After a long absense, I've finally forced myself to brave the heat outside, forgo museums and churches, and come here to update my much-neglected travel diary. In opening, I want to say a very big THANKYOU to Pete and Molly, who both sent me Mint Slice biscuits from Australia, now beckoning me from the freezer at home, as well as other goodies, and thanks also to my mother, Bernie, Anna and Felicity who've all got into the act of mailing me things. I was in danger of sinking into homesickness a week ago, but now I feel very much loved!

I suppose I've been enjoying Firenze too much to tear myself away from it long enough to reflect on it. Not just Firenze either - so far all my little trips have been around Toscana (unwisely, my roommate Moy and I have both left all the most expensive "must-see" locations until last!). Last week Felicity came to visit from Cambridge, and so I took the opportunity to show her around a few things, and to fail to show her around others - we went to Lucca, which was a first for me, but not for her. Felicity chose the saint Zita for her confirmation name (not having received a Catholic upbringing, I'm not quite sure how these things work). Saint Zita lived all of her eighty years in Lucca. On her previous visit there, Felicity wasn't able to find any real references to Zita: this wasn't the case this time. After stumbling upon a stand of funny old postcards, we wandering into the church San Frediano, and one of the chapels in the the church was a chapel to Santa Zita, and contained her unpreserved body in a glass case. Unfortunately we couldn't enter the chapel, as a mass was underway, but we wandered around the church for quite a while. I've been told that Zita is variously the saint of charity, flowers and lost keys, and that she never went anywhere in her life but Lucca, but have to admit that after these paltry facts, I really don't have a lot to offer. Lucca was, of course, beautiful - though not my favourite of the small towns in the region. My favourite would have to be San Gimignano, where we went on Saturday.

After an uninspiring wait to change buses at Poggibonsi, we arrived n San Gimagnano ready to eat the lunch we'd carefully packed, accompanied by some newly acquired Chianti wines. I suggested we head towards one of the main squares to sit down and eat our picnic, only to find that (of course) in the three weeks since I'd last visited the town they'd blocked everything off. If we'd walked a little further we could have found a lovely spot in the shade looking on the Duomo, but we sank to the ground and ate, looking instead at the blocked-off main square. After lunch we all split up for a while, and I visited the Duomo by myself - full of beautiful frescoes, which seems to be par for the course. The one that caught my attention was a image of San Sebastien, presiding over the rear, viewed when exiting the church. I've never seen a San Sebastien with so many arrows in him. Seeing all these images, I begin to realise how little I know about the lives of the saints - everything I see and do reminds me of half a dozen more things I know nothing of. They all end up on the growing list of things I want to read more about, to research when I return home.

Also on the itinerary was an aborted journey to Siena, which would have been my third time there. I spent a Saturday afternoon there a few weeks before, wandering about the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala: what was used as a hospital until quite recently and then converted into the museum space it is now. The hospital was begun about a thousand years ago, and the present structure is over 500 years old. In the same rooms which housed patients, there are gorgeous frescoes on the walls and ceilings, some dedicated to the legendary founder of the hospital. Like many other things in Siena it is dedicated to the Virgin Mary: the town itself is seen to have a special relationship with the Virgin, because the town has devoted itself to her for so much of it's history.

As well as the high-ceilinged rooms full of frescoes, there are also underground chapels and relics, and beneath it all, two floors underneath the hospital, they have recently installed the Museo Archaelogico. The collection itself probably wasn't very inspiring - I felt too much that I was walking through it without appreciating the differences between items. What made the Archaelogical museum so memorable for me was the fact that it is arranged in an underground labyrinth. Walking amongst that collection of ancient etruscan items, I felt like I'd stumbled into a different world.

As I was sitting in class today (after we'd learned "Pronome Indiretti", the important lesson of the day) I started to scribble down all the places left in Italy I still want to see, and have realised how many of them there are. I still have so many of the major museums and churches to see, not to mention the fact that I want to get to Bologna, Verona, Padova, Venezia and possibly Ravenna in the next few weeks.

In between my traipsing about Toscana, wandering the streets of Firenze, and doing my fair share of art-gazing (and learning to conjugate in the future tense too) I've been reading steadily. At times it feels like I've read a lot - like I've somehow "knocked over" a fair few new things. Then I gaze at lists in the back of my Penguin classics and realise how much more there is to read. But I've been reading a lovely mix of things - more Henry James (What Maisie Knew, Daisy Miller, The Bostonians and The Europeans) as well as reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (in modern English - I'll struggle through the Riverside Chaucer in a few years time), and then romping through some Carson McCullers short stories and essays in The Mortgaged Heart. Have been reading Keats and Anne Bronte and Simonides of Keos. Somehow my reading is travelling all over the place, and every book I finish is suggesting another ten I must read. I feel almost that this reading I've doing must be in its way even more valuable than all the things I'm seeing. Or rather, since they can't be compared, somehow it all goes into this melting pot of sensation, experience, knowledge, wonder... It feels like the pot has never been so full. I find that I want to read so many more things - so much of the great, long, daunting poetic works - want to read Milton and Spenser and Christopher Marlow, and I want to read Pope and Shelley and as much ancient literature as I can manage.

At the same time as wanting to read all these works of literature, I find that I just wish I know more about how the world works - so I've begun to read some of the Oxford Very Short Introductions... already covering such a wide array of subjects, with more due for release in the near future. So I'm learning at the same time about the way the Bible was put together, and the different bibles in use, about Cultural and Social Anthropology, about the Cold War and Classics... these odd, important things side by side: the spectre of Greek Temples and the nine nuclear warheads on Cuba at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis. I think it is that kind of juxtaposition which best explains the type of place Firenze has become for me.