This page will contain little snipits of places we have been and stories that have come from traveling. 

Fun Fact: Perspective- Although most people think that Brunelleschi created a 3-D perspective in a 2-D plane, this isn't the whole story.  Artist before the Renassaince movement had been playing with perpective, shade/shadow, and depth of field; this is most apparent in Giotto's work.  It wasn't until Brunelleschi, however, that there was a mathmatical formula to produce the 3-D feel in paintings, frescos, ect.  This is why Brunelleschi is the father of perspective.   

Carnivale in Venice: (02.25.2004)  So, we knew that carnivale was going to end on Ash Wednesday and there was a group of us that hadn't done anything for Carnivale so Nick and I get this great idea to gather up some people at dinner (we had a pot luck dinner on Sunday) and convince them to go to Venice for the night.  We have been seeing MTV at Venice all month long and they were having a huge party to end Carnival and we wanted to go.  It ended up being nine of us that hopped on the train at 8:30 to head three hours away to Venice.  We studied Italian for the first two hours then started to drink a little wine for the walk from the train station to the St. Mark's.  Once we got there we spent an hour wondering around the canals of Venice trying to find St. Mark's which would have normally not been fun, but we were in Venice and 'were feeling no pain' by this time so the getting lost around town was so much fun.  We had story time and told each other jokes.  When we finally got to St. Mark's the plaza had flooded and they moved the concert down the river to another place.  Even at night however St. Mark's was so much fun to walk around and see all the architecture nerdy stuff.  We finally got the the concert which was a rave of some sort, and dance until they shut it down.  We took a water bus back to the train station and jumped on the earliest train back to Florence to make our nine AM master and monuments class.  I will never regret going to Venice for the night or all of the fun stories that came from the adventure. 

Snow in Firenze (01.26-30.04): This week we have been snowed on three times.  This is the first time in ten years that Firenze has seen snow.  So, although people think that it has been really warm here it has actually been cold.  Andrew is in Denmark and has told me how he is jealous of our warm weather.  I didn't want to tell Drew that it is actually cold down here so the roommates and I was planning to get dressed up in shorts and get a picture of us in the sun next to the Pont Vecchio to show Drew how warm it is in Firenze.  Unfortunately it rained for the next week and we never got a chance to send him the picture.  So, Andrew, no pictures of babes in bikinis.

Trip to Roma: After our hour and a half train ride from Florence, we arrived in Roma.  Four blocks away from Termini train Station was our hostel.  The first thing that we wanted to do was visit St. Peter's.  It didn't take twenty minutes for us to find the subway, get tickets, get on, and then get lost.  We ended up taking the B line instead of the A line, which took us south instead of west.  When we tried to get off at the next stop, half of our group got off and the other half stayed on the subway.  After an hour of back tracking and a visit to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (an accidental visit), Nick and I met up with the rest of the group at St. Peter's.  We spent three hours at St. Peter's sketching and taking pictures.  We found out that you can go to the first sub-layer of St. Peters to see the box where a wool necklace is located (commonly miss understood as St. Peter's bones).  We also climbed to the top of the dome to see the rest of Roma.  The worst part of the trip was that on the climb up to the top of the dome, my camera ran out of batteries.  The rest of the week I wasn't able to take pictures.