Florence Visit #2

On Saturday we made our second trip to Florence. The students rode the city bus into Arezzo from Monterchi and made it to the train station about five minutes before our train was supposed to leave. However, unbeknownst to us, our group was about to have its first encounter with the dreaded and all-too-frequent European train strike. The strike had been scheduled for several weeks, apparently, but we had no knowledge of it. Trains were running, but there were many delays. Our train finally arrived about 45-50 minutes late. So instead of arriving in Florence at 10:30, as we had planned, we didn't pull into the Santa Maria Novella station until nearly 11:30. Plus, it was raining, so the stars seemed to be aligned against us.

We had reservations for the Galleria d'Accademia at 2:00, so we dispersed from the train station to do our own thing and eat lunch for a couple of hours. My family took three students into the Santa Maria Novella church, which now charges 2.5 euros for admission. (It really is a shame that nearly all the significant churches are charging admission these days. It certainly seems to be dissuading many of the students from going into any of them.) After spending some time in there with the Masaccio and Ghirlandaio frescoes, we ate lunch at a snack bar with tables in the piazza in front of the church. Then we went to rendezvous with the group at the Duomo at 1:30.

We met at the cathedral because most of the group didn't know how to get to the museum. It took us about 5-10 minutes to walk there, and we were able to go in immediately, unlike the people without reservations, who were forming a long line stretching all the way down the street from the museum. I pulled the students into a group in the first room and gave a very brief history of the "David" and tried to explain its place in Florentine life. I also briefly described the other Michelangelo statues they were about to see in the gallery, but nearly all of them were so overwhelmed by the "David" that when they saw it down at the end, they headed straight for it and ignored the six other works along the way.

After leaving the museum, the group split up again. We went into a supermarket across the street, bought some picnic fare, and then went into the Piazza San Marco nearby to snack. Since it was so handy, we decided to go into the church and museum at San Marco to see the Fra Angelico frescoes and Savonarola's cell. Then we gradually made our way back toward the strain station, stopping at the San Lorenzo market for some postcards. We also went into the San Lorenzo church to see Cosimo de' Medici's and Donatello's tombs and a Brunelleschi chapel.

We reconvened at the train station at 6:00. The train we were hoping to catch at 6:09 actually left more or less on time. Because of the uncertainty of our return time to Citerna, Jonathan canceled dinner at the hotel and gave everyone a second meal allowance for the day. When we got back to Arezzo, the students walked into the town to find supper. Our parking allotment was about to expire, so my family went ahead and drove back to Monterchi to eat at a restaurant there. It was a nice place, and it's a good thing there was a cheap pizza menu, because that was about all we could afford. It was very good, though.

Unfortunately, the battery on our camera died Saturday morning, so we have no pictures from this Florence trip. It did stop raining on us about 1:00, but it remained very cloudy, so we would not have gotten very good photographs in any event. The churches and museums are all forbidding photos these days . . .