The Best Museum in Florence.

And no, it's not the Uffizi.

It's the Death Penalty and Serial Killer Museum. No, I'm not making that up. This is the best kind of museum with wax figures. The point is not to scare, but to inform. Granted, even bad wax figures are scary because, well, they're of serial killers, but there were no surprising turns or things that moved.

The first room of the museum had some old school serial killers that I had never heard of but were frightening none the less. The man who you first get...acquainted with was the inspiration for the story of Bluebeard, but the fairy tale toned his story down considerably. He kidnapped, killed, dismembered, ate, and occasionally raped at least 800 children. At least. Children. Then the next lady was a dutchess convinced that drinking the blood of a virgin would keep her young forever ((Hocus Pocus, anybody?)), and when she was caught, they walled her up alive in her tower to die. Way to get this museum off and rolling.

After a room about the man who started criminology and the obligatory room of Jack the Ripper, we headed into the main room. This contained six of the modern world's most notorious serial killers.
Ted Bundy
John Wayne Gacy
Andrei Chikatilo
Albert Fish
Ed Gein
Charles Manson

Let's discuss my favorite two, shall we?

Albert Fish::
This man drove across the country so that he could eat a child from every state. But wait, there's more. He was addicted to pain, and would shove needles up into his pelvis from below. Some of them were so far in he couldn't get them out. After his execution, they found TWENTY-NINE needles in his body, rusting.

Ed Gein::
You've probably heard of this guy. Or one of the THREE separate movie characters he inspired. If you've seen Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or Silence of the Lambs(Buffalo Bill, not Hannibal), you know Ed Gein. Or at least part of him. How, you ask, can one man inspire all three movies? Thusly. Father? Dead. Mother? CRAZY religious and over bearing, so Ed grew up disgustingly attached to his mother. He was also slightly effeminate but learned to hide it. Then his mother died ((movie character 1 - check)). Ed believed that he was a woman, and went to graves to dig up bodies, take them home, and cut up parts to both decorate his house and create a skin suit of a woman to wear ((movie character 2 - check)). But grave robbing wasn't enough, so he took to luring women into his seemingly innocent house in the middle of nowhere and killing them ((movie character 3 - check)).

Other than that, I saw an excellent "staged reading" type of performance of Carmen, and went to a fresh olive oil market. What did you do this weekend?