Well, I’m once again wearing down extra internet time, and I’m pretty beat, so it seemed like a good idea to write some more.
So I arrived in Florence around 11h00 this morning. I just barely caught the 10h00 train from Lucca. I got to the station, checked my bag, and then promptly lost the claim ticket. I’m really hoping no one found and went to get my bag, but right now I just really don’t want to know. Since I’d decided to wear pants today, I figured I should knock all of the churches out. I started at Santa Maria Novella, which was absolutely beautiful on the inside (no pictures allowed though). It was pretty crappy on the outside though. The Strozzi side chapel I thought was really cool. The frescoes were very vivid (although not quite so much as the dome of the choir of one of the churches in Verona) and I just thought it really meshed well with the architecture.
On the way to San Lorenzo, I naturally stopped at one of the recommended gelato shops, this one being the Gellateria of the Bermuda Triangle. I didn’t disappear or anything, but the gelato was pretty good.
The next stop was San Lorenzo, which also had a crappy exterior (apparently Michelangelo was supposed to design an exterior but didn’t finish it) and a really really nice interior. The art was actually properly lit, partly because of the design (thanks to the genius of Brunelleschi), which let in a lot more light than you usually get in the Gothic cathedrals in France, and because they actually went to the trouble of setting up nice diffuse lighting that let you view the works from all different angles. There were some really cool sculptures by Donatello.
My final church was the big kahuna, the Duomo (Cathedral) Santa Maria del Fiore, one of the most massive cathedrals in the world. When I walked up to it I thought, “at last, a cathedral with a decent exterior”. It actually didn’t feel all that big from the inside, but it was once again very nicely lit, although not quite as well as San Lorenzo. There wasn’t much in the way of art on the side, which was pretty plain and boring. I decided to shell out for the bell tower outside the cathedral. The climg wasn’t too bad and the view was pretty cool, but there was this damn dome in the way 
.
After the cathedrals, I went to eat at the Trattoria Anita. They had an awesome lunch menu: two courses and a vegetable for only 5.50 euros. There was an American girl inside who was also eating alone, so I went and introduced myself so that I wouldn’t have to eat alone. Her name was Eleanor a she was a Biology major at Harvard. Turns out she was also studying in France and spending a little bit in Italy before heading back to the US. It was nice having a cool person to talk to at dinner once again (I seem to be having a pretty good record at that so far). After lunch, she wanted to go to the Duomo and I was going to the science museum, so we went our separate ways.
The science museum was really cool. They had all sorts of scientific instruments from the Renaissance onward. There were tons of telescopes, Galileo’s middle finger (which I thought was a particularly appropriate choice), all different kinds of compasses (the geometric, not magnetic kinds), globes, a whole bunch of chemistry things, very detailed anatomy models showing how to do Ceasarean sections, breach births, and all that good stuff, and a whole bunch of electrical stuff that I didn’t have time to look at because the museum was closing. There was also a girl called Rachel who went to Ohio State who was just as interested as me in all the stuff (almost everyone else was just breezing through). We got to talking and after the museum closed we went for gelato together. We went to Vivoli, which very well may be the best gelato place in the world. The flavors were all so rich, and everything was so creamy. Their peach was incredibly peachy. I’m definitely going to have to go back. We were both pretty beat, so we just sat down in a random place and chatted for an hour. Weirdly enough, she had also finished a study abroad in France, was travelling in Italy before heading back to the US, was staying in the same hostel as Eleanor, and recommended all of the same museums.
So that’s day one of Florence. For day two, I’ll be checking out the art museums. Of course, I’ll probably also be spending a lot of time checking out the lines because I didn’t get reservations. Oh well.