Posted by Haley Topper on Monday, May 29, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

This weekend was our free weekend, and 6 of my friends and I went to Florence! After we arrived, we walked all the way from the train station to our Air Bnb (about a 20-minute walk), and you could definitely tell we were in a bigger and nicer city. The streets were lined with high end designer stores and boutiques, something you never see in Cefalú. The city was quite obviously very divided in terms of wealth which reminds me a lot of LA. You can be in Beverly Hills and assume the city is wealthy and everyone is rich, however, if you go to the outer parts, it is clear that is not true. I imagine that all the nice stores are also there to target tourists who want to buy designer clothing, shoes and bags in Italy.

While we were only there for about 2.5 days, we managed to really pack things in. It was decently easy to do everything we wanted because nothing is more than a 10 or 15-minute walk from where you are.  We went to the Accademia and saw “The David”, which is something I have wanted to do since I was in high school. It was beautiful, much larger than I imagined, and I learned that the statue depicts his intelligence rather than strength in defeating Goliath and that is why the sling is so small in comparison to David himself. We also went to Palazzo Pitti and saw a villa and the surrounding gardens. The gardens were enormous, so much so that it felt impossible to actually see everything. In the Villa, the sights to see were the walls and ceilings. They were painted head to toe with religious paintings, and a lot of ‘optical illusions’. What I mean by that is that the artist managed to make a lot of things look 3-D, when in reality, it was just paint. The pictures may not do it justice, but in person it looked like there were balconies in the rooms, arches jutting out, and crests on the walls.

The next day, we toured the Ufizzi museum and the Galileo Museum. The Ufizzi was beautiful, but I feel like my expectations were not met. I only say this because I felt like I saw a lot of the same thing over and over again which made it hard to appreciate each piece individually. The common themes were Madonna and Child and the birth of Jesus. However, there are definitely some incredible paintings that the Uffizi holds. The museum is home to The Birth of Venus, Leonardo De Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi, and we even managed to find a fellow commodore! As I walked through all of these museums, I couldn’t help but feel sadly about the fact that our generation won’t have beautiful works of art like this. We have modern art but, in my opinion, it is not as beautiful as the paintings or sculptures I see in museums today. In general, being an artist is so looked down upon because our society is so focused on money and if the job doesn’t make you money, it’s not a real job. People who want to make art in today’s society are thought of as lesser because they don’t make as much money, but I find good artwork to be an incredible skill (one that I do not have), and I wish it was appreciated more so we could make more paintings like these for future generations to look back on.

Out of everything, my favorite was the Galileo Museum by far. This may just be because I’m a complete astronomy nerd, but Galileo is one of the coolest guys of all time. He went against the church to introduce the idea of a heliocentric galaxy and made huge strides in astronomy in general. I got to see some really old sextants which are contraptions that are used to measure the angle of a star in the sky in comparison to the horizon. These are still used today in celestial navigation, a tool that the Navy uses, which uses stars to navigate the seas. I also got to see some old journals, terrestrial and celestial globes from the 17^th and 18^th century, a huge wall of telescopes used by astronomers during this time period, the first planetary model, and even Galileo’s finger! Then, as I continued to walk through the museum, it transitioned into physics discoveries, which made me even more excited! There were lots of machines that were used to experiment with electricity, some models (that we still used today) in physics to study mechanics, and the first model of magnetic fields around a wire. As I wandered through, I was able to understand how they used everything and thought it was so interesting, but also realized that while I understand, I never would have thought to create these things. For instance, I understand how the machines used to study electricity work, but I never would have been able to conceptualize such a machine while learning. This got me thinking about the differences in learning styles now a days and back in the 17^th century. It seems to me like now, we learn and then experiment in the classroom whereas back then, they experimented to learn. Now, I know you have to learn the material first before you can experiment and get the correct results, but I think there is something to be said about just trying something you think may work and discerning the conclusion from all of those experiments. It sparks and encourages a creativity in the students that we lack in the present.