Well I failed to write a blog entry every day so far, and thats simply because I have been so busy recently. Classes began Monday and my schedule is pretty agreeable, just that Tuesdays are tough. Mondays/Wednesdays I have an English class called Shifting Identities: Society and Individualism in Renaissance Florence which is very interesting, we are reading Visari's Lives of the Artists as well as Boccaccio's Decameron. The class focuses on the changing idealology of the "Renaissance mind" in relation to the medievel mind. An easy way to think of this is that in the Medieval era, man was subserviant to God, and to be curious was seen as strange and dangerous. With the advant of humanism in 1450, and specifically the Decameron, the role of women in society and the strength of the individual was greatly improved and seen as a more positive behavior.

After that I have Italian III, which is pretty straight-forward but the class takes an interesting approach to language learning. Instead of memorization and repeating back to the professor, we are going to go out into the city to meet Italians and converse with them. We even get to meet an author and ask her about the writing process, as well as multiple Italian youths to see similarities/differences in culture. The professor isreally cool too, and there are only 8 people in the class so it is extremely focused.

My final class is my favorite so far, Leonardo DaVinci. The professor is a world-renowed expert on Leonardo and the first discussion we had yesterday was extremely stimulating and brought up some very succient points. For example, why is Leonardo considered a universal genious? This is a 'fact' for many that is just accepted and never challanged and it was good to look at it from multiple angles. From the view of his insights into fluid mechanics, flight but also his revolutions in painting style are little noticed. One of the main reasons that the Mona Lisa is so impressive is that Leonardo totally revolutionized painting techniques. We also get to go to Milan to see the Last Supper, which is fantastic considering only 1 group of 20 is allowed to view it each day for only 25 minutes.

Tuesday is long, with Italian III first, but after that I have a Cultural Literacy Workshop led by an Australian professor who is just fantastic. She moved to Florence 10 years ago, married a Florientine in 2001 and has remained here ever since. We will examine just what makes the cultures different, and some of the psychological factors that constribute to a culture and cultural norms, etc.

I end Tuesdays/Thursdays with Business of Art, which seems very intersting. Something I learned today that blew my mind was the way that most of the major European banks, and specifically the Swiss bank, avoided a bad fall in the financial crisis of 2008. The Swiss bank had been buying art work for the past 50 years, and through the strength of its collection could retain most of its assests, which is an extremely intersting change in the world economy. To think that banks can give out loans based on the art collections they house is astounding.

Thats it for now, I have some homework to do but will post another update tomorrow with more Florence details, not class-related. I am traveling to San Gimignano Saturday, which is going to be incredible.

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Ciao