Vinci and two Medici Villas

We're playing catch again, so here's a trip that we went on on January 30th! Kind of a long time ago and we forgot to mention it on this here blog. Unfortunately this trip kind of turned out to be a bit of a let down. Not only was the weather really terrible and gray, but I was genuinely super excited to see some rad Medici villas because everything affiliated with the Medici in the city is SO spectacular and golden and shimmering and amazing. These villas must have been their attemps at a simple country life, because they were pretty bare and also not super well taken care of. The first one we visited was right outside the city and was Villa di Castello and it was the best. The gardens were not especially amazing but they were nice.





There were these amazing fake caves filled with beautiful fountains full of animals and crazy cool fountain sculptures, like this giant man who looks so cold!






This indoor courtyard was definitely the highlight. Unfortunately a lot of the interiors were remodeled during the 1900's by the last heir of the Medici family, so he put down these really ugly linoleum looking fake marble floors to cover the original terracotta tiles and a lot of the rooms were really stuffy and Victorian. This was luckily never remodeled.



The last heir, Emiliano's, study. The red is in velvet!


Then we drove to Villa Petraia, which was similar except that the custodians followed us like white on rice and pictures weren't allowed so we just have the outside and...


Ricardo and this cat. They made friends and then argued. And...


Two Chinese newly weds having their pictures taken! This is just one of the couples.


After the villas we went to a small village called Carmignano to stop at S. Michele to see Pontormo's Visitation. Super excited Christina is super excited. And a little smug looking for some reason?


The second to last stop was at the village of Anchiano to visit the house they think Leondardo da Vinci was born in. It was an adorable house with cheesy display of facsimiles of his drawings. The house and the landscape were beautiful though. Again, it's a state museums, so no pictures, and it was so small there was no escaping the single custodian.


Finally we got to Vinci which was so beautiful! Even if there wasn't really anything to see it was so god damn cute!





The only thing we did there was go into this RETARDED museum that had reconstructions of Leonardo's machines. It was pretty cool but really cheesy and not super informative. The cool part was that outside they had these awesome mirrored tile drawings in the floor and a cool fountain.



We wandered around some and Ricardo found some chickens and an olive grove!


and lastly Helen bought us all wine, cheese and salami and we went up on hill overlooking a small valley and drank and ate and then went home! It was a nice day over all.