No, David!

Greetings, P2D2!

It is I, Lego Man. My tiny feet are very tired; Ginny and I have been walking all over the place.

We're very sorry, again, for our limited Internet access. How are you guys? What are you exploring this week?

The past few days have been very busy, and we've seen so much--but two of the things Ginny thinks you might want to hear about were our trips to the Galileo Museum, and to see a sculpture called The David.

The Galileo Museum was wonderful; we saw all kinds of tools that Galileo and other scientists used when they were exploring some of science's basic principles. We saw old-fashioned telescopes covered in beautiful marbleized paper, some of which were almost as long as the Preschool 2 classroom--and we saw a large room of very old, enormous globes that Ginny loved. Do any of you have a globe at home?

In Preschool Two, you've talked a little bit about maps in the past...but you've never talked much about globes; globes are another 3-D way of displaying the map of our entire planet, and sometimes globes even have small bumps to show you where the land rises very high--in particularly large mountain ranges, for example. In Galileo's time, about four centuries ago, globes were made by taking a gigantic wooden sphere and then applying papiér mâché to it. After the papiér mâché had dried, an artist would work on carefully applying the map itself. Do any of you remember making all those papiér mâché piñatas earlier in the fall? Ginny tells me that some of you are serious sluggers, when it comes to cracking open a piñata.

Something very unusual about the Galileo Museum is that, along with all of the beautiful old scientific equipment, they have a display of Galileo's finger...and one of his teeth. The finger and the tooth are kept in glass; Lego Man feels that this is both totally disgusting and totally awesome all at once. Galileo's finger, in case you are wondering, really does look like it's about 400 years old. Yucko.

After the Galileo Museum, Ginny and I did a lot of exploring. Towards the end of the day, though, we went to another museum called the Accademia. This museum is one of Florence's most famous (and, ugh, most crowded) places, because it houses a sculpture called The David. Ginny says that Henry and a couple of other Preschool 2 friends might be able to tell you something about The David; many of you would probably recognize this statue if you saw it.

The David was carved by a man named Michelangelo; Michelangelo is responsible for so many beautiful things in Florence, but this one is well known because it is absolutely enormous. Ginny tells me that you all absolutely adore the No, David! books, and that you can recite most of them by heart. Does this fellow look anything like your beloved David?

The David is 17 feet tall. (Which is even longer than your shoes were that time that we took all of our shoes off and lined them up to see how big an apple tree typically is.) The simplest way of explaining this is that it started out as a gigantic slab of marble (from Carrara, which is in the north of Italy) that some people were working on, but then they changed their minds and just let it sit. Many artists wanted to take the slab and create a beautiful sculpture of David; David was part of a tall tale that many people knew well. (People often said that he had conquered a mean old giant using only a tiny slingshot and his cunning. That basically means he used his noodle, and didn't really want to hurt the giant or be violent.) There was a competition to see who might be best suited to work on the giant marble slab, and Michelangelo won...even though he was only 26 at the time. That might seem very old to you, but it's young for an artist. Michelangelo worked on The David for two years. Can you imagine working on something at the project table for two whole years? That would be like starting something in the Toddler 2 room, working on it every single day (instead of playing or having story time) and then finishing it at the very end of P2. Crazy! Actually, many of the masterpieces in Florence took much more than two years to create. There is a set of fancy doors here, on the local baptistry, that took one artist forty years to complete.

The David used to sit outdoors, in the Piazza Della Signoria (one of Florence's main squares, which is filled with nothing but beautiful sculptures...it's one of Ginny's favorite places to walk around) but he had to be moved several hundred years ago. There was one spring in Florence where it rained, rained, and then rained some more--David didn't have galoshes, or anything to protect him properly from the nasty weather. The statue of David was so important to the people of Florence, and so well loved, that they wanted to move him indoors to help him remain wicked handsome. So they moved him, from the Piazza Della Signoria, into the museum that Ginny and I visited today. He now sits indoors, in a quiet but sunny rotunda, and is perpetually surrounded by hundreds of tourists. The funny thing is, the people of Florence missed having David outside so much that they made a smaller imitation of his sculpture--and put it in the same spot, outdoors, where it used to sit. You can still see the copy-cat David; he sits in the Piazza Della Signoria, just beneath the Palazzo Vecchio, which used to be like Florence's town hall. There's even a THIRD copy-cat David that someone put in the Piazalle Michelangelo, a lovely little park that sits very high above the city. Ginny and I marched up there to watch the sun set earlier today...it's so funny to think that the sun set hours ago here, and you're just waking up from nap time!

There's a legend about the copy-cat David who sits in the Piazza Della Signoria; people say that on the night of a full moon, the copy-cat David jumps down off of his pedestal and walks around the town square, saying hello to people. (Everyone who tells this story says that David is very friendly. Tall. But mostly friendly.) Do you think that's true? Lego Man thinks that might be just another tall tale, but so what. There was a full moon the other night, in Florence; Ginny and I happened to be in the Piazza Della Signoria. She and I both know about the legend; the statue was standing completely still, but she started whispering to it. I thought I heard her saying: "I'd like a hamburger and french fries". (She tells me that the nap room children in Preschool 2 often pretend the wall doorstop is a drive-through window at a donut shop. Is this true? How awesome! And creative.) Do you think that David heard her? Do you think that he replied?

I'm thinking "probably not". But, then again, I have always been a glass half-empty sort of Lego Man.

Arrivederci! Ginny misses you, and I can't wait to meet you! (Soon!)

Love,

LEGO MAN (and Ginny)

ps: Sorry we don't have more photos from today. The museums wouldn't let us take photographs.