Birth of the Re-Birth

Because of how early I had fallen asleep, I woke up at 7 and showered and then met Vanessa out in the hostel's restaurant area. The hostel has a restaurant that serves free breakfast (with one night's stay) and has dinner that is pretty cheap. I got scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. Vanessa got cereal and yogurt. It ended up being the best breakfast of the whole trip. It was so delicious. I left to go climb the Campanile and the Medici Chapels (Vanessa didn't want to pay and just plain wasn't interested).

I was super excited about visitng the Medici Chapels. For those who don't know, I did a project on Lorenzo "Il Magnifico" Medici in 11th grade. The Medici Chapels are connected to San Lorenzo which is the oldest church in Florence (which is saying something). Directly inside the doors is the crypt which is where are all the lesser Medici's are buried. There weren't any real tombs here and apparently when the crypt was built a bunch of the bodies were just thrown in haphazardly. Next up is the Capella dei Principi where 6 Medici are buried but only 3 have completely finished tombs. The room they are in is incredibly lavish with green, pink and black stone and gold everywhere. They are in an octagonal room that has a dome really high up too. Even the scaffolding in the room was painted black and had gold joints. Finally, the Segrestia Nuova where Il Magnifico and 3 other Medici are. Il Magnifico (so named because of how magnificent he was and because there were a ton of "Lorenzo Medici"s so he needed a nickname) did not have a finished tomb. Michelangelo had a plan for it but left for Rome and never came back to finsihe it. Two other guys though have incredible tombs. One has two statues, Dusk and Dawn and the other has two statues as well, Night and Day. They are worth a google search just to see them.

I headed on to the Campanile. There were 414 steps to the top. It wasn't too bad of a climb because there were 3 or 4 terraces where you could catch your breath and take some pictures. The views were amazing and it being Sunday, church bells were going off in the city. At the top of the bell tower, I met a family from Canada (Western Ontario to be exact) who were super nice and took my picture for me (picture 2). The views of Brunelleschi's dome with Florence behind it were really amazing (picture 1). It really is an engineering marvel. He created it with no scaffolding. Amazing. I went back to the hostel and Vanessa and I went on a free walking tour that left from the hostel. It was not very good. The tour guide talked really quietly and was hard to understand through her strong Italian accent. Plus whenever we were walking she would talk to these three people in Italian and walk SUPER slow. Add to that that we always walked in the shade and it was cold out (for us) and it was a pretty miserable experience. Vanessa lost her gloves so she wore mine which meant I didn't have any so I had to make due. We walked by all the major sites of the town. The highlights were Piazza della Santissima Annunziata (where the Accademia is and picture 3), Piazza San Croce (where San Croce, a church, is) and Piazza della Signoria (where a bunch of statues, the Uffizi Gallery and Palazzo Vecchio are). The tour ended in Piazza della Signoria and I took a bunch of pictures of the statues that were there. David by Michelangelo was in this square until 1850 or so (only a copy outside now). There was Perseus which I liked a lot (picture 4).

I tried to find us some sunlight to warm up in and found it along the Arno River. We walked along the river to the Ponte Vecchio (picture 5). It's a bridge over the narrowest part of the Arno that has a bunch of gold and jewelry shops on it. It's very famous and was fun to look at all the gold shops. From there, we walked up the ridge on the other side of the river to Piazza Michelangelo which has greats views back over Florence and the hills surrounding it (me and Vanessa picture 6 with Duomo and Palazzo Vecchio sticking out behind us). It was a pleasant walk through trees and it made us warm again. In the Piazza, there were some American Indians singing traditional music which was nice. My PCCC sweatshirt had some wine from Venice spilled on it so I bought a zip-up Italia sweatshirt. Just above the Piazza, is San Miniato al Monte, a church. It was built at that spot because when Saint Mitius was killed, apparently his ghost brought his head up here so they built a church. His bones are in the crypt below the church. I took a picture of the candles in the crypt (picture 7) which is definitely one of my favorites of the whole trip. The mosaic floor in the church was cool. There was a pulpit with an eagle above a man above a lion. Which signifies man's place between the divine and real world. Inside the church, there is green and white marble like from the outside of it.

We went back down the hill and across the Arno to the church of San Croce. We went inside and saw all the famous people's graves. The most important tombs we saw were Michelangelo, Ghiberti, Dante, Machiavelli, and Galileo (picture 8). All of them were very cool and it was super convenient to see them all in one place. The pulpit had reliefs of St. Francis's life. On the way back to our hostel, we stopped by the Baptistery. I took some pictures of the doors for my sister Amy (picture 9). I wished she could have been there to see them. She did a project just like me in 11th grade but her's was about Ghiberti, the guy who designed the doors. It took him 27 years to finish them. Now that's commitment. I went to the Accademia to see David by Michelangelo (alone again, same reasons as before). It was totally worth it. I loved the statue. It was truly mesmerizing. The statue weighs 19 tons and was outside for 300 years before being brought here. We ate dinner at the hostel. We got a bacon burger and spaghetti with meat sauce for €4 which was fantastic. I went online and stuff. Vanessa and I spent the rest of the night discussing what we wanted to do next. She didn't really want to stay longer and I sort of agreed. We talked about renting a motorbike and seeing Tuscan towns but it was too cold. We also discussed going to the Cinque Terre. We didn't really decide anything before we went to bed though.