Week 5 - Florence, Paris
Buongiorno and Bonjour!
I'm a week late with this update but I've been caught up with school and other responsibilities. It's been a busy and exciting past week. One of the highlights was celebrating Carnival. In our Italian class, we learned that different cities in Italy, have different ways of celebrating Carnival. For example, Venice is well known for having very elaborate costumes, and Viareggio celebrates with very large elaborate floats. Here is a website that shows how 5 different cities celebrate in unique ways.
https://www.marthasitaly.com/articles/100/italy-carnival-festivals
As for Orvieto, Carnival is mainly celebrated by the younger kids by wearing costumes. This was very similar to the costumes kids would wear on Halloween in America. Our teachers insisted that we also wear costumes to celebrate so we had to get creative with the clothes we brought. I did my best to dress up as a skier but was lacking a couple of main pieces of equipment. Several members of the community gathered in one of the main piazzas and they had a DJ to play music for the event. It was a pretty easy class because all we had to do was join in on the dancing and have fun. We even had the DJ play a few songs like Cotton Eye Joe and the Wabash Cannonball so we could teach a few dances. It was exciting to learn about a holiday that we don't really celebrate in Kansas and also get to experience it hands-on!
Friday we traveled to Florence and had a very quick tour around the city. Our tour guide did his best to give us a non-typical tour of Florence because this town is a very popular tourist site. He really wanted us to understand some of the history of the families that founded much of Florence's architectural highlights. I also did quite a bit of research before we traveled to understand why Florence became the birthplace of the Renaissance. Here is a great YouTube video that explains the renaissance really well.
The Renaissance Period Explained | All You Need To Know
https://youtu.be/Om1jvUzVAtE?si=LS3xGPSdNGIrRLq2
Basilica Santa Croce
Piazza di Santa Croce
(The Piazza was covered in dirt because of an event they were holding the next day)
The event they were holding was a historical reenactment of a football match held during
the Siege of 1530
Palazzo Vecchio (Government building in Piazza nella Signoria)
Mainly used as a museum now
Now if you know much about Florence you would probably expect me to show you pictures of Michelangelo's David, the Uffizi Gallery, or Ponte Vecchio. However, I had such limited time that I didn't get to see any of these things. We did get to spend a bit of time walking around the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore which was truly breathtaking. It was currently being cleared for the Holy Year in 2025 so we were able to see how much grime had built up on the outside of it. The dome was absolutely massive and when I go back this is something I really want to get a tour of. Here is a video I found really interesting about the dome.
How an Amateur Built the World's Biggest Dome
https://youtu.be/_IOPlGPQPuM?si=IvXPR3b5j-lGmm1H
This was one of the sides that hadn't been cleaned yet.
It was so difficult to get a picture of the full building it was so huge!
One of the last stops Aenya and I made was an adaptive reuse project that turned an old prison into a social housing building and an art museum. It was a great example of modern architecture being created from decaying buildings designed by Renzo Piano. Most of my classmates ended up staying the weekend to truly experience Florence to the fullest but my friends and I had already made other plans. Friday night we hurried off to the airport and caught a flight to Paris!
Our trip to Paris was only a couple of days long so we had a lot of ground to cover. We wanted to hit as many of the iconic locations as possible without overwhelming ourselves. Aenya and I had a great time exploring the city on foot and with the subway. We were both surprised how clean it was compared to New York’s subway system.
George Pompidou Center also designed by Renzo Piano
City Hall decorated nicely for the Olympics
The Louis Vuitton Foundation was probably my favorite buildings in Paris
Designed by Frank Gehry
Seeing the amazing joint connections on the outer screen was incredible. I truly don’t understand how someone could envision something like that.
Pictured left to right
(Aenya, Tanner, Avery, Austin, Maddie, Natalie, Rebecca, Joe)
The city of love with my love!
One of the highlights of this trip and one of the main reasons we came was to see Noah Kahan perform in concert. This is one of my favorite artists at the moment and it was so cool to hear him perform and listen to a crowd full of people from all over the world sing his songs even if English isn't their first language!
After my inspection, I can confidently say that Paris is ready to hold the Olympics!
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