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Florence.
Our first official morning in Florence began with a nice breakfast at our
Hotel. After feasting on eggs, bacon, sausage and endless fruit and yogurt, we got ready for our day of touring museums. My parents had struggled to order the tickets for both Accademia and Uffitizi online, but luckily, I was able to call from Spain and reserve us some tickets in order to save us a bit of waiting time in the lines of the museums. After getting all ready after breakfast we made our way to the Accademia Museum which is widely known for housing Michelangelo's sculpture of David. Along with this famous sculpture, there is a wide array of both religious paintings and other works of marble throughout the museum. As we began our tour in the front area of the museum, I noticed a familiar face strolling her son around the building. It was the family we had met on our flight to Milan. I went over to greet her and we ended up talking to her for quite a while. It was so crazy that of all the places in Italy we were in the same museum at the same time. She was a very kind lady and gave me her email and phone number if I ever needed anything while I was in Spain. After finishing up our conversation with her, we headed over to view David. I had not previously learned much about this sculpture, but was extremely impressed when I finally was able to see it. The statue itself seems to be around 30 feet tall and it all made of marble. From the expression in David's eye to the details of the veins on his hand, it is an incredible sight to look at. David, who is naked of course, is holding a rock in one hand and a sling in the other to depict the biblical story of David and goliath. It is a very moving piece and something that is worth the time to look at.
Fallowing our time at the museum, we went to grab a bite to eat at a near by street restaurant. This little cafe had outdoor seating, which was even more enticing with the warm weather and nice sunshine. We sat and enjoyed some fresh pasta and pizza and people watched as we gave our feet some time off.
From there, we wandered around the streets of Florence and into a larger plaza on the way to the Ufitzzi museum. The plaza had a carousel and plenty of live street performers. One of the guitarist's caught my moms ear and she ended up purchasing one of his cd's as a way to solidify that memory of our afternoon in the plaza. After walking through that plaza, we made our way to the Uffitzi museum. This museum houses some of the most famous renaissance paintings in the world and is comparable to the size of the Prado museum in Madrid. Just like the Prado, this museum could take months to really be able to study each and every painting, but we took the speedy route and enjoyed the majority of the works as we strolled through. After getting our share of good art, we headed back to the hotel for a nap and shower to get ready for dinner. We had made reservations at a restaurant on the river called Golden View Open Bar and were excited for a nice meal out. At round 7:00 we headed towards the river and were early enough at the restaurant to get a perfect table by the window over looking the water. We sat and enjoyed fresh seafood and good meat, along with drinking a new favorite pinot grigio. We winded and dined for almost 3 hours as we waited for the jazz band that was setting up to begin. We eventually had to leave since our table was reserved for another family, but we thoroughly enjoyed our stay. From dinner, we came back to the hotel to play some yahtzee and go to bed. But, as I laid in bed around 11, I started to feel my bed shake. I wasn't too worried until I noticed that my parents felt it too. At previous places, I assumed those shakes were from under ground metros, but we were near nothing of the sort. It stopped after about 10 seconds and we simply brushed it off as nothing big. What we didn't realize until the next morning was that we had experienced some of the pre tremors to one of Italy's largest earthquakes in over a half a century.
Florence-Rome.
When we woke up in Florence the morning after the tremors, we had not yet heard the news about the earthquake. I was checking my email when I received a message from my advisor in Spain asking me if I had been affected by the earthquake. From there, we learned more about the devastating earthquake that took over 300 lives in a town about 2 hours in-between Florence and Rome called L'Aquila. We were both a little apprehensive about traveling, but thankful that our part of the country remained unharmed. It is a little unnerving to be in a country that you are not very familiar with and have a natural disaster happen that you are also not familiar with. We would have had no idea as to what to do if there was an earthquake in our area. In the states, we know to go to the basement for tornados, but earthquakes are still a pretty foreign thing for us.
Once we had caught up on our news, we headed to the train station to go to Rome. We were all looking forward to our longer stay in Rome, and my mom was anticipating the Inn that she had booked for us. We arrived in Rome in the early afternoon and checked into the Daphne Inn. We were greeted by a friendly staff who sat us down and walked us through a map of Rome with all the places that we should see. For those of you have visited, you know how enormous the city actually is. There is no way to see all of Rome in a matter of months, let alone the three days that we were there. So, we sat down and decided the main things that we wanted to see and went from there. After getting all settled into our room, we went to grab lunch at a small Italian restaurant just a walk from the Inn. We enjoyed some pasta and then went out to walk around the city. With the map in my dad's hand, we just started walking and looking for major monuments that we wanted to make sure and not miss. Our first stop was at the infamous Trevi Fountain. We were joined by the hundreds of other tourists that came to view the same fountain. It is very impressive in its entirety and we came to find out later that all of the fountains in Rome are still fed by the aqueduct that was built at the time of the Roman Empire. Pretty impressive when you think of how old that is and that that kind of technology has been able to withstand such a great amount of time and changes to a city. After the Trevi Fountain, we wandered through plazas like the Plaza Nazaroma, Plazzo Farnese, Piazza Spado and Campo de Fiori. All of the plazas had amazing fountains and great lay outs. Areas complete with Roman Columns on the building's surrounding and on every corner an accordion street player to boot. In-between the many fountains and plazas, we made sure to stop at the Pantheon. The Pantheon is quite amazing not only from the outside, but also the inside. Its strong roman structure on the outside is very impressive, and as you walk inside you are impressed by the preciseness and accuracy of the architecture of the circular dome. From the marble floors to the perfect ceiling, the pantheon is something I am very glad I was able to see. After the pantheon we continued our walk through many cathedrals full of impressive ceiling paintings and then ended our walk at the Largo di Torre which is a roman ruin area. When we began heading back to our Inn, I got a call from Ginny and her and her mother wanted to try and meet up so we decided we would head towards the Trevi Fountain and meet them there. After we arrived, we waited for about an hour looking for Ginny and her mom and eventually decided to leave. We came to find out the next morning that Ginny and her mom had gotten a little lost on the bus system and didn't make it to the fountain until much later. As we walked back to the Inn, we grabbed a pizza from a small restaurant to take back with us for dinner. The pizza in Italy wasn't exactly what I had imagined. We had ordered a pizza with ham, olives, artichokes, and onions, and we did indeed get that on our pizza, but all of the ingredients were separated out into sections on the pizza. It was really funny trying to rearrange the pizza to how we normally eat it, on top of having to tear it to pieces since it hadn't been pre-cut for us. We stayed in that night eating pizza and getting caught up on 24 (my parents television obsession) as we watched it on the Mac desktop that was in our room. We all went to bed fairly early as we were exhausted from our first day in Rome and wanted to be ready to head to the coliseum fully charged in the morning.
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