Day 8

Hi!

Today was long and tiring. I woke up at about 7:45 and made an egg and avocado sandwich for breakfast with a banana and some cantaloupe on the side. We met at Santa Croce at 10 and sat the steps for almost an hour just going over the history of the church and the piazza in front of it. We went in at 11 and met a man, Antonio, who took us onto the scaffolding. This scaffolding has been in the capella maggiore (the main chapel/altar) since 2005 to restore the frescoes filling it, done by Agnolo Gaddi in the late 1380s. The subject of the frescoes is the legend of the True Cross (Santa Croce means Holy Cross); there are 4 levels of scenes on each side wall with brilliant stained glass windows on the back wall, lined by a variety of figures (http://met.provincia.fi.it/public/images/20110415100336095.jpg). I don't know how tall the whole chapel is, but the scaffolding we were on was 7 stories tall and each level was a normal height (8-9 feet?). It was amazing being that high up, at the same level and closeness to the frescoes as the artist and his helpers were over 600 years ago. It was such a bizarre and unexplainable feeling.

Once we were done on the scaffolding, a few of us girls ran to the bathrooms and came back to find out that Dr. Zaho had talked had convinced a handsome guard named Amico into letting us into a prayer area to see the crucifix done by Donatello. According to legend, Brunelleschi saw Donatello's crucifix (they were friends) and said something about Jesus looking more like a farmer than the son of God. So Donatello told him to make one himself. A few months later Brunelleschi got Donatello over to his studio to show him his own crucifix, to which Donatello reacted poorly and didn't talk to his friend for months.

After looking at the crucifix we walked along the church walls to look at important tombs. There are 14 along the walls (7 on each side) with hundreds more just in the floor. Of the hundreds in there, the most important we saw were those of Michelangelo, Galileo, Ghiberti, and Machiavelli. We then looked at the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels pretty quickly because it was getting late and we had somewhere to be at 3, but we wanted lunch beforehand. Anyway, we saw those two chapels, frescoed entirely by Giotto. The Bardi chapel, from the 1320s, has 6 scenes from the life of St. Francis (because Santa Croce is the largest Franciscan church in the world). The Peruzzi chapel has scenes from the life of John the Baptist on one side and scenes from the life of John the Evangelist on the other. After that we looked at the Baroncelli Chapel, decorated by Taddeo Gaddi (father of the man who decorated the cappela maggiore and pupil of Giotto). This chapel has scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary.

I apologize for my descriptions being so short in this post. I'm tired and my head is clouded and I have to wake up very early tomorrow in order to catch a train to Pisa (!!!). These posts take much longer to type out than you'd think.

Anyway, we left Santa Croce after Dr. Zaho established with a guard that we can re-enter another time using the tickets we purchased today (awesome, right?). We walked over to the place we got our first paninos, owned by Stefano and his wife Stefania. I got the same one I've been getting all along - tomatoes, mozarella, and pesto. Always so good. Then Katia and I decided we needed gelato so we got some at Vivoli next door. I got banana and strawberry and they were so delicious.

After lunch we walked over to Capa to meet a student from the University of Pittsburgh (named Lorenzo, who looks like the living version of the David) to join us on a tour of the Palazzo Vecchio. This tour was with a woman in character as Isabella, a Spanish woman who married into the Medici family. She came to us out of character to explain the back story and what she would be doing, then she put a gold belt onto her already very adorned costume and turned into Isabella. She was kind of rude and none of us liked her, so we didn't listen very closely. We were also walking through elaborately decorated rooms that had frescoed or gold gilded ceilings with beautifully painted walls, so there were a lot of distractions. She also moved very quickly from room to room but it was fine because we knew most of the information from Dr. Zaho already. We went into one room that was lined with cabinets covered in maps. After she talked for a little bit, Isabella opened one of the cabinets and led us down a secret hallway to a beautiful balcony with frescoed walls that used to house a garden in the Renaissance. Once we got back inside, she took the gold belt off and turned back into a normal person and we liked her again.

After she left us and the cute Brazilian couple we toured with, we walked back through the rooms we had been in with Isabella to get better looks at Dante's death mask, Donatello's brass sculpture of Judith and Holofernes, and massive paintings by Vasari. All of it was incredible. Once we were done inside we all split up. Geoff, Katia, and I went to the grocery store to pick up a few things (where we briefly met two girls from Tampa) then went home to make dinner.

Now I'm going to go through pictures (I have 1,393 so far...it's disgusting) then get to bed early so I can be fully rested to climb the Tower of Pisa tomorrow. :)