May 21
Today was filled with so many fun adventures! We started off by walking around the city of Florence and learning more about the history. We saw the church as well as the baptistry. These sites took years to build as it was both intricate but also faced with many obstacles. While building the church, Florence was hit with 3 years of rain with intense flooding. The city also faced famine and bank failures as well as the flue and plague. However, the city rose above all of that.
At the museum we visited, we saw a lot of the original statues from the church. We saw how the styles of statues shifted from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. We reenacted the different eras of art and how they changed from more stoic to expressive as time went along.
Our next stop was Santa Croce. The church was absolutely gorgeous with one of the most ornate alters we’ve seen yet. The church held tombs of many notable figures including Galileo and Michelangelo.
We got lunch at this super cool sandwich shop and got some shopping in. Our group went to the leather market which was such a cool experience!
We met up again to climb the Duomo! I was scared that I wasn’t going to make the 463 steps but our group had fun climbing up! It was so cool being able to see Giorgio Vasari’s frescoes of The Last Judgment up close. Also the view from the top was absolutely breath-taking (maybe I was a tad out of breath too…). During our descent, we heard mass begin. Climbing down the stairs as we heard the organs was such a movie experience!
For dinner, we ate with our family groups and this was probably on elf my favorite meals yet! The cheesecake was absolutely perfect!
Loved everything about today!! Florence is so fun!
