The Events of Saturday, March 26, 2011

                The Academia is one of Florence’s most famous sites. It is in fact so famous, that we had to buy tickets two days in advance and we had a specific time at which to enter. We arrived at the Gran Caffé San Marco bus stop a little bit earlier than the time on our tickets, so we ducked into a combination library, bookstore, café, and free WiFi area for a little bit. Daddy had planned ahead and brought his laptop with him so that we could get our internet fix. (We are sorry if we are behind on blogs; most of our lodging in Europe does not have WiFi). In order to get “free” WiFi, we had to buy a 1€ croissant from the café part of the shop and shared it among the six of us. We got a good 45 minutes of internet time in and then a little before 10:30 am, we crossed the street and went into the Academia.

                After a security check, we headed straight to the highlight of Florence, Michelangelo’s David. Fourteen feet high, gleaming white marble, illuminated by the half dome above his head, the Biblical character, David, loomed in front of us. Michelangelo had been commissioned by the region of Florence and was given a piece of marble that all other sculptors rejected as too tall, shallow, and flawed to be of any value, but the talented Michelangelo turned it into a masterpiece which became the city’s icon when he finished David in 1504. We walked around David in circles admiring the looseness, naturalness, and innocence of this young nude with a sling over his shoulder and a stone cradled in his hand. His eyes were always changing. From directly below, David looked off to his left, sizing up Goliath with confidence. But when you look him directly in the eyes, which I like to do when I look at all statues, you can sense that there is natural human fear, wrinkling his eyebrows and making his eyes a little wider than normal. My favorite part of him was his left hand. It rested on his shoulder and the veins and knuckles were so precise. It was a beautiful hand.

                After we finished admiring David, we turned around and walk up a hall filled with a series of Michelangelo’s work, the Prisoners. The Prisoners look like they are trying to force themselves out of the stone in which they have been imprisoned. Michelangelo believed that there is a soul in every piece of stone and it is his God-given job to release the soul in the chunk of marble. The Prisoners are very strong and emotional pieces of art. Off the hall, were side rooms filled with the “final exams” of the students from the art academy that has been attached to the Academia since it opened. The paintings and sculptures that filled the rooms were so old that a majority of them have screws covering them to keep them from crumbling to the floor. My favorite of the statues was a little boy who was praying. He knelt on the floor, his chubby fingers intertwined, and his eyes pointed heavenward. It was very picturesque and cute, a faith so deep and trusting. I love art.

                After passing through rooms with Pre-Renaissance paintings of religious figures, we went into a large room with tons of paintings and one famous sculpture, Rape of Sabines. The intertwining figures depict a period where men would literally steal women and girls from town to increase their town’s population. The three nude figures that form a spiral are a woman, her husband, and her kidnapper. The husband and wife look desperately at each other one last time, the kidnapper’s face hard, determined, and cruel. On that note, we moved on to the Museum of Musical Instruments. This portion started with an interactive instrument that was a steel bowl of water with brass, curved handles on either side of its rim. After dipping your hand in the water, you would rub your hands on the handles and a loud tone would vibrate from under your fingers. The water sometimes ripples and formed bubbles when the vibrations were really fast. After that, there were computer stations that told you about the history of instruments of the time and their uses in the church and in the court. They were invented for use in the courts, to entertain the kings, queens, lords, ladies, dukes, duchesses, counts, and countesses of Italy’s higher class. After that brief history lesson, there were the first instruments on display, only a few of them still playable. In the last room, there were the first harpsichord and the first piano ever built. They even had an interactive display that taught you how the harpsichord and piano worked. Then, we walked to the WC’s and through the gift shop and out into the warm, breezy spring air, headed for lunch.

                Trattoria la Stracotto is a small café with homemade specialty food unique to the Tuscany area. After being provided with bread and water, the waiter who spoke pretty good English, took our order. Daddy ordered Beef Florentine which looked pretty much like animal scat in my opinion, but tasted like a spicy meat that I could imagine a Viking would eat for breakfast dessert. Mommy ordered baked lasagna with a very thick, creamy, and delicious ricotta cheese sauce. Caitlin ordered roasted beef cooked Tuscan style with stewed potatoes. Ben had stuffed rabbit, which our animal lover, Abby looked on in pity and wouldn’t try, and I had artichoke soup with sausage chunks, a very thick base and a scrumptious flavor. Abby had Mediterranean ravioli and sautéed veggies. The whole reason we came to the restaurant was for their chocolate soufflé, but it wasn’t even on the menu, so we skipped dessert and walked a few blocks to the Leonardo Museum.

                Leonardo da Vinci was a genius of the Renaissance era. In the museum we saw replicas of some of his greatest inventions and got to mess around with a few. First, was a marching drum, he invented a self drumming, wind up drum that would go by itself through the battlefields. The first armored tank, the first bicycle, the first crane, the first paddle boat, the first machine gun, the first water skis, and parachute were all products of da Vinci’s genius and we got to see them. Abby climbed on a replica of the first crane and enjoyed spinning around and hoisting heavy bags up and down. We also learned that Leonardo da Vinci was the first person to ever invent gears. He tried to use all of these inventions to be the first man to fly, but had little success. We saw copies of his paintings of the Last Supper, Mona Lisa, and the Woman with the Weasel. His diagram of the perfectly proportioned male was on the wall. We learned that if the average male was placed in the center of a square and a circle, the male organ would be at the center of the square, the navel at the center of the circle, the bust is ¼ of the height, the head is 1/8 of the height, the face is 1/10 of the height, the hand is 1/10 of the height, the foot is 1/7 of the height, the arm is ¼ of the height, and the ear is 1/3 of the face. Once we had gotten all that straightened out, our lives could continue and so we headed out of the museum and back to the combination library, bookstore, café, and free WiFi area. After catching up a little more with the world outside Florence, Italy, we headed to our bus stop and set out for home.

                Our little neighborhood was still quiet with its sweet birdsong and yummy smells of dinner coming from every house that we passed. Once we reached our little apartment, I cut Daddy’s hair, Caitlin and I washed the inside of the car, and then the rest of the day was mostly unperturbed. Since we had had dinner for lunch, we had lunch for dinner with bread, peanut butter, Nutella (which we love), blackberry jam, toast, and strawberries! Then, we relaxed the evening away and headed to bed after a cultured and educational day.