Petti Palace

Today we went to the Petti Palace as a group with Randal. I don't think there was a single person in the group who knew what the Palace was, but it ended up being one of the most extroardinary places we have visited thus far. It turns out that the Petti Palace is the most recent home to the Medici dynasty who ruled in the 17th century and the last descendents eventually died off in the 1940's. The tour guide told us that if someone comes up to us and says he is a Medici, we should tell him he is full of it, because they are gone. So it turns out, contrary to what he tells us, Andrew J. Magid is not a distant relative. Our tour guide was a unique guy. He wore yellow striped pants with a matching yellow watch. He was also brilliant, and knew exactly what he was talking about. When we entered the Palace, I didn't know what to expect. The art work and apartments used by members of the family were exquisite! In each room, there were about twenty to thirty peices of art work including a lot of Rafael's paintings. I was surprised that many of the peices he showed us were extremely dark and it was almost hard to make out the figure in the painting. However, he was able to give new meaning to them for us. After we went through the rooms with all of the art work we saw the apartments where the king and queen stayed. The queen's room was unbelievable. The bed was a queen size, ha ha, and a large intricate canopy hung overtop. There was a love seat that looked entirely comfortable and relaxing. Our tour guide told us that the windows, which are never opened, would let in so much light if they had been, that you wouldn't be able to see outside of the room. Seeing this Palace just made me want, once again, to be able to go back in time and see how it was when the Medici lived there and see how much they appreciated the art work that was their home.
The funniest part of the tour that cannot go without mentioning, was the quarrel between our tour guide and another one of his "collegues". We walked into one of the art rooms and he was about to begin telling us about the history of some of the paintings when this woman says to him "NO! I NEED TO DO IT!". Everyone was so confused because there were two separate tour guides with different groups. Before he could even respond, she rudely said "I am a guide! So I need to do it." Everyone was baffled and one of the woman working even came up and apologized to us. It was just hysterical and had to be mentioned.