In graduate school I did a summer class in museum/art librarianship in Florence, Italy. One of my classmates is my now good friend Meredith. We’re both Jersey girls, we both like food, art, shopping, we’ve done a fair amount of traveling, we can sort of laugh and raise our eyebrows at absurdity going on around us…we bonded. But we haven’t lived near each other much in all that time, so now that she’s back in the area we’ve tried our best. She’s working a 6 month contract at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and while the museum is closed on Mondays staff can bring in guests. We’ve been excited about this for ages, and today (with her thesis done!) we finally had Meredith Monday at the Met. And I got some very cool photos of the empty museum. I had a blast.

The empty Great Hall.

The Temple of Dendur.

The Charles Engelhard Court, part of the new American Wing that reopened this spring. That facade is the front of Martin E. Thompson’s Branch Bank of the United States, a 19th century bank on Wall St.

The Arms and Armor Court (my favorite as a kid).

Dusting the goods.