November 23rd

Only a week and a half left until critiques. The fact I've been quite busy as of late explains my lack of posting in the last little while.

Arezzo, Monterchi and Sanasepolcro.

The biggest bit of news, is the trip my class went on last friday. Like the week before, our school rented out a bus for us. The main purpose of this trip was to visit a select number of artworks/galleries.

Our first stop was Arezzo in order to visit the Basilica of San Francesco. It contains artwork of Piero della Francesca. Most notably the "Story of the True Cross" which contains snippets of the biblical tail, which tells the story of the wood which was used to create Christ's crucifix. Seeing the artwork in person was absolutely stunning. I'm going to mention right now, that I do not have any pictures of the art work. Mainly for two reasons. None of the pictures I take could match those of official reproductions. Secondly and most importantly, no places allow you to take photographs of artwork. It's a copyright reason as if you take pictures, you wont buy their postcards or other memorabilia. Any place in Italy which contains an amazing piece of art, has a gift shop jammed in nearby to cash in on tourists.

Anyway, Arezzo was a nice small town. Besides the Basilica, there was not much to see or do (we did see an amazingly huge dog, which I thing was a Newfoundland.)

Th second place we visited, was Monterchi. We didn't even really visit the town. It was a very small place, which appeared to be in the middle of nowhere and contained maybe six buildings and no more then one dog and two cats. We stopped to see one painting, which was another Piero della Francesca painting, which was called "Madonna del Parto". Beautiful painting and had an entire house dedicated just to it. After seeing the painting, we were swept out of the door into the bus to head off again. We stopped in at Anghiari; which is an amazing town built on a hill, for lunch. Peter (our art history prof) loves one of the restaurants there and suggested we all get their seafood and wine. Afterwards, we wandered around the town and basically checked out how cool the place was.

Our last stop, was Sansepolcro. We went to check out their small art gallery which contained more works by (you'll never guess) Piero della Francesca. There was his painting of Christ's reanimation, which was really cool...But besides that there was not much else worth seeing. We stopped for tea again and then hopped on the bus for a two-three hour bus ride back to Firenze.

Here is a link to my google plus account where I uploaded pictures of the trip.

Today, I went to the Uffitzi for the first time with my class for art history. Big giant art gallery, very stunning collection but also very overwhelming. We had a whirlwind tour of a number of the early renaissance paintings (as well as some of the heavy hitters like Leonardo De Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and Caravaggio.

For the past few days (about the past four) Two of my classmates (Megan and Michelle) and myself have been working on our presentation on something to do with Italian culture. We chose to do Fairly Tales and were scheduled as the last group to present. We recorded and animated a podcast (conversational instead of lecturing) and I think it was well received.

A couple of us got ben and jerry's ice cream yesterday. I got chocolate chip cookies and cream and it was rather tasty. I'm still working up the desire to climb to the top of the Duomo. It costs 8 euros to get into it, which is utterly lame. I don't really want to head up until I get a panorama stitching application for my Iphone. I don't know what else to say. Things are going nicely. The weather is getting chilly now. Getting to a high of low teens. getting to around 2/3 degrees and night.

Anyway, that is all for now.