Italy - Florence and Beyond

We spent our last day in Florence scurrying around in the rain going to museums. We started with the Academia in the morning. It is largely a sculpture museum with ancient statues and plaster casts. Of course, the highlight is Michelangelo's 17 foot tall statue of David. It truly is magnificent!
As I circled around this marble masterpiece, I was struck by the fact that Michelangelo portrays David as the real giant, not Goliath. I like to think he meant to convey the truth that a boy, with God on his side, is bigger than any giant. After lunch, we stood in the rain to tour the Duomo. So much art, so much opulence, such amazing engineering! Then, in the afternoon, we toured the Ufizzi Gallery. This is supposed to be the finest collection of Renaissance art in the world. And, it lived up to it's reputation. As we went from room to room, each featuring different artists, it was easy to see the evolution of art from century to century and also interesting to notice how the subject seemed to change, from religious art to more secular art. We enjoyed the day.
Today, we checked out of our Florence accommodations and picked up our rental car and headed in the direction of Venice. We stopped for lunch in Bologna and had the best bread in the world! We saw a bit of Bologna and found it to be a lot like Athens, Georgia, just bigger. It is definitely a college town and we saw the University of Bologna, the world's first university, which still trains doctors today. Then we drove on, stopping for a couple of hours in Ferrara. Since I had spent a week in Ferrara while on a a summer mission trip while I was in college, I wanted to go back! We toured the Castlello Estense that sits in the center of town and is protected by a large moat and drawbridges. I was particularly fascinated by the dungeons where the walls are still covered with graffiti from prisoners who were held there in the fifteenth century. Kneeling down to step through the four-foot high doorways into these dungeon rooms gave me some sense of just how hopeless these prisoners must have felt. It was good to get back out into daylight. Then, as we walked back toward our car, we paused to snap a picture in front of the oldest wine bar in the world - a place listed in the Guinness record book. This is the same bar where Copernicus, while studying and formulating his theory about the earth revolving around the sun, stayed and likely knocked down a glass or two of Vino.
We got back in the car and made our way on to our hotel for tonight - just across the bridge from Venice. Tomorrow promises to be another interesting day!