Florence, Day 11

I am quite sunburned. Good thing I brought Aloe!

Today in Italian class, we worked on prepositions. At this point, none of my class understands exactly what's going on with Italian prepositions and every time we asked for clarification or realized that we had really messed one up, Luigi merely said "Is ok. Even Italians get confused by the prepositions." Well, at least it's not just us.

Isa and I had lunch in the Linguaviva courtyard (and were soon joined by one of the other boys on the trip, Michael) and spent an hour or so doing our homework before heading out to the Church of Orsanmichele with Jodi and the whole group. The church (which used to be a medieval open-air market, or loggia, and granary) was really pretty and had some amazing sculptures in it (pictures below), but a lot of people weren't really paying attention which was a bummer for those of us who actually wanted to be there.

The medieval stonework at Orsanmichele.

The elaborately decorated altar inside.

One of the statuary niches.

Things to know about Jodi: she rocks. They were getting ready to close the museum on the second floor of Orsanmichele (which is where they now keep the original statues from the building, for conservation purposes) for a dinner party that was happening that night and she managed to talk the volunteer in charge of admission into letting us all in for a half hour or so. Holy crap. We saw some amazing stuff, like the original of the four statues in the last picture above. Jodi knows an incredible amount of information too, so the entire time we were up there I was just trying to drink it all in. Talk about a wealth of knowledge.

After we were dismissed from Orsanmichele, Gretchen, Isa, Ian, Sarah, and I went to Grom since Sarah hadn't been able to experience their gelato the first night we met as a group. I tried chocolate and blueberry. I'm kind of convinced Grom doesn't have a bad flavor in their entire shop.

Once we had successfully had our daily gelato time, we headed back to Linguaviva to pick up our Italian books (which we hadn't wanted to carry with us) and then grabbed our bus back to the apartment. Gretchen was going to come over to Sarah and my room (since we live about a block and a half apart), so I memorized a long sentence to tell Signora Anna, asking if she minded if Gretchen studied with us and telling her how long she would be over. I was super pumped to be able to use my carefully crafted sentence but then ended up only using about half of it on Nonna (who is a little bit deaf) because Anna wasn't home yet.

Dinner was amazing, to the point where Sarah and I felt it necessary to get a picture (which is below).

Probably Sarah and my favorite dinner yet.

Toast topped with prosciutto, cheese, and fried eggs, plus potatoes and bean salad on the side. Oh my. Family, be warned: I will be making this when I get home. I will hunt down the good prosciutto and cheese it requires. Good Lord, it was good. Sarah and I pulled out our dictionaries just to be able to shower Anna with compliments for this specific dish. She brushed us off a bit, but I think she was secretly very flattered. Score.