past four nights. It was a good way to end a day of touring about, with a swim and some time in the sauna. This hostel was more like a hotel than a hostel.

Anyways, I obviously spent lots of time in Florence, let me recap some of it. The first three days were spent seeing the sights with the groups of friends I had met in Cinque Terre. Together we saw the large cathedral, Duomo, which had the largest dome at the time of it's building. In fact they built the church with a large hole, not sure how they were going to make a dome that large work, held a contest to see if anyone would engineer it. The final dome is quite an amazng sight to see, and constantly looms in the distance, from wherever you are in the city. It was even more amazing to climb on up and get close to the dome, which while it looks big from the main floor, it's all that much larger from right before it starts. What was an even cooler realization was that the ceiling fresco which looked incredible detailed down below was really made up of huge, broad strokes of the brush. It makes sense that the 'resoluion' of the panting doesn't need to be very detailed from close up, because it will almost always be viewed from a hundred or so feet away. The views of Florence were spectacular from on top of the dome as well. I spent a good hour ontop, people watching, viewing the surrounding landscape and writing in my journal.

Also as a group we visited the Acadamia, a Renaissance art museum which housed The famous statute of David. It was one of those pieces of artwork that kind of just blows everything else away. While there were lots of other statues in the museum, nothing could compare in the same way. And since we weren't allowed to take pictures, I decided to sketch David in my journal (but also snuck a quick photo in). It was quite funny to watch the poor photo-nazi run around yelling 'no photo' every two or three seconds to someone or another. I don't think I would want that position.

There was much to see and do in Florence, and by end I had seen several more museums. Waited 1.5 hours in line to get into the Ufuzzi museum, which had yet another huge renaissance art collection. It was here that I saw the 'Birth of Venus' painting. I do have to saw that it's been really near to see these masterpieces in real life, after only seeing images of them in booksy entire life. I feel as though I could go through most artbooks and be able to point out a lot of images that I've now seen in person. I've seen lot of art. In doing so I really have come to see what makes some of these lives of art so recognizable and famous. Going through the Pitti Palace the other day, with rooms just jam packed with artwork, it was amazing to just see the difference between what most artists were doing and what some of the greats had done. In particular one room housed Carvaggio's (forgive me for butchering names) "Sleeping Cupid", and the difference between that piece and all the rest in the room was like night and day.

Well Florence was filled with lots of good times. By day 5 I was getting a little stir crazy and needed to leave the city. Luckily there was a wine tour to the Chianti region hosted by my hostel. Since I'm a big fan of wine, how could I have not gone.

It was a fun day filled with Tuscan hillsides, wine, and a small 13th century town (turned into one big tourist attraction it seemed). Needless I was able to enjoy chianti, a super tuscan, and othet wine fresh from the winemakers themselves, as we visited two wineries. The second included a lunch, on the hillside overlooking the tuscan landscape, filled with bruschetta, deli meats, cheese, anipasta and lots of wine. One of the touists in my group happened to buy a 30 euro bottle of wine from the previous winery, and cracked it open to share for lunch. It was quite the amazing wine, most expensive (and for good reason this time) I've had in a long while. After all of this, I had lemoncello, rosemary blackberry, and black forest gelato from a world champion gelato shop. It was a good day of wine, food, gelato, and great countryside views.

Well I think that about wraps up this entry. Up next, a halfway there look back and thoughts (I think).