Before Rome, we stayed in Florence for a while and went to a lot of museums there and got our fill of the Michelangelo sculptures, even the tremendous and powerful sculptures in the Medici Chapel, Day and Night and Something and Something Else, which I'd been looking forward to more than anything else we'd planned to see, because I read about him sculpting them in a book while the 2nd movement of Beethoven's 7th symphony played in the background and I wept and it was one of those transcendent moments that you read about that only happen to me when I'm reading about them, and then not all the time.
But it was a let down because all these school kids were there in the Medici Chapel when we went, and the little bastards ruined it for me and I wanted to kill their teacher for bringing them because I wanted to hear Beethoven while I gazed upon Michelangelo's immortal comment on the vanity of it all instead of their nasty little squeaky voices parroting third-rate art history textbooks.
I'd also wanted to draw at least one of them, maybe Night, or Day, or the other ones, but I was too flustered and there was no place to sit. I did get a chance to draw the David though. He's huge! I made a funny joke; "If that's David how big was Goliath?" but I didn't word it correctly and it fell flat. I also had the feeling that a lot of grandpas had come into that very museum and made the same joke, and thinking that made a part of me die inside.
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