Renaissance Retreat

After two and a half years of living in Europe, I'm still awed that I can take a two hour flight from Amsterdam and arrive in any one of many distinct cultures. Between breakfast and lunch, we can step into an entirely different country and its rich history.

These are the types of trips and vacations I only dreamed of taking while living in U.S., and that I only took after a great deal of saving and planning. Now, we can easily go to Barcelona or Budapest for a weekend a get-away. It's weird!

This October, we're in Tuscany for the kids' two-week school break. First stop was Florence. Like I said, by lunchtime, we'd time traveled from the Dutch Golden Age into the Renaissance, visiting with one of its usual suspects: Michelangelo's David, at the Galleria dell'Accademia.

Gross! Body parts!

The Gallery is not huge (although the line is), so it was a pretty good first-day activity.  The kids liked the room of heads, which is actually called the Nineteenth Century Room and used to house all of Bartolini's plaster casts. The room pays homage to the nineteenth century origins of the museum, even though most people come to see the David from four hundred years before.

We stayed right next to the Santa Maria Novella, so we stopped here before then eating like kings at a local tratorria (De Sostanza is a must) and then relaxing at hotel.  Go to Santa Maria Novella.  It's not as well-known, less crowded and, by gazing up at Masaccio's fresco, it's a nice, baby-step introduction to the Renaissance's discovery of perspective in art.

Tomorrow's adventure is sneaking a peek at us . . .