Well this is a much delayed blog entry, and will probably be a short one, I'll add much longer information to the photos I upload from Chianti and Pisa/Lucca. Right now I'm feeling under the weather with a sinus infection, but hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow. I'll be satisfied with waiting until saturday to feel better, when my friends and I go to Venice for the first day of Carnival. Well back to last week, my classes have been going really well and the professors are all interesting and fun. I'm excited to get further into the semester and start more site visits around Firenze next week. The weather is slowly improving and getting warmer, helping keep my room above 55 for the past 3 days which is quite an accomplishment. The only hiccup was Saturday when we went to Pisa/Lucca, it was pouring rain that morning and the 10 minute walk to the train station didnt help keep our spirits up. Luckily, it was only overcast in Pisa and great conditions for pictures, while Lucca was similar except for a 2 minute deluge.

Friday the 'Penn State' group at the Institute went to Chianti and we had a fantastic wine tasting/tour and the chance to buy wine directly from the vineyard. The website for the vineyard is http://www.vignamaggio.it/index-english.html The name of the vineyard is Vignamaggio and it was so beautiful and the wine/cheese/salami pairing was fabulous. One of their main selling points is that the Mona Lisa was painted (or at least the study for the painting was undertaken) in the villa. Mona Lisa was born in Vignamaggio, which her family, the rich Gherardinis, called home-starting in the 14th century. All in all it was a fun experiance and our tour guide was very personable and informative and made the wine tasting very fun.

Saturday was the tour of Pisa and Lucca, similar to the trip to Siena/San Gimignano I took last week. Pisa was nice, but nothing spectular really, most the information about this is in the pictures. Lucca was the most fun, we got to ride bikes around the city walls, which were still standing after they were built in the 15th Century and it was so beautiful. I have an internship at the Palazzo Vecchio as a tour guide, and my first meeting is tomorrow so I'm going to go get a lot of sleep so I hopefully feel better tomorrow morning.

Ciao