Ciao amici!
Classes started yesterday and it's crazy because, after less than a week, Florence is really beginning to feel like my home. The city is surprisingly very manageable and although I don't know my way around the city in its entirety yet, I feel pretty confident walking around in the corner where we live and study. It helps that there are so many huge, memorable landmarks (i.e. il Duomo and the other large churches and buildings).
Last night, I spent the nicest evening I've had so far in Florence just walking around the city with Michelle and Andrea, le mie compagne di stanze.
Our journey started out just a few minutes from our home in a church that we were just going to look at. The church we went to for Sunday mass, Santa Felicita, was much newer than this was and was very clearly in a late Rennaisance/Baroque style. This church, on the other hand, had art spanning from the early 1000s when it was built to one sculpture that had the year 1982 inscribed on it. Really, it looked something like an antique sale at first, as if everything in the building were just randomly placed there for storage. However, the more time I spent there, the more I grew to love the little church and appreciate the eclectic pieces. Really, this church, by itself, could probably tell the whole history of Florence, which is an unfathomably amazing thought.
Even more beautiful than the art, however, were the people in the church. There was a group of about eight old women praying the rosary at the very front of the church when we walked in and it was just a really beautiful sight. When mass started as we were about to leave, we couldn't resist joining them.
Wanting to truly join in the mass with our new nonne italiane (Italian grandmothers, they don't know that they have already adopted us, but I do), we went on the hunt for an Italian missellette, that took us literally all around town to different book stores, many of which were closed because it was about 5 or 6 in the evening. Although we didn't find our missellette (we did buy them this morning when the other stores were open), we spent the afternoon walking around the city, going back and forth between English and Italian and seeing a part of the city I hadn't seen before. I really am starting to feel much more like a local than a tourist and, although I still have a long way to go, I really think that I am going to grow and learn a lot while I am here and I'm beyond excited for these next few months!
On another note, we had our first Art History class today and I felt like a few of the different sectors of my life started coming together. Because we talked more about History than actual art, I learned that Florentines from the late 1200s/early 1300s onward were tremendously innovative not only in art and literature but also in the political sphere (Florence was one of the only, if not the only Republic since Rome fell) and (get excited) the realm of Economics (my favorite thing). Did you know that many of the thirteenth and fourteenth century Florentines were among the first international bankers? And that, long before the Euro, the Florin was a single currency that united many places? These bankers even invented a system similar to credit cards where people could deposit money in a bank in, for example, Florence and withdraw it so that they could trade, even in large quantities, from a connected bank in, for example Switzerland or France. Can you even imagine what an invaluable, indispensable tool an international bank would be to long-distance trade? It's totally unbelievable!! Now that I know that Florentine history has such vasts amounts of Economics as well as art, I don't know if I will ever be able to leave!!!
But, fortunately, that day is very far away.
Ciao for now!
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