After making my list in class last week of all the places left in Italy I want to visit before I dash off to Berlin at the end of next week (I still can't quite get my head around the fact that my time here in Firenze is nearly over...) I made another list of all the things left in Firenze that I still had to see - a shamefully long list, with some terribly important things on it. I seem to have made concentrated efforts in some areas, with multiple visits - for example the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Brancacci Chapel - and somehow missed out on other things altogether. So now I feel like I moving more into that touristing pace of doing and seeing things, instead of letting myself fall into too many long lazy Firenze days, which, aside from shopping for food and explaining to little old ladies at the supermercato that I buy Granny Smith apples both to eat and to cook with, seem to achieve very little. However, since last Thursday I have reformed, and have been dizzy with the history of Italy.

I forgot to do anything for the Wednesday lunchtime club last Wednesday, but I think I made up for it with my adventures on Thursday. Firstly I tried to visit the Medicee Library, but found that the library itself was closed - but I could still enter the foyer to see the Michaelangelo staircase. This was interesting, and I'm glad I saw it (and yes, it was of course a beautiful staircase) but I wish I could have walked up it, and see all those beautiful old books. After this I took myself to the Galleria d'Accamedia: this is the first of my shamefaced areas of neglect. I'd seen the two copies of Michaelangelo's David, outside Palazzo Vecchio, and in Piazzale Michaelangelo, but I hadn't quite got around to seeing the real thing. Strange the profound difference between seeing the copies and the real thing. I felt dizzy with it. Was talking to Moy after I came home and the way she put it was "I wish I had never used the word beautiful to describe a boy before. Because David is REALLY beautiful." No matter how many pictures, details, copies, etc I had see before, there was nothing to prepare me for the moment when, walking around the corner in the Accademia, I really saw HIM, along with several other of Michaelangelo's pieces, the others unfinished works. Another favourite from the Accademia was a piece painted by Masaccio's brother (I sheepishly can't remember the artist's name. I was so dazzled by the subject matter of the painting, and the fact that he was Masaccio's brother that somehow another piece of information was impossible to etch in my mind at the same time) supposedly depicting the wedding of Bocaccio, set in Fiesole... Fiesole, in the hills just outside of Firenze is still on my must visit list. I was considering a sunset visit tonight, but another thunderstorm has just begun, so I think I'll sit in my room with the balcony window open and watch the action... But it is my plan to visit Fiesole before I leave, and when I do I want to buy a copy of Bocaccio's Decameron while I'm there.

I also went to the Archaelogical museum in Firenze - something fatal, as now I find I want to see all the Etruscan archaelogical sites around Tuscany, as well as visiting Roma, and then Pompeii... The collection in Firenze contains the Medicee collection of archaelogical artifacts as well as later collections: housing both an extensive Egyptain collection, and an extensive Etruscan collection. I enjoyed the Etruscan piece more, because, I suppose, these were more of a revelation to me. A beautiful bronze statue of a chimera, a collection of ancient mirrors and the stray fact that mirrors are one of the most common items found at Etruscan sites. A multitude of tiny figures, strange and also seeming so very modern. I don't think I will have time this time, but I hope I'll have a chance to come back to Italy, and spend some time in the deep south of Toscana, in Volterra and the areas around, and on the road to Roma. Every place I visit simply reveals a new wishlist of places to visit. My lists are no use, because things never get ticked off, only added: one visit, or two, or ten - it's never enough for me to feel I actually know anything about a place. Looking at all those ancient tarnished mirrors I wondered what it was like to be vain two thousand year ago.

I spent the weekend with Moy and Adi on a bit of a whirlwind adventure: Moy and I were "cattive ragazze", and skipped school on Friday morning to hop on a train and head off to Verona. On Saturday we moved on to Padova, and Saturday night and Sunday we got lost over and over again in Venezia. I hardly know how to write about any of these adventures. It is easy enough, I suppose, to say that we visited the house of Juliet, and lay in a garden beside the stadium in Verona, that we visited the Duomo in Padova and the Church of Saint Anthony, an amazing spectacle: hero worship of a saint on a grand scale, unlike any of the churches I'd seen before, that we wandered around Venezia for hours, talking to mask-makers about the different characters of the traditional carnevale masks (I settled on a traditional Capitano, the curved beak mask was always my favourite...) - but somehow the weekend is still a jumbled series of impressions that will only begin to grow clear in a year or two. In between the house of Juliet and San Marco, between San Antonio and the Peggy Guggenheim collection there was a lot of walking and waiting and dragging our bags around too. Living in one place for the last seven weeks, I'd blissfully forgotten what it was like to move quickly!

My favourite thing in Venezia was visiting Peggy Guggenheim's home. Such a beautiful collection, and a beautiful house on the Grand Canal. After so much of the Renaissance here in Firenze, and after the Tiepolos and Tintorettos of the Accademia in Venezia, it was a relief to find myself surrounded by my more usual diet of modernist and contemporary work. While travelling around Veneto I finished reading both Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey (I can both see that Anne is a somewhat more consistent writer than both her sisters, but also in a way more tiresome as well: there is such an obviously moralistic aspect to her work, I read her and feel her objective in writing is to point how tiresome everyone is when they succumb to their vices... I can't help feeling there's a touch of the didactic in the clear superiority of her wholesome, brave, gentile, poor, sensible heroines) as well as the Oxford introduction to Globalisation, so I bought Peggy Guggenheim's autobiography, and have been reading it joyfully. There's something so eccentric and seemingly careless in the tone and the way the anecdotes are strung together: there's just so much colour in the whole thing, such offhandedness to the wonderfully strange things that seemed to happen to her her whole life.

Then returning home, I was confronted by my list of things to do in Firenze again... so I've resumed visiting museums and churches... visited San Lorenzo yesterday, then spent several hours in the Museo dell' Opera di Duomo, and this afternoon I spent several hours at Palazzo Pitti. I emerged from the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue in New York with a lot of new ideas on house we should be furnishing our house (for a start, where are all those Vermeers we should be splashing on the walls?) and after visiting the Galleria Palatina this afternoon I have a few more ideas, following the inspiration of the Medicees!

Tomorrow I'm going on a small adventure to Assisi, and then I'll spend Thursday in Firenze - it will be Moy's last night - before I dash down to Roma this weekend, and the Vatican. When I think of Vatican city I think of the History Channel's trivia question. What country has a population of 1000, the official language of Latin, and a birthrate of zero?