Medici Villas and Vinci

This weekend we went to Vinci with my class. It was the last fieldtrip before spring break. So I have two weekends now to do whatever I want! I’m definitely going to stay in Florence for next weekend (this coming weekend?) and explore outside the center, perhaps try out the bus system. ACTUALLY! This Sunday Florence plays Rome (homegame! Yes!) so that will be an amazing game. I have to remember to wear PURPLE. Sunday, as it turns out will actually rock. I’m going to a carnival about an hour away on train with my friend from Malta, Justin, and a bunch of his friends that are coming up. I really can’t wait! And Thursday is the chocolate festival in Piazza Santa Croce. CHOCOLATE! Yes yes yes. It’s going to be a great week.

Anyway. VINCI! WAS! AWESOME! It was the loveliest feeling to get out among the green stuff and feel the sun. It smelled like rosemary and rain. On the bus we passed hills covered in vines and lushness. The houses all had smoke coming from the chimneys and it couldn’t have been more stereotypical “Italian countryside” which all of us soaked up and snuggled in. We saw some of the Medici Villa’s on our way over, which are insane. They would use these villas every once in a while. It’s like those people in PC who buy multi-million dollar mansions to use for two weeks a year. I decided if I were to have been a servant in one of those houses back when, it really would have been the life. You only have to take care of the Medici for two weeks then you get the house to yourself for the rest of the year. They did have some spectacular gardens and grottos that were filled with animal sculptures (more unicorns! Jeeeeez!). I most enjoyed the sculpture of a girl wringing out her hair by…shoot…we actually didn’t learn who sculpted it. OK, well from the tip of her hair, water falls into a bowl and then falls again into a bigger water fountain. It is really beautiful. Hercules Strangling Antaeus was also one of my favorites by Ammannati. It is a terrible subject, but the figures are so graceful, they look like they are dancing.
Vinci was the really fun part because it had stopped raining and the sun came out. We saw Leonardo da Vinci’s supposed birth house (I signed my name in the log book…yay! It says my name then SACI 2009 with the 09 crossed out and 10 written next to it. Great.). Helen, our prof, walked us around the Museum of da Vinci that has a bunch of his contraptions in large scale so you can see what he had come up with, he was brilliant, to say the least. My favorite was the bicycle. There is no way wood wheels would work over cobblestone, and turning would give you a bit of a problem, but he totally had the right idea. bus driver parked us right next to a rosemary bush so before we all loaded up to go home we stuffed our pockets. The driver laughed at us, but I’m sure he appreciated the aroma wafting around more than the bus smell. Buses all smell the same. They’re pretty narsty. Anna, the TA in the class is so cool. I sat next to her to and from Vinci and we chatted about the ups and downs of living in Italy, semantics, Helen, grammer, and Italian Pop. She knows so much! It was fun picking her brain, plus she's gonna make me a CD of her favorite italian pop songs...AWESOME.