There was a book I've seen in bookstores called Brunelleschi's Dome. I liked its cover. They say never judge a book by its cover. I do that all the time. It turns out this guy built, at the time, the largest dome in the world. Actually a double dome. And it's in Florence. There are no skyscrapers in Florence so it was huge then and its still huge. And I just like saying Brunelleschi. Italian probably has the most fun words to say. "Brunelleschi". And if you move your arms a lot or just touch your middle finger to your thumb and wave your hand around, you really feel Italian.
Before we got there, we saw a couple of monasteries. I know it doesn't sound that interesting. In fact, kind of the point of a monastery is to not be too interesting. But they were. I had heard of Benedictine monks, but didn't really know what that meant. Now I do. Saint Benedict's monastery is up a terrible hill. I saw it from a distance and just knew we wouldn't be taking this big old bus up there. But here we go. An incredibly steep hill with a road that went back and forth on it with really sharp turns. Just awful. I felt closer to God just going up that hill. (Pictured on the left is the Hill of Terror. You can barely make it out, but the monastery is on top. We foolishly took a bus up to the top.) And we were also at St. Francis of Assisi's monastery. Its in Assisi. I hadn't really connected the dots on that one, but it makes sense. Both were kind of austere, but again, that's the point. I bought a St. Francis shirt. It is written in Italian, which as I mentioned is a fun language. I'm not certain what it says, but I doubt something with St. Francis' picture on it is going to be too profane. Our tour guide said it was something like "Do what is necessary and what is possible, then you will be surprised to find you can do what is impossible." Francis is probably wrong on that, but still, cool shirt.
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