PontifiKate

Day 6: Sun. Sept. 18th -- FLORENCE

[OKAY: me, my memory stick, and a foreign computer are FINALLY posting the rest of these entries. I should have done this a long time ago, but I kept thinking we were almost back online, plus I was busy, plus I was experimenting with patience(!!!), and then I had issues getting my memory stick to work on other machines. Argh! Anyway, these‘ve been done for a while (it‘s been a month, after all!), so here they are.]

Florence photos with titles and some captions

Florence photos in slideshow format

Elissa and I decided to go to mass at the Duomo because it was supposed to be beautiful and touristy (meaning we wouldn’t stick out as much). I tried to follow along, and while I got some, I didn’t get a lot. It was interesting, at any rate.

I wore a skirt for the service and ended up wearing it the whole day, which was a nice change -- except that it was rainy again and probably the coldest day we had the whole trip, which meant that my legs were cold all day. Oh, well.

We breakfasted at a place that was kind of “too nice”, but of course the food was good, so I was happy. After that we wandered a street market for a good while, which was a nice change of pace and quite fun.

The Palazza Pitti: A definite highlight. It houses an exhibit of modern art, which, while not what I would call extremely modern, did make a nice change from the masses of renaissance stuff we’d been seeing. I particularly enjoyed the painting of the three women at the piano, the one of the painter trying to woo his nun subject, and the one with the lower ranking officer/soldier protecting the higher ranking officer/general in battle. Good stuff.

And oh, the Pitti Gardens! They started out normally enough, but the further along we got, the more we realized, a) the vastness of them, and b) how enchanting they were. We kept referring to each newly discovered nook as a “secret garden” because they all seemed so tucked away and private -- and were absolutely beautiful. This (despite the cold, my aching feet, and my hunger) was probably my favorite part of the trip.



We left in search of food, but in vain because restaurants don’t open until 6:30. We bought cookies to tide me over. (Elissa opted for fruit. What’s that about?)

Dinner (finally) was good, and afterwards -- even though it wasn’t very late -- we went back and hit the sack.

posted by Kate @ 4:57 AM