MJ & my Museum Mission

I was up and getting ready by 7:45am this morning. Ugh, way to early for my liking but unfortunately the museums here in Florence tend to only be open until 1:30pm and I wanted to go to 3 today. I have assigned myself a little mission for the next 34 days which is to go to 16 museums. I thought if I was ever going to accomplish this, I needed to set a goal. So, my goal was 4 a week for the 4 weeks. Well last week I learned that most museums are only open until early afternoon so if I was ever going to make my goal it meant getting up earlier than should be allowed by someone on holidays, and just get it done.

So today was day 1. I was at the first museum by about 9:30am and was quite annoyed when I found the doors open (opening hours were Mon-Fri 8am-1:30pm) but the man at the door told me they were closed. There was a barricade around the door and all they could tell me was that they were closed, with no other explanation. So, unfortunately, I need to go back, a third time to this museum. I should interject here and say that I actually am not a fan of museums. I know, I know, we should all love museums because they show us our past and teach us all about history, but as harsh as this sounds, I just find them boring. I am a nature girl and a photography girl. Put me out by water and I could sit there content all day but put me in a museum where I see the same sculpture 3 times by different artists or 5 of the same paintings just painted with a different media and I could almost fall asleep. I have decided to do this little mission though and my main reason is that I bought this pass that gets me into all of these places and I don't want to see it go to waste. I have been to 4 already but feel in order to get my monies worth, I need to go to all. Ambitious? possibly... Doable? We'll see. ;)

So after failing for the second time at the San Marco museum, I left and headed to my second building. Well I was equally perturbed when I walked in and the lady told me that I can no longer use my pass at this museum and that it was going to cost me 6e to get in. So, what did I do? Yup, I turned and walked out.

I was really hoping that my luck was going to change because if not, I was going home. Well it did. I made it to my third building of the day and was able to use my pass and I toured through the museum. It was small but nice. The architecture in each building is always so grand. Everything was created on a very big scale 100's of years ago. They also had a tendency to make everything in marble or other precious stones so everything you look at is very colorful.

After leaving what ended up being the only museum that I could get into today, I decided to go to one that I have been wanting to go to for quite some time now. I made my way to the museum of Photography. I did have to pay to get in but this one was justified and I enjoyed my time looking through negatives, slides, camera's and of course pictures from as early as 1835 (when photography first came to be). They also had a display case that held many scrapbooks with family pictures in them. It was interesting to see because we think that scrapbooking is quite a new, fun thing to do to make our pictures tell a story. However, after seeing the photo albums today I realized that a hundred year ago, they also used their pictures to tell a story in their albums as they looked like works of art as opposed to just laying pictures in an album. All in all it was very enjoyable.

I decided to end my day today with a little Michael Jackson. They were playing the new MJ movie This is it, at the Odeon theater here and I had to go and see it. I was a little saddened when I was told that they didn't have popcorn or pop at this one though. What theater doesn't sell popcorn during movies? Just strange. What he did try to sell me though was a sandwich (which he had a whole bunch pre-made) and alcohol. Isn't it weird that you can go to a movie in the middle of the afternoon and instead of being offered popcorn and coke, you are offered a sandwich and a beer. I guess this yet again shows me the differences between Europe and Canada. :) So instead, I bought a bottle of water and went in to enjoy the show and I did indeed. It was a great movie/documentary and I was very glad I went. Ahhh, I miss MJ. He really is the King of Pop as far as I'm concerned. :-)