Tuesday and Wednesday, April 5th and 6th.

I think there is too much to tell you about Florence! It has been two long days going to different museums and sites, but we have seen most of the important art of the Renaissance.

We started at the San Marco Museum which was quite fascinating. It is really an old monastery that has frescos all over the courtyards and in each one of the monk's cells by Fra Angelico. They were quite beautiful and I am really enjoying seeing art in-situ or in the situation that it was designed for.

Next was the Medici Palace and then their chapel, which is actually where their tombs are. They were very extravagant. but not as much as the Doge Palace. The Medici Chapel was especially interesting as it had tons of different kinds of marble that made beautiful patterns. The chamber that was for Lorenzo the Magnificent was designed by Michelangelo and had 9 of his sculptures in there. He does a beautiful male nude, but his females are a little lacking. A not so kind commentary on them is that they are masculine figures with bulging muscles and coconut shelled breasts. He obviously had not studied female nudes.... Still, his work is fabulous and amazing. It was fun for me to go to these places as I had read a lot about them in the book, The Agony and the Ecstasy--a must read before coming to Italy, in my opinion.

Our last stop was The Accademia, the museum which houses Michelangelo's David. It is magnificent. I can certainly see why the people of Florence loved it so much that they never put it on the top of the Duomo. Instead, they put it in the main square of town. It became of representation of Florence itself. The statue itself is huge at 17 ft. tall. Michelangelo sculpted it from a piece of marble that had been abandoned as too difficult to carve, and too flawed as another sculptor had cut too deeply into it. So Michelangelo used that deep cut area at David's waist. Michelangelo was only 26 when he carved it. How amazing is that!