The First Days of Class in Florence

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Today marked the fourth day since I arrived in Florence and it was the second day of classes. The main focuses of my courses here is Apparel design, but I am also currently taking an Italian Language course which is interesting. The teacher is so friendly, but I am not particularly good at Italian. I have already taken quite a bit of language classes including Spanish, French, and, the most recent, German, but I have just never been able to get a handle on any of them. I fear that I will also struggle to learn Italian in the same way I have failed to learn the previous three, but we will just have to see if I improve any in the remainder of my three weeks here. I do have to say though that numbers in Italian make so much more sense than numbers in German. I may be bad at remembering the pronunciation and articles of words, but I’m confident in my understanding of the Italian number system. There was also a cooking class, but I think that was only a one-time thing. It was cool to learn how to make things from scrap and everyone was getting along well and working well together. The kitchen that we cooked in also had all these handy little machines including one that, when you put in cut up tomatoes, it keeps the seeds and skin so only the juice and stuff get through. The lady who ran the class was knowledgeable, but also strict so she was a little intimidating. She had that all-knowing grandmother vibe to her. There were certainly cultural differences as some of the ways in which we eat she found to be rude. She did explain these to us, but it did make me a bit sad that she found us impolite. It is always important to understand cultural differences when you are traveling because while we are raised on the expectation that if it has been placed on the table it is alright to go ahead and eat it, other cultures may not.



One of my favorite things that we have done since getting here though is going to the Palazzo Pitti. It is a castle and is now a museum. Before we went in, our professor was telling us some facts about it and its construction. An interesting fact is that, at one point, as a celebration someone filled the entire courtyard with water, and they assembled boats so they could recreate a naval battle. Which sounds exactly like something some eccentric rich guy centuries ago would do. She also was telling us about a guy who murdered his brother so he could take over the Palazzo. This doesn’t really surprise me either because people have murdered for way less. So, after hearing about that we got to walk around on our own through out the museum. There were so many interesting paintings and furniture. We saw things that took inspiration from Spain and I was surprised to see they also had things that were clearly inspired by cultures like the Egyptians and the Chinese. I was particularly found of the statues as they just had so much detail and just looked amazing.



After that came the best part. We went to the Costume Gallery and they had a special exhibit going on. Normally, the museum hosts a bunch of historical garments, but for this particular exhibit they were showing modern stuff from some big designer names like Prada and Dolce & Gabbana. The whole exhibit was based around showing how animals inspire fashion with their unique colors and patterns. Each room was inspired by a different species from around the animal kingdom. This included fish, bees, alligators, parrots, etc. My top three were the dresses inspired by spiders, those inspired by snakes, and the dresses inspired by butterfly’s. There was this cute short red dress with a snake wrapping around it and an apple near the hem. Another one I liked was this dress that kind of looked like an old wedding dress with these really puffy sleeves and it was covered in butterfly’s which was just so pretty. It has literally been the highlight of my trip so far and it’s such a shame that the exhibition was kind of short because I did not want it to end. It was not long enough. I was surprised though that they didn’t include a Peacock room due to how much they have already been used to inspire fashion.

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