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Dear Folks,

Well, I hope you received and enjoyed the daily chronicles of our time in Rome.
The rest of the week was a little less organized and thus harder to treat in such a fashion,
but I will try to catch you up on it now.

Thursday was our last day in Rome, and we were free all day to do as we wished. Bridge
Mitchell and I got going about 10:30 to wander around the town. It was raining continuously,
and we were soon forced to buy an umbrella to keep the water from running down the back of
our necks. We went around some of the route taken the day before on our tour of Renaissance and
Baroque Rome, to set the impressions more firmly in our memories. Then we strolled on through the
downtown area, and caught a bus to go out to see the area of the coming Olympic Games. We went
first to a pair of stadia (one for track + field with not many seats and surrounded by huge white
sculptures of athletic figures; the other a large but very plain soccer stadium) built under
Mussolini. Then we walked (20 minutes away) to the central Olympic area on the north edge
of Rome. There are many apartment buildings under construction for athlete housing,
which will later be converted to low cost housing for Rome - a type of living facility already
very prominent, and effective in eliminating slum conditions. Adjacent to these apartments
are a pair of structures designed by the Italian architect Nervi, beautiful and imaginative
creations. One is a small, dome shaped basketball pavilion, the other a medium sized (50,000)
soccer stadium, which seems to barely touch the ground, it is so gracefully constructed.
From the Olympic area we walked back to the middle of town, stopping off for a light lunch
in a sort of automat, stand up cafeteria, then met the two girls purely by accident as
they finished their shopping and went on back to the hotel for dinner. Thursday night we packed
and went to bed early because Friday at 7:20 AM was departure time for Florence.

We arrived in Florence at 11:30, found a hotel near the railroad station, left
our luggage and ate lunch in a nearby restaurant before setting out to see the town.
We went first to the Cathedral, the second largest in the world (St Peters is larger). It is a
sort of mixture of styles - outside it is quite decorative looking, with use of white black, red
and green marbles, a fair amount of painting and sculpture over the doors, etc; inside it
is basically gothic, with very bare walls (this is emphasized by the size of the structure too) broken
only by some cornice work added during renaissance times (the church was built from 1296-1436).
In the side transepts were some very lovely stained glass windows which, though inconsistent
with the Gothic idea, added warmth to the atmosphere. Right next to the cathedral is
its bell tower, a campanile built by Giotto (about 1350), done also in the striped marble style,
a little gingerbread-like, but quite beautiful. Across the street is the Baptistry,
a simple dome-like structure of the same appearance, whose greatest value is the 3 magnificent
sculptured bronze doors of Ghiberti, showing scenes from the Bible, and
called by Michelangelo "the Doors of Paradise". From the cathedral we strolled through the
shopping area to Ponte Vecchio - an old bridge across the Arno which has a row of small (but
expensive) jewelery shops clinging to each side of it. Very picturesque and famous spot in Florence.
We walked on from here to the Pitti Palace, begun about 1440, a huge fortress like structure of large
sandstone construction. Then back to the Arno, which to me is much prettier than the
Tiber in Rome, and along it to the foot of Piazzale Michelangelo. From here we walked up the winding
path and steps to the Piazzale itself, a lovely open plaza 380 feet above the river, with a copy
of the Michelangelo statue "David" in the center and a splendid view of Florence and
the Arno valley. We got there just at sundown and I ran around to each side for
pictures. From here we walked down across the Arno to the church of Santa Ciorce, where the
tombs of about 20 famous Italians line the walls inside: Machiavelli, Galileo, Michelangelo,
DaVinci, Cillini, Al Capone (OOPS!), etc. Also a small chapel done by Giotto, but badly peeled.

Saturday was a beautiful sunny, warm day, ideal for sightseeing. We went (about 10
of us together with Herr Zimmerman, our German instructor) for about 3 hours to the Uffize
Art Galleries, one of the finest in the world, particularly for Renaissance painting. They had some
of the best of Boticelli, and some good Davinci, Durer, Holbein, Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, etc, etc.
Hundreds of works of which we really looked at only a very few.