by: Bret Lott
Creative Writing Professor Bret Lott is leading the summer, 2017, study abroad program in Spoleto, Italy.
Saluti!
Today was loaded—and these pictures won’t do much toward sharing the whole experience.
As with each year, the walking tour of Firenze was led by our own Alexandra Lawrence, College of Charleston Class of ‘98, who has been living in Florence for twenty years as an editor and writer and historian and part time tour guide. So accomplished is she with her touring expertise that she led Prince Charles (that guy again!) on his private tour of the city last year; two years before, she gave Beyoncé (a singer of some renown, I am told) her private tour as well. You have to be someone good at what you do to be THE person the city of Florence chooses to guide Prince Charles and Beyoncé both around this place, a fact not lost on the students. They listened, they looked, they learned.
We walked all over the place—approximately five miles, according to the Fitbit—including Piazza della Repubblica, the Palazzo Vecchio, and a visit out onto the Ponte Vecchio, where the students took in the morning stillness of the Arno River. The tour finished with a visit to the Accademia, where Michelangelo’s David stands, and where until only last year they wouldn’t let you take pictures. The building itself, a museum housing not only David but hundreds of other works, primarily sculptures, has an architectural beauty all its own, and I hope no one minds the picture here of the skylight that allows Michelangelo’s masterpiece to be viewed in natural light.
Finally, the day ended in our annual wine-tasting salon with Count Niccolo Capponi, a dear friend of the program who has for years educated us with his insightful candor, keen wit, and elegant spunk on what it means to be a Florentine (his family has lived on the Arno just across from the Uffizi since the 13th century) as well as leading us on a tasty tour of the produce of his family’s winery, Villa Calcinaia. And finally, finally, in his indefatigable generosity, he invited us to his family’s palazzo, that one on the Arno across from the Uffizi, where since the 14th Century his family has been ensconced. There, up in his study, he brought out family artifact after family artifact, and let the students look closely at them, hold them—he allowed them to touch history in a way none of them ever had before. None of them, for instance, had ever held in their hands a document signed by Henry VIII asking the Count’s family to help amass troops for a possible war; and none of them had held a first edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn inscribed to the Count’s great grandmother on the occasion of a visit to the palazzo in 1892.
Afterward, we all went, the Count included, for pizza a couple doors down from his palazzo.
I told you these pictures wouldn’t do the day justice.
Alexandra and students at the Piazza della Repubblicca.
All quiet on the Arno (with the Uffizi on the left; the Count’s palazzo is the three-story orange place on the right).
‘David’ in his rightful light.
Henry VIII’s royal seal, handled by students who can’t believe this is happening: Chris (red hair), Alex, Kaileigh, then the Count holding court, with Caroline and Brett across the way, agog.
Kaileigh with the autographed copy of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ to the Count’s great grandmother—it’s easy to tell how Kaileigh feels about holding this (Kara and Mary are pretty excited too)!