Firenze
We go to Florence A LOT. Not only is it just insanely close to Arezzo, but it has a ridiculous amount of amazing art to see. Because of this, we take 4 trips there with my Art History class to hear lectures about the Renaissance art that Firenze has to offer. After today's trip to the Uffizi Museum, we are halfway done. Two weeks ago, we went to two different churches: Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella. We learned about their architecture, facades, frescoes, and paintings inside of them. Both places are beautiful, and it was interesting to learn about the differences between the Franciscan church of Santa Croce and the Dominican Santa Maria Novella. The impact that the different preaching orders has had on the art is really cool. Fun fact about Santa Croce: it's known for being the burial site for many illustrious Italians, including Galileo, Machiavelli and Michelangelo! Here are some of my favorites of what we saw.
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| Santa Croce, with my friend Will's head creeping in |
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| Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce, with awesome frescoes by Giotto |
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| Santa Maria Novella |
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| Altar of Santa Maria Novella, surrounded by beautiful frescoes |
A sad but understandable fact about museums: some places don't let you take pictures. The Uffizi is one of those places. So, I unfortunately don't have any pictures from today's trip. But I can tell you that my favorites from today were probably Michelangelo's "Holy Family"and Gentile da Fabriano's "Adoration of the Magi". Google them, they're legit. Because "Holy Family" is the only panel painting by Michelangelo in existence, my professor Kirk guessed that (even though it really is priceless) it's probably worth about 500 million dollars. It's not every day that you see something that epic.
Abetone
Now this was one of the most crazy-awesome weekends that I've had so far. A group of us really wanted to go skiing while we were here in Europe, so we planned a trip to a little mountain town in the Apennines called Abetone. It's actually not too far of a trip from Arezzo, and we had heard from my friend Katie's brother who is stationed with the Army here in Italy that the prices there are pretty cheap. So, we booked an apartment for the weekend and headed on up into the mountains. Katie, her brother David, and I left earlier on Thursday than the other half of our group because we were done with class sooner and we needed to go meet with the man who was renting us the apartment to get the keys and whatnot. We made it to Abetone about mid-day and -- after the extremely fun but somewhat stressful experience of having to communicate with our good buddy Raphaele who spoke very little English while the 3 of us spoke very little Italian -- moved into the apartment and scoped out the town a little bit. The rest of the crew (Amanda, Jordan, Will, and Paris) made it by train to Pistoia where you then have to catch a bus up to Abetone. Unfortunately, it had been snowing all day and they stopped the buses earlier than normal... so they got there too late to catch the last bus. This meant that they had to turn around and head back to Florence to sleep there until they could catch a super early train/bus to make it to Abetone by a decent time on Friday morning. Luckily, Will's girlfriend, Paris, is studying abroad in Florence so they were able to crash at her place. Bleary-eyed but ready to hit the slopes, they met us for breakfast and then we all went to get our rentals and make our way onto the mountain.
We had a blast! It literally snowed the entire time that we were there, so the powder was EPIC. The runs themselves actually reminded me a little bit of Colorado -- it wasn't the Alps, so they weren't the crazy-long runs that I've heard about (which was probably a good thing because it had been about 4 years since I last skied . I fell back into a rhythm pretty soon though, and only had a few yard-sale wipeouts to keep me young. Overall, it was an awesome weekend. We hit up the discoteca at night, and ate some good food. Great friends, great snow, great food... not much more you can ask for!
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| One of my last runs -- I went solo for most of the last half-day, so a selfie was in order! |
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| View from our apartment balcony |
Cortona
This past weekend we had our Getting to Know Arezzo class on Friday, so there wasn't really time to take a major overnight trip. Did that mean that I was just going to hang around Arezzo?? No way!! Saturday morning, I woke up and walked around the monthly Antique Fair in Arezzo for an hour or so before I caught a train to visit Cortona for the half day. Most of my friends wanted to check out the Antique Fair for longer and stay in Arezzo, so I decided to take my first solo day trip. It was actually a great time! I love traveling with my friends, but there is something really freeing about traveling by yourself... I got to be on my own time and do exactly what I wanted.
Anyway, Cortona is really close to Arezzo, so the train to Camucia and then bus up to Cortona only took me about an hour. I was in Cortona by 1 pm, and I ended up staying there until about 4. That sounds like a really short time, but it is a pretty small town and I actually fit pretty much everything that I had wanted to see into those 3 hours! I walked the very steep streets. I saw the Duomo and the Chiesa di San Francesco which has a piece of the True Cross and 3 relics from St. Francis of Assisi. I got gelato. I walked the Via Crucis all the way up to the very top of Cortona to see the Fortezza and the Basilica di Santa Margherita. I saw glorious views of the Tuscan countryside. I came back home and watched Under the Tuscan Sun (filmed in Cortona) and realized what a horrible movie that was (but I did recognize the places I had been earlier). In general, it was a fantastic way to spend my Saturday afternoon!
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| Relics of St. Francis (tunic, pillow, New Testament) |
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| Typical alleyway in Cortona |
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| Reliquary with the piece of the True Cross |
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| Beautiful view of Toscana |
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| Via Crucis |
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| Man I'm so artsy. |
Orvieto
Sunday. My good friends Amanda and Dom came along with me on a day trip to Orvieto, a town a little over an hour by train south of Arezzo, in Umbria. After the slight hiccup of Amanda oversleeping through the earlier train that Dom and I took (nice going, Mandy Moore :P), we made it. Luckily, there was a fast train right behind us so Amanda just got there about a half hour after Dom and me. We were all pretty hungry, so we walked for a while until we found a restaurant that looked good and stopped in for lunch. Maybe it was because I was really hungry or maybe it had just been too long since I'd had truffle pasta... but it was amazing. I got the local, hand-made pasta with a black truffle and sausage sauce and was just completely in heaven, especially once we added in the Orvieto Classico white wine. I could easily name that in the top 5 meals I've had here so far.
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| AH-MAH-ZING |
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| Amanda posing in front of our lunch destination |
After lunch, we just kinda wandered until we found the Duomo. It was still on the mid-day break, so we had to wait about 45 minutes or so until we could go see the inside. What else could we do but go get some gelato? So we did that, and walked around and saw some of the amazing ceramics shops (another thing that Orvieto is known for) and one of the smaller churches. Then we made our way back to the Duomo and checked it out. Unfortunately, it is another one of those places that doesn't allow photography inside... so I don't have any photos of the AMAZING frescoes that were in there. But just let me tell you -- they were unbelievable. The chapel off to the right side of the Duomo was literally covered entirely in frescoes with beautiful colors and active scenes... it was great. Definitely worth the 3 euro or so that we had to pay to get inside.
Then, we killed some time before we went to go take a tour of the underground caves of Orvieto. Apparently, Orvieto has over 1200 caves underneath it... many of which were carved out by the Etruscans. The tour didn't exactly blow my mind, but it was still very interesting. The coolest part was seeing one of the sections of the second of the two caves that we saw that was used as a shelter during World War II.
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| Random picture from inside one of the sections of one of the caves |
The last thing on our list was to climb down into "il Pozzo di San Patrizio" or St. Patrick's Well. It's an impressive architectural feat of a pretty deep well (about 180 feet) that has 2 spiral staircases in a double helix formation that allows a different path of ascension than descension -- something important for the functionality of the well. It was built in the mid 1500s and it still blows my mind that they could construct such impressive structures so long ago. Anyway, it was fun to walk/run down the steps to the bottom to throw a coin in the well and then not quite as fun to make our way back up.
I brought home two bottles of Orvieto Classico, some great pictures, and many fun memories... so it was a very good day.
That's about all I've got for now! I'm getting ready to leave tomorrow to head to Genoa for a few days, so I should have an update when I get back. We are going to a Serie A "partita di calcio"aka soccer game to see AC Milan play Genoa, so that's going to be epic. I'm also hoping to see some of the cool port city stuff, including where Columbus used to live!
Anyway, I miss you all!! I still can't believe how blessed I am to have this opportunity. God is Good!
Beautiful ! Thank you for sharing..
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