A young gentlewoman here in Florence

Alright, onto Sunday the nineteenth.  And yes, I realize that was two weeks ago, but I'm a bit slow I'm afraid.  My days were packed while I was gone, and in America my whole schedule's messed up.

Okay, but Florence!  Or Firenze, as the Italians call it.  We started off by going to church, which was in a rented set of rooms in the middle of a street full of apartments.  Hard to find parking.  But going to church in Italian made me realize how long it's been since I've been to church in English.  Not since before going to France.  The meeting was interesting to say the least.  Especially because there were these two absolutely adorable little kids (this fat baby boy with curls for the first half of the meeting and this little girl with short hair and a light pink dress) that kept climbing up on the stand during the meeting.  Like over and over again.  They'd climb up, the bishopric would stop listening to the speaker and watch the kids instead, ready to jump up and grab them if they fell, and then about five minutes later their respective mothers would sigh, march up to the stand, and retrieve them.  I listened to the meeting too though, I promise.  They were translating on behalf of some other Americans, so we actually heard most of the talks in English.

We only went to sacrament meeting, so on our way to the part of Florence we were going to explore we stopped in at a bakery and bought some more bread.  One kind was absolutely delicious and the other kind was the most flour covered and bland thing I've ever eaten.  Mom was fascinated by the fact that you could just walk into the bakery and buy part of a loaf of bread.  Just tell them that you want half a loaf and they chop it off for you.  Much more effective to only buy the part that you want to eat.

Yeah, so then we went (okay ran) down to the Uffizi museum.  As we went past we saw this really huge church (doma) that I guess I'll talk about first.

Well, you can see me and you can see that there IS a building in the background.  

This church is ginormous, seriously.  And it's just sitting in the middle of town, surrounded by all of these small streets.  I guess that's how they do it in Italy.  We didn't go in (there was a big line) but we walked around most of the building.  They've got a bell tower thing on the side (which made SO much more sense after seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa) and it's all colorful.  It's all green and red and white, and SO pretty.  I'm pretty sure that it's like limestone.  Except the sad part was that it was filthy!  Really, they need to get a crew in there with sponges to clean the place up.  If they cleaned it up I think it could become (1) a major tourist attraction and (2) the most fabulous church building anywhere.

There.  Now you can see the colors.

Well, as I said we ran over to the Uffizi Gallery, which is a museum in the Medici's old home.  Yeah, cool isn't it?  Because for those who don't know, the Medicis were like THE art family.  Back in the days when art was done because of commissions from churches or wealthy families, the Medicis were that wealthy family.  So the museum was choke full or all of this art that they'd commissioned, plus some stuff that they didn't.  It was  a pretty awesome museum, but I think I liked best the fact that it was in their old home.  The last Medici donated the building and a lot of the artwork.

After we finished at the Uffizi we wandered down to the other museum that we wanted to see and stood in line for probably an hour and a half to get in.  The main thing in this museum (I've even forgotten what it's called) is the David by Michelangelo.  Bascially it used to be out in the main square, but they decided that they needed to move it indoors (preservation and all that important rot) so they built a museum to house the statue.  They then realized that they need something else in the museum BESIDES the one statue, so they put in a bunch of other statue work, including a bunch of the unfinished sculptures also by Michelangelo which was really neat.  People talk about being able to see a statue in the stone before it's carved, and you could totally tell that Michelangelo had that ability.

When we saw the actual statue it was late enough in the day that the sun was streaming through the window above the statue lending the marble a sort of ethereal glow.  It was really neat.  I wish we had been allowed to take pictures.

On a different, amusing sort of note, there was this sign posted on the wall of the museum outside where we were standing in line which read, "Writing on the walls or stones of a public historic monument and in any other way defacing or damaging IS A CRIME punishable by law with imprisonment.  WARNING!  This area is under video surveillance." About a foot below the sign, this is what the wall looked like.

Lots of this was recent graffiti.

It made me laugh anyway.  I find general group disregard for notices of importance to be entertaining.  So obvious that the sign wasn't doing anything.

We grabbed gelato on our way back to the car (it was pretty good, but the Genoa gelato was better) and then drove towards Rome.  Here's another funny sign that we saw on our way.

The two arrows at the bottom are the original sign, showing the road splitting.

We drove through some absolutely gorgeous countryside on our way.  Italy has a very different sort of flavor to it than Switzerland.

Random castle on a hill out the window.

Well, that was pretty much all for Florence.  We stopped on our way to Rome at one of the AutoGrill places that they have at all of their rest stops and I got some pretty excellent pasta.  Gelato and pasta pretty much defined the whole Italy food experience.