Yellow Field

It's canola (rapeseed). There were a bunch of these around.

It's spring!

There's fluff about

It blows around. This is the source (it's a photo from my cell phone, so the quality's not that good):

Sunday Sightseeing

Kristen made it here on Tuesday, though one of her bags took a while longer. I’ll leave it to her to describe her process of getting used to Italy. Today was our first day of exploring and sightseeing together, and we wanted to go to the Rose Garden, which is only open for another week (and is located very close to the Iris Garden). We went there by bus and got off a stop early, at the church of San Miniato al Monte, an 11^th century Romanesque church located a little above the Piazzale Michelangelo. I really like this style of church for its simplicity, and this one boasted some nice frescoes as well, as well as a gilded mosaic above the altar. We’ll have to come back sometime to hear the monks chanting (apparently they do that every afternoon). We then walked down to the Piazzale Michelangelo, but didn’t linger for too long since it started lightly raining. Right there was the Rose Garden, which we walked through, but unfortunately it seems like it was a few weeks too late for roses – most of them had already bloomed. So we just walked back into the city, stopping to get gelato (ricotta & figs, and orange chocolate, among other flavors) on the way before taking the bus back to the apartment.

Later this afternoon, we went to Ikea for a couple of small things. It seemed like half of Florence was there – probably a consequence of it being one of the very few stores that are open on Sunday.

Iris Garden

Another beautiful spring day today, and I took the bus up to the Piazzale Michelangelo, from where there's one of the best panoramas of the city (the picture on the banner at the top of the page was taken there). It's definitely getting more and more crowded in the city as the high season of tourism has arrived.
But I was not primarily here for the view, but rather for the iris garden, open for only a few weeks in the spring. The iris is a symbol of Florence, having been the inspiration for the fleur-de-lis, and can be found on the city's emblem. There were truly hundreds of varieties of irises there in all colors imaginable. Apparently, there's also an iris competition, and some of the entries for 2010 were already planted.