More Sheep. And the pros and cons of studying near the Uffizi.

In my paper for History of Costume and Design, I think I may have written "Sui diti [Eleonora di Toledo] ha portato molti agnelli, uno un simbolo del matrimonio." 

I meant to say that she wore lots of rings on her fingers, one of which was a symbol of  marriage.  However, the word for ring in Italian is anello.  The word I used, agnello, means a lamb (yes, as in a baby sheep. Why do all my lingual mishaps have to do with sheep?).  This occurred to me AFTER I turned in the paper.  And that's not all.  I found out over dinner last night that the proper phrasing is ai diti.  Sui diti means literally on top of her fingers.  So here's poor Eleonora di Toledo walking around all day long trying to balance her symbolic marriage lamb (not to mention several other purely decorative lambs) on her fingers...

In other news, I had an hour between classes the other day, and it was rainy and grey, so I went over to the Uffizi for a bit (I still can't get over the fact that I can do that...).  I meandered through the gothic period, the late gothic, and the early Renaissance, and then realized I had about 15 minutes to get to class.  No big deal--the Uffizi are across the piazza from the Sede.  Not a problem, right?  Wrong.  Turns out you cannot go out the door you came in.  So I had to speed-walk through at least five centuries of art, three staircases, and seven (I mean that quite literally.  I counted.) gift shops in order to get to the exit.  I also passed about ten emergency exits on the way, but I figured being late to history would not go over well as an emergency with the security guards.  In all it took me a good ten minutes to get out (and that was without stopping to look at anything on the way--although I did get held up in the 18th century in a narrow hallway when the group in front of me stopped to look at something), and the exit is at the back of the museum, so it took another three minutes to get around and then across Piazza Signoria, and then a minute to run up the stairs, and I was very nearly late to class ("sorry I'm late, professor, I was looking at 600-year-old art and forgot to check the time..."  too bad it wasn't my art history class!), but wasn't actually late, so that was all right.