"By Jove, everything here is striking and decorated with outstanding beauty." -Leonardo Bruni

Every once in awhile, one of us looks around and sighs with a "ridiculous" or "unbelievable" or "this is absolutely insane." It's quite beautiful. And ridiculous/unbelievable/absolutely insane.

Today, after sitting in the unbelievable gardens of Villa La Pietra reading up for art history and taking a break for lunch (one of the cooks came up to me, concerned: "va bene? va bene?" to which I smiled and laughed: "Si si! Va bene!") we had our first art history class. We have loads and loads of reading to do, but I can tell this class is going to be great. Today, after a brief introduction (during which Jane - our professor - mentioned Boticelli's The Decameron, which I got really excited about and summarized to the class, like a nerd), we went over to Villa La Pietra, the main villa of the five-villa estate that is the NYU campus. La Pietra is now a functioning museum, so we were shown the ridiculous abundance of art inside the Renaissance-building villa, and then, of course, we received the tour of the gardens, complete with fountains, endless statues, meadows galore, a butterfly garden and a natural stage complete with perfectly trimmed hedges as "wings." Might need to jump up there and whip out some shuffles and pirouettes.  Pictures from the garden! :

Un cane!

reading in the garden

one of the 30-something designed views from the garden at La Pietra

That's all for now! A group of us officially booked ourselves a hotel at Viareggio (the BEACH) this weekend, and three of us are shooting for Barcelona next weekend. We'll see!  Off to read Machiavelli for George's class tomorrow. A domani!

Ciao Amori!

Laura