Florence

The first stop on our travels after midterm was Florence. I had been here once before in the early 90s and have to say that I enjoyed it a lot more this time. They seem to have gotten some of the traffic under control in the core area. And it helped to have acclimatized to Italy a bit before joining into the tourist frenzy. The people in Florence are not terribly friendly... they're just sick of dealing with tourists. Everybody speaks English even when you attempt your marginal Italian. And when you go out to a restaurant you are more likely to find it full of American university students than Italians. There are tons of study abroad programs from the US based in Florence. I'm not sure this is a good thing.

But the architecture is amazing. I found drawing frustrating because I was having trouble getting perspectives to work for me. My notebook is full of attempts to figure out how to construct a hexagonal dome base in flat perspective. But along with a lot of lovely pictures I've thrown in a few drawings here...

Ciao!

- B -

ps- I should add that there was a lot of architecture by Brunelleschi in Florence (like the humongo dome for example) and he also developed one-point perspective during the Renaissance... so I felt good about practicing perspective drawing on his architecture! :^)