Firenze day two

Day two in Florence has also been awesome. We started by visiting Santa Croce , which is kinda the Florentine Westminster Abbey, since it is full of monuments, like the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo.  The most impressive is the memorial to Dante, but he's buried in Ravenna.  Since we were there officially to pray, I did not take interior pictures. From there we returned to the Cathedral and did the tourist walk.  

We also visited two more museums  today, San Marco and the Accademia. San Marco was a Dominican monastery but the brothers there got kicked out twice(!) because Blessed Fra Angelico did the frescos in the cells and the public areas.  They are amazing and you can see literally see his life of prayer manifested in his art.

A few of the frescos 

Just down the street from San Marco is the Accademia.  It houses so many late Gothic early Renaissance religious masterpieces that you practically go numb, though at the end of the gallery is my personal favorite, John the Evangelist crushing the vices (sadly my photo is blurry).  And it also houses Michelangelo's David.  Everything else famous has been pretty much the way I expected it to look.  David is beyond my expectations.  He really is a masterpiece.  Tomorrow we have the entire city south of the Arno to do so we should be really busy.

Just on of the many