Florence day 3

Today was supposed to be our gallery day, but we only managed to get to the Accademia gallery as we couldn’t book tickets to the Uffezi. We’ll just go early tomorrow and line up.

The Accademia was a pretty impressive collection of religious iconry. However the big drawcard for this gallery was of course, David. He was very fabulous, and a lot bigger than we expected. Interesting proportions though – it looked like his hands and head were a bit bigger than the rest of his body. Of course there were hundreds of people gathered around him, but we had a good gawk too 🙂

The other interesting thing at the accademia was that they had a Mapplethorpe exhibition on at the same time, and had juxtaposed Mapplethorpe images with the Michaelangelo statues, both finished and incomplete. Sounds weird, but it worked! The contrast in medium set off the curves of the bodies and it clicked. The unfinished Michaelangelos were interesting too – the bodies looked like they were pulling themselves free of the stone block, rather than being uncovered by the artist. Cool!

Other wanderings today included the market again, and a look through the food market. Much to R’s delight, there were tripperias! Tripe, tripe, and more tripe! Ugh!

There were yummy pasta shops, sausage and cheese shops and piles and piles of porcini mushrooms too though.

Another interesting contrast of culture – poultry is sold with the head still attached. I guess it’s kinda understandable, but I don’t know if I could prepare chicken if it was looking at me!

Our hotel is quite noisy. There’s roadworks along the cross-street, which is understandably painfully noisy, but this morning I was woken up by the laundry service at the hotel opposite, CLANGING as they pushed carts into their van. Since Via Medici is all stone with no plants etc to soften the noise, it echoes and amplifies beautifull until it reaches our fourth floor windows. Thank gawd for R’s earplugs. I was about to start yelling out of the window…