We moved out of our honeymoon suite in the boutique hotel we were staying at for the past two nights and into the honeymoon suite at the Westin Excelsior Hotel right on the river thanks to Mom's Starwood rates. It's Rania's birthday today and we decided to splurge a little and pamper ourselves for the day.The highlight of today was by far seeing Michelangelo's David, a 17-foot marble statue of the male nude. The marble used had already been worked on by an earlier hand and thus established Michelangelo's prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination. Michelangelo had a lifelong interest in anatomy and was granted access to the corpses of the Church's hospital where we would study the anatomy of the bodies. As a result, David has extraordinary lifelike qualities in his muscles, ribs and limbs. A true masterpiece. Here is a quote from Michelangelo himself that I really like: "In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it."
We went back to our hotel to get ready for tonight. Tonight we're meeting our friend Giovanni for dinner and drinks. Gio is Janice's friend from her exchange in Amsterdam and we met him when he came to Montreal in our final year for a visit. He picked us up from our hotel and helped us polish off the bottle of champagne that we bought from the wine bar yesterday before bringing us to his favorite pizza joint in his neighborhood which specializes in true Napolitano pizza. It was great having a local friend bring us around to parts of Florence you wouldn't normally go to. After dinner we went and met a few of his friends at the bar they frequent often. Tomorrow morning we're off to Venice so we called it an early-ish night and enjoyed a restful night on those amazing Westin beds!
xoxo
Alexis
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