Date: July 21, 2024
Location: Florence
Blogger: Josh Landgraf ‘28
Hometown: Southlake, Texas
It is Sunday, July 21st. We have a later start with a self-guided tour in the afternoon, so I decide to give myself some extra sleep to reset my energy levels for the next couple of days. I wake up at noon with one of my roommates, and we go to eat breakfast in our hotel. I have a banana for quick nutrients and some chocolate cereal to keep me active during the incoming appreciation of the finest art in Florence. I head down to the hotel entrance where over a dozen students prepare to head out to the Accademia Gallery of Florence. As we make it inside this pillar of Italian history, we’re handed devices that serve as audio supplements as we view each different hallmark of Italian history. I didn’t know much about the art I was seeing, but being surrounded by numerous intellectual music connoisseurs, I soon learned the importance of some of these objects. I saw the Stradivarius violin, for example, which I was informed was worth something in between 8 and 20 million dollars. And then there was the gorgeous Statue of David, which I had thought was so infamous that it must’ve been behind Parisian glass by now. After the tour is over, some friends and I go to the bookstore, where I buy the first book in the Dune series and “How to Tell a Good Story”, which itself is heavily inspired by the work of Aristotle. Perhaps the most important thing of today, however, was nothing I saw or bought. Rather, it was the things I heard, later in the evening, as I talked to one of my best friends on the trip. We talked about politics. We talked about morality. Anything under the sun, and we talked about it. It reminded me today of how there is so much for me to learn from each unique perspective at Texas A&M. I’m going to bed excited for the four years to come.