Taxidermy and The Duomo

Monday morning I got up bright and early and walked over to the Museo di Storia Naturale "La Specola" a quick walk by the still closed up shops of the Ponte Vecchio.

the outside of the building...wait awaits me inside???

after hoofing it up 4 flights of stairs- paying my 6 euro to get in i was delighted at the rooms and rooms of amazing taxidermy!!! It's basically a zoological museum (34 rooms) put together in the 1700's and also 13 rooms of anatomical waxes. You aren't allowed to take pics of waxes so I took a bajillion pics of the taxidermy to make up for it.

wax heart

it was fantastic! i was pretty much the only person there and took as long as i wanted to wandering through everything. by the time i got to the waxes my brain was a bit shot after all the animals but the anatomical waxes were amazing as well!
check out this flickr set for all the animal pics.

after all of that i i walked home by way of some neat little shops. and i'm so glad i did! i stopped in at this sweet little shop where a gentleman makes the most amazing hats! i was interested in a yellow green hat but then i tried on this amazing bright red cloche and well...it had to be mine! i spent a few more minutes shopping in his shop and and chatting before i walked home for lunch before we went to The Duomo that afternoon!

hat work shop!

hats for sale

The Duomo! It really is quite striking! one of the things that I really enjoyed is because of where we were staying and walking we ended up coming upon it a lot unexpectedly. It would just pop up with it's beautiful facade now and again and catch me by surprise.the dome inside with it's beautiful paintings!

at one point they stripped off all the decoration outside because it wasn't finished and for ohh..about 300 years had contests and such to compete to see what it would look like.
In the museum for the Duomo they have a bunch of these large wood models and they are pretty cool.after wandering through the Museum and the actual Duomo we made a mad dash through the rain to the Battistero di San Giovanni right next to the church and oh my goodness was I glad we did.
We walked in and i thought "oh that ceiling!!!!!!" it is all made from teeny tiny tiles and lots of gold ones to boot. it was beautiful. we chilled out on the benches for a while before braving back out to the rain.
late afternoon -wandering around for a bit (doing some more shopping of course) we felt that cocktails were in order and because cocktails are generally pretty expensive it italy we figured lets make the most of it! so here we are at Gilli on Piazza della Repubblica drinking 12 euro Americano's and 8 euro glasses of Proecco. It was fantastic! We sat and chilled out- wrote postcards and gossiped about all the people around us who were also sitting in the amber glow of this beautiful tent right on this beautiful square.

mmm...americano!