We catch a bus every morning around 9:00 (here’s a picture of us making our way to the bus stop) to the recently vacated studios of The Florence Academy of Art. I hear the new place is beautiful, but we are thrilled to have use of their old studio. All the walls are painted a dark forrest green. There are black curtains blocking light in strategic places, allowing control of the artificial lighting to be used for lighting your subjects, portrait or still-life. To get to our studio, we walk down a long dark forrest green hall which is lined on both sides with small dark forrest green studios (large enough for probably one artist each) with black curtains covering the windows. Some rooms still have little tables set up for a still-life. Our studio is a large dark forrest green room at the end of the hall, with black curtains. Models, easels, a stand for the model and a spotlight were provided to us by the Academy. We’ll be working from 9:30-3:30 every day.

This afternoon, after working hard in the studio all day, we caught the bus home to our villa and washed the pastels out of our fingernails - or tried to. We went back out onto the streets and caught another bus to the Uffizi Gallery to see paintings and sculpture from the 12th to the 17th centuries—Botticelli, Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raffael—to name a few. Previously the private collection of the Medici family, the works were given to Tuscany.

We returned home tired and aching. Ivano and Debra had fresh hot pizza, fresh cheese ravioli with mushrooms, salad and much appreciated prosecco.  We sat around the long rectangular table for a long time and talked and laughed and finished our dinner with a biscotti-type cookie, cantucci, which you dip into a liquor.


One final thing, Kim McKerracher, your name has come up quite often the last couple of days. In your honor we also pulled out a bottle of lemoncello and toasted you!

To Kim!