Ravenna and Co.

The Only fresco i saw.




The Monestary.



Ravennas famous stained glass windows. (in real life they look like blown amber.)


Jhon baptising Christ (mosaic)



One of William Blakes illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy


Today I woke up at six twenty-five to jaunt off to Ravenna. Second biggest comunne in all of Italy. It was a class field trip. Conected with the classes: geography, art and history. Ravenna is famous for its mosaics and is said to be the birth place of mosaics.

It is filled to the brim like any other Italian city with churches, cathedrals, and baptistries. And like any other Italian religious building it is filled with art. The most common kind of art you would find in an Italian church would be frescos. The chuches we saw in Ravenna had lots of the general art you see in other cathedrals. But no frescos. All the walls were covered in mosaics. Mosacics of Christ, the apostles, oh and they loved to make mosaics of birds and sheep.

We stayed in the city all day.(Until 8 O'clock.) We saw two cathedrals, one monestary, two baptistries, one orthodox church, and one (and not the only one) Dante's tomb.

Now let me tell you a little bit about this Dante guy. He wrote the divine comedy and many other poems. He wrote them in the Florentine dialect, which became the modern Italian. Which is why he is so important to Italians. He was kicked out of Florence and so he moved to Lucca, Pisa and later Ravenna where he died. When he died, Florence demanded his body back. They didn't get it. But that didn't stop them from building him a special tomb without any bones. This explains why the tomb in Ravenna isn't Dante's only one.

Today I Got My First Driving Ticket.

Today we went on an escapade to the downtown Florence ghettoes. Not just to admire their beauty but to go to a land, a land called Vigilandia. It's a bit like Trafalga except that the place was run by the police. It was a big obstacle coarse with bike lanes, pedestrian zones, and car lanes. The point of the game was to obey all of the traffic rules and signs while trying to get all of the plastic tiles around the course. Except, there were cops everywhere watching your every move. The people who work at "Vigilandia" all played parts in this educational game. Some drove Go-Carts in certain parts of the course, some were pedestrians waiting to be let across, and others were traffic cops. The reason we were down at "Vigilandia" in the first place was because of their (the kids at school) mechanic class. So they had all been studying what each sign meant. Knowing this I thought, that along with the detailed instructions and the fact that they knew what the signs meant they would be a safe bet. Because I didn't understand the detailed instructions, nor did I have tech (the mechanic class) like them, I followed along. And so when each individual was placed somewhere on the track I was lucky enough to get behind someone. When the whistle blew and the time we had to complete the race started ticking away I followed her every move. That strategy worked for about the first twenty min. Why I didn't stick with her is because: when I got back my ticket at the end of the hour all of the times I had been pulled over by the police I was with her. Luckily, after the first twenty minutes I realized, "she doesn't exactly know what she is doing. Does she?" so I left. Which was a good matter. Because at the end of the course when she showed me her tickets and I showed her mine she had been pulled over ten times. Yikes!

Galileo Galilei

Today we went to the exhibit on Galileo. We also saw lots of other works of astronomy by other cultures. We saw Galileo's telescope and his finger! In the flesh and the bone. I wrote this report about some of his discoveries. Enjoy!

Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer Physicist, Mathematician , and
Philosopher. Born on the 15 of February 1564. He died on the 8 of January
1642. In Pisa. Pisa in those times was in the Duchy Of Florence. Galileo is known as “The Father Of Astronomy.” Stephen Hawking, a great modern physicist says that “Galileo, more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of
modern science.”.Some of the main things Galileo is known for are The Phases
Of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter (which are
named the Galilean moons.),And the observation and study of sun-spots. Galileo was the favorite astronomer of one of the most powerful political families of his time. The name of the family was The Medicis. When Galileo finished his first major observation of the heavens he presented the lens from his telescope to Lorenzo the Magnificent, The Leader of the Medicis in the time of Galileo. He had it framed in a trophy of ivory and marble and placed in the Uffizi.(his familys private offices.) It was later dropped and broken. And so I end my Story of Galileo Galilei’s life.