Before Christmas, Block 5 PRE students visited Florence and Siena. This was a visit designed to provide us with background information for our Utopia projects that we will be doing over the forthcoming term, in which we will be required to create a vision for a perfect society.
This visit gave us the opportunity to see the effects of good and bad government on a society, and how a society runs.
In Florence we visited the Duomo, which was astonishingly beautiful, and depicts the kingdom of heaven; a type of utopia.
It was commissioned by the Medici family, who were very influential during the renaissance period. A visit to Santa Croce gave us the opportunity to see the tombs of Michelangelo, Machiavelli and Galileo, whilst the amazing Uffizi Gallery was an opportunity to see some of the most amazing artworks by people such as Botticelli, Da Vinci and Titian, again a lot of them Medici commissions.
On the final day, we visited Siena, where we saw frescos of good and bad government in the Palazzo Pubblico, and visited the Sienese Duomo, which was absolutely beautiful.
It was a visit packed full of amazing artworks and architecture, and we had the wonderful tour guide Erika with us (who has worked with Bedales twice before on Music tours), as well as our teachers of course!
In addition to all this fantastic culture we managed to find time for delicious Italian ice cream, and some exploration of the cities as well as some shopping! All in all it was a fantastic trip, and I feel that we all learnt a lot and had a brilliant time; so a huge thank you to all the teachers that made it happen.