Les Jardins du Luxembourg is the garden of the French Senate, which is itself housed in the Luxembourg Palace. The Palace was designed for Marie de Médicis, mother of king Louis XIII of France. Marie de Médicis desired to make a building similar to her native Florence’s Palazzo Pitti which, coincidentally, we visited during our visit in Italy. The garden is largely devoted to a green parterre of gravel and lawn populated with statues and provided with large basins of water where children sail model boats.
The garden contains just over a hundred statues, monuments, and fountains, scattered throughout the grounds. Surrounding the central green space are about twenty figures of historical French queens and female saints, standing on pedestals.
Our first stop in Italy was Florence or as the Italians call the former capital of the Kingdom of Italy, Firenze.
Housed inside a palace designed during the Medici rule as offices for Florentine magistrates, hence the name, uffizi, is one of the oldest and most reknowned art museums in Europe and, indeed, the world. Over the years, further parts of the palace evolved into a display place for many of the paintings and sculpture collected by the Medici family or commissioned by them. Here, outside the Uffizi, a street performer dresses up as one of the many statues found on the walls of the museum.
After the house of Medici was extinguished, the art treasures remained in Florence; it formed one of the first modern museums. The gallery had been open to visitors by request since the sixteenth century, and in 1765 it was officially opened to the public. Here an artist sits outside, offering a selection of his own artwork.
Classical guitar fills the plaza by the Uffizi.
We encountered a remarkable number of musicians and performers throughout Italy. Here is one eccentric example.
The Arno riverside in Florence.
The apartments lining the river were rather picturesque.
After celebrating mass in Italian at the Basilica of Santa Croce, where we were so fortunate to see the tombs of Galileo, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli, we stopped by for our first taste of Italian espresso and prosciutto.
Being American.
The view from Giotto’s bell tower at the Duomo of Florence, the city’s cathedral. The basilica is one of Italy’s largest churches, and until the modern era, the dome was the largest in the world. It remains the largest brick dome ever constructed.
Caricature artists outside the Duomo where one can make out the green and pink polychrome marble panels on the cathedral’s exterior.
Before arriving in Florence, none of us had actually thought to make any concrete plans as to what we might visit and do while in the capital of the Tuscan country. Justine, pictured here holding high her cone of gelato, decided to grab her copy of Frommer’s Europe from $85 a Day and lead us fearlessy through the first half of our tour of Italy.
Mopeds and bikes were everywhere. What really amazed me were the meticulously dressed italians in their perfectly tailored suits and their brilliantly polished shoes cruising around town on two-wheels.
We had the fortune of attending Papal audience on Wednesday morning. We were no more than 15 feet away from His Holiness. We had all purchased trinkets from various street vendors before the audience in order to get them blessed. Told that the blessing would occur at the end of the audience, we all began taking out our rosaries, crucifixes, and such from our bags when the crowd began to disperse. Don’t they want things blessed, I asked myself. Apparently, I am told, the blessing occured while we were removing our items from their bags. I hope His Holiness made sure to bless things in bags as well.
A large rotating globe from within the Vatican Museums which displays works from the immense collection built up by the Roman Catholic Church throughout the centuries.
The Museums is home to the Sistine Chapel.
The Cathedra Petri, latin for Chair of Saint Peter, is a cathedra, which is the chair of a bishop, preserved in St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, enclosed in a gilt bronze casing that was designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and executed 1647–53. The cathedra in Saint Peter’s Basilica was once used by the popes. Like many medieval reliquaries that took the form of the relic they protected, it is in the form of a chair.
I had the incredible opportunity to celebrate mass in the Basilica, not 10 feet from the entrance to the crypt where the body of Saint Peter rests.
Taken from inside the Colosseum, Stephanie remarked at this scene’s recollection of the empty tomb of Easter.
Like ivy growing up old university walls, the city of Rome has slowly crept around its ancient remains.
Next to the Colosseum is the Roman Forums which lays mostly in ruin.
The forum served as a city square and central hub where the people of Rome gathered for justice, and faith.
The forum was also the economic hub of the city and considered to be the center of the Republic and Empire.
A gorgeous building by the Spanish steps.
Pensées 