Firenze

I'm in the middle of re-reading (of course) one of my favorite books, The Agony and the Ecstasy, a biographical novel about Michelangelo.  It deserves its own post, but I had to take a little breather because Irving Stone's descriptions of Italy are so masterful.  

I spent two weeks there when I was in high school (i.e. when I was a very silly girl, who thought I was doing a great job with my travel journal and little sketches.  I kind of want to smack that Anna sometimes for not doing/seeing/documenting more, but I suppose she was trying.).  In that time we breezed through Venice, Naples, Verona, and many other towns, and spent enough days in Rome that I could find my way around in all of the glorious ruins.

But the place that really stole my heart, that can make my chest hurt for wanting to return so badly, was Florence.  

The first time we rounded the corner and saw the Duomo, my friends had to pull me to get me to keep walking (a teenager being dramatic...how original).  But I really loved it.  I had studied the history and architecture of the dome - the largest ever built at the time - and a testament to the vision and courage of its architect, Brunelleschi.  And this was where the Medicis had prayed, and da Vinci, and my Michelangelo.  I had already read this book at the time, and couldn't stop seeing it as it had been in the 1500s.  Michelangelo purportedly declared the he would never live out of sight of the Duomo.  Commissions all over Italy made this impossible, but the sentiment was surely understandable:

You just can't get better than that.