terrshee's Diaryland Diary

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Day 4 in Florence

Day 4 in Florence. It is not yet noon and I've been to three museums. And the possibilities are far from exhausted. I know I'm a museum junkie, but this city has me overdosed.

I know I said I don't like Michelangelo, and I'm not ready to take that back, but the staute of David at the Accademia is truly awesome; monumental, beautiful and simply genius.

The Precious Stone museum is a quickie, and rather interesting, but not particularly easy because everything is in Italian. Which is actually true of many places here, even the Uffizi.

The Archeology Museum was a welcome change of pace. They have a very cool exhibit on some prehistoric cave paintings (again all noted in Italian), some good Etruscan antiquities, and passable Egyptian exhibits. Nothing on the scale of say the British Museum, but respectable.

If I'm not talking much about the specific art, well, that's tough to do. All the Madonna col Bambino e Sante tend to blend together. Every so often you get the thrill of seeing a painting you've long admired or realize you're looking at the work of a favorite artist that never makes it into the art books (and you're not allowed to take a picture of it). Wonderful, and frustrating.

And today's observations:

1. The Italians are big on exact change. Their cashiers really don't like breaking big notes, i.e. anything over a ten gives them fits.

2. Signs around Florence are pretty good to get tourists moving in the right direction toward a site. The problem is once you get there. You then have to figure out which majestic old building houses what you want. Oh, and the signs don't exactly tell you when you get there, they just stop.

Until tomorrow.

11:39 a.m. - 2003-02-11
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