San Marco was originally a convent and a church, but is now a museum. It is famous for two Dominican monks who lived there in the 15th century: the painter Fra Angelico, and the preacher Savanarola (whose name I remember from AP Euro because it sounded like Salmonella). Anyways, there are two main attractions at San Marco. 1) Fra Angelico's "Annunciation" (a common Renaissance subject where Mary is depicted with an angel who gives her the news that she will soon be pregnant with the baby Jesus). 2) Fra Angelico painted an individual mural in each monk's cell. Each of these works shows a different scene meant to inspire religious meditation. Since there is no photography allowed in the museum, I sadly don't have any pictures of these, so you'll have to take it from me that they were amazing. Here's a picture of the courtyard though:
After San Marco, I was getting super hungry, and this presented a dilemma for me, because I had never eaten by myself in a restaurant before, and it is, frankly a little intimidating. Whenever I see people eating by themselves, I always feel bad for them and wonder why they don't have any friends, and why, if they don't have friends, they would subject themselves to the humiliation of eating alone. I tried to avoid this experience by going to the Mercato Centrale and getting a sandwich or something, but of course they were closed, it being Sunday. So I bravely bit the bullet and asked for un tavolo per uno. No one gave me weird looks, and I actually enjoyed eating alone. I got to people watch and really concentrate on my food. No one was trying to talk to me or get me to hurry up and finish because they wanted to get on to the next thing. It was just one way in which this trip has been surprising so far. I thought I wouldn't like traveling alone, but I actually love it, being able to make my own schedule and only do what I want to do. At the same time, being here without my family is super different. I've never really been a "tourist" in Italy in that when I've been here before we were always traveling with Italians and doing more "local" things. It always surprises me when someone speaks English to me at a restaurant when I try to order in Italian. I'm glad that I'm at least living with an Italian family, so there is some degree of authenticity.
After my surprisingly enjoyable lunch, I walked over to San Lorenzo. You may remember that I talked about San Lorenzo a couple of days ago, when I went to the Medici Chapels. This time I went into the church proper and remembered another thing I had forgotten about Italy: the dress code in churches is taken very seriously, and if you break it, they make you wear what I can only describe as a paper dress to cover your shoulders and legs. While traveling alone is fun, it is less fun when you are the only person in a huge church wearing a paper robe.
But anyways, San Lorenzo. San Lorenzo was designed by Burnelleschi and is a textbook example of Renaissance. Again, it was a building I studied in class, so I enjoyed seeing the real thing. Off of the main church is the "Old Sacristy" (as opposed to Michelangelo's "New" one), which was also designed by Brunelleschi. One really cool thing about it is that the dome over the altar shows the arrangement of the stars on July 4, 1442 exactly. Why? Unclear. But it's still pretty neat.
After that I just wandered around for a while. Everything here is so close together that I quickly ended up at the Palazzo Vecchio (city hall) and then the Arno. I'll likely talk more about these places later on when I go for real visits, but for now, here's a picture of the river:
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