THEY DON'T CALL IT FLORENCE IN ITALY

For some reason, they call it Firenze, which sounds a lot more Italian to me anyway. I understand it's the birthplace of the Renaissance, which ha ha come to think of it must mean "the birthplace of the rebirth". Okay then, let's just say it's where the Renaissance got its legs, or better yet it's where there is a whole lot of stunningly beautiful art and architecture and such that probably didn't get labeled Renaissance or anything else until years after the stuff got created. And just how talented were the artists that made all this amazing art anyway, I bet you're wondering. Thanks for asking, because I've got a really good answer. There's this really nice cathedral in town that they built a baptistry for in about 1500 and what do you know, they forgot to put doors on it! So to cover their tails they have a contest to see who can design the best doors. Now Michaelangelo gets wind of it and he enters the contest, and he doesn't even win! Michaelangelo, for crying out loud! Can you imagine having Michaelangelo and this other guy he lost to (his name was Ghiberti) in the same high school? They'd have gone undefeated in Art all four years for sure. By the way, Lisa is showing you the doors in one of the pictures below. She maintains that they are her favorite doors in the whole world, which is kind of embarrassing for me because my list of "favorite things in the whole world" is confined to things like doughnuts and cartoon characters from my childhood. Anyway, back to Michaelangelo. He's bummed out about losing, to the point that he considers giving up art to start a dry cleaning franchise with his brother in law. But then he comes to his senses, picks up a hammer and chisel and blasts his famous David sculpture out of a huge chunk of marble. And we got to see it, because there it was in a Florence museum called the Accademia. We'd have taken pictures of it but we weren't allowed, even though a lot of people did anyway. They were pretending they couldn't read the Italian signs which was pretty comical because most of them were speaking Italian like they know it pretty well.
So Florence was great, and I hope you enjoyed the history lesson. Most of what I said is true, although I did embellish a few details to improve the narrative flow. For instance, some respected scholars insist it was his cousin, not his brother in law.