Date: July 21, 2024
Location: Florence
Blogger: Leela Bindingnavele ‘28
Hometown: Corpus Christi, Texas
On Sundays, our mornings are the epitome of freedom: we can sleep in or we can (voluntarily this time) wake up early to go to mass, go for a run, or have fun with friends! This Sunday morning, I did not set an alarm and woke up around 9:30. We had gone to a small arrangement of La Traviata (an opera) the night before, and we returned to the hotel a little late, so I planned to savor every moment of sleep. A couple of us had planned on going on a run, but, as not all of us were awake before 10:00 and Florence gets very hot, the run unfortunately didn’t happen. I ended up doing a workout on the roof, taking a shower, and meeting friends to go to an outdoor museum exhibit.
In our group of six going to the outdoor exhibit, four of us hadn’t had breakfast. We stopped by the sandwich shop where the two who ate breakfast got their sandwiches, and three of us ended up buying the same (huge) sandwich. The delicious sandwich was called “Il Duomo,” and someone made a hilarious joke about how, despite not getting to go into the duomo, the duomo was now inside of us. We walked to the outdoor museum with our sandwiches, and, after purchasing tickets, sat on the ground to eat our sandwiches. By the time we finished with our sandwiches (not that we finished the gargantuan sandwiches, we were just so stuffed that we couldn’t eat more of them), it was almost time to leave for our 2:45 meeting with the rest of the group. We got to see terracotta dogs and a couple other cool statues (some near a pool), and then we walked to the museum where we were joining everyone else.
When we found the rest of the group, we all got our tickets and headed into the Galleria dell’Accademia (where they informed us that neither small glass jars nor large 2-liter water bottles were permitted). We saw lots of old paintings, three instruments made by Antonio Stradivarius (a violin, a viola, and a cello), the first upright piano ever, the original Michelangelo’s David (which was very lifelike except for the fact that it was 17 feet tall), and more cool statues. After perusing the museum, we walked to the hotel where some people had their life-mapping meetings and, after the meetings, to our usual dinner restaurant, Matto Matto, where we had gnocchi for dinner.
After dinner, some of us went to the Red Garter for karaoke. We arrived a little early, so we hung out in the square until karaoke opened. They told us that karaoke was booked, but we still had fun! I left with an earlier group to the hotel because the next day was to be an early morning, but those who stayed informed me that the karaoke started up soon after we left. At the hotel, a couple of us hung out on the roof and then we went to bed, packed and ready to take a train to Venice the following morning!