Wednesdays I have no class, so yesterday morning I headed out to explore some new places in Florence. I visited the Basilica di Santa Trinita which was very peaceful. It was darker than some of the churches I've visited and not as full of tourists. Then I headed up to Cenacolo di Sant'Apollonia which houses one of the Last Supper frescoes in Florence. This particular Last Super was done by Andrea del Castagno in 1447. It was really neat to see and again was not a very busy place, so I just sat and studied it for awhile. Then I headed back towards my apartment, stopping on the way at Orsanmichele a small church originally built as a grain market. It's an interesting little building that stands alone and houses Daddi's Madonna and Child which I was excited to see because it's another work of art I remember from Art History last spring. The outside of the church is decorated with niches containing statues of many saints. The current statues are replicas and the original works are in museums.
Basilica di Santa Trinita
Orsanmichele
Last night, we went to the Opera as an API cultural event. We saw Lecouvrer by Francesco Cilea. It was first performed in 1902 in Milan and is based on the life and times of Andrienne Lecourvreur who lived from 1692 to 1730. API gave us a summary of each of the 4 acts in our booklets, which was very useful because the whole opera was of course in Italian. The music and singing were fantastic, but the story was very hard for us to follow (mostly due to the language barrier). It was quite enjoyable though, and I'm really glad I went. We also had fun dressing up to go.
Ready to go to the Opera!
Today I had my first archeology lab!! We cleaned pieces of Etruscan pottery found in Tuscany. To clean the pieces, we used acetone to wash and soften the dirt and then scalpels to scrape it off. It was really neat though a bit tedious. It's hard to tell when you're finished sometimes.
My Mostly Cleaned Pieces of Pottery
Tomorrow we're heading to Rome for the weekend!! It should be a lot of fun and I'm very excited!!!
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