School and Museums

Boun giorno! Sorry it's been so long. I've been super busy with school and traveling! And all the other things involved in living on your own in  a foreign country. Since it's been so long I'm breaking this up into two different posts. This post is mainly about school and the museums I've been to. The next one will be about my extracurricular travels. 

For one of my classes that I'm taking, Social Science 300, it is all about Italian culture. For this class, every Thursday, and sometimes Tuesdays we go to a different museum or important site in Italy. Last week we went to La Specola and The Accademia Gallery. La Specola was one of the coolest museums I've been too. It's the oldest scientific museum in Italy. It is stuffed full of pinned insects, posed crustaceans, and "stuffed" animals. At the very end there is a human anatomy wing... but I'll get to that in a second. So the first room that I really looked at was the one with all the pretty butterflies and moths. I had an assignment for my Physical Anthropology class to find examples of sexual and natural selection, this was a good place to start. Some of those insects were crazy cool, with all their colors and defensive strategies. There were these butterflies that had transparent wings. Never seen anything like it. We also saw a selection of stick bugs and bugs that looked exactly like leaves. I skipped over the spiders and only just glanced at the crustaceans. Then we came to the mammals. Lots of cool animals to see. There was even a hippopotamus that was a Medici pet in the 17th century that lived in the Boboli Gardens. How crazy is that? The rest of the animal rooms had birds, monkeys, lemurs (a super cool and freaky one called the aye-aye). And a plethora more of "stuffed" animals. So now we come to the final wing... The human anatomy wing. All the figures in here are wax figures of real people. The wax models came out of the Black Plague. Over half of Italy's population was wiped out so these anatomically correct models were representations of Plague sufferers. I had kind of a hard time with this part, because I have a somewhat weak stomach, but at the same time it was intensely interesting. 

The Accademia Gallery is where the real David is. What a hunk... Haha. It was totally insane to actually get to see the REAL David, that Michelangelo sculpted with his one hands. It is the most surreal experience ever. I've seen two replicas in Florence already and nothing can ever compare to the real thing. It's huge! It's 17 feet tall. I have no words to describe seeing the real thing. It's also really cool to learn the historical significance of this statue, and what it meant to Florentines at the time. There were some other statues there by Michelangelo, however they are unfinished. There are four sculptures that mainly people called the Prisoners because they look like they are trying to break out of their marble. And then there is an unfinished Pieta by Michelangelo too. There are some other cool things too, but David was the most important to me. 

So other than going to some crazy cool sites I've just been doing school work. Haven't had too much homework which is good. And I've been keeping up on it pretty well, which is good so I can go travel on the weekends. And now on to my adventures....