Not dead yet.

I'm still here in Rome; I have not disappeared.  I've been very busy.  Projects are ramping up, and I'm still dealing with all the work we usually do.  Our first midterm was Wednesday, and the midterm for the other class is next Tuesday.

It's funny -- these are all my usual excuses that come along with this time of the quarter, but I am here, and there are churches and bus lines and tree-lined Trastevere streets and class dinners and gelaterias and the theatre.  Oh, the theatre.  We went to see a show, an acrobatic/modern dance interpretation of Dante's Inferno, and it was magnificent.

And there is laundry and cleaning the bathroom and changing the sheets and grocery shopping and all of that, too.  My treat, too, is watching Lost on the internet each week.

I have quite a few pictures to share.  I'm not sure why my heart hasn't been here, pouring it all out on this page.  It's all in there, and will be there forever.  There will always be so much to tell all of you.  Mainly, Rome has changed me for the better.  I am also aware that I will come back here, and that there will always be something I haven't seen, waiting for me to see it.

More soon, I hope.  I have quite a lot of work on my personal project to take care of this weekend, but perhaps I'll find some down-time to work on a post in the next few days.  I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew that my silence is a good silence, it means good things, and not that I am not loving every minute of this.

Le Scarpe Italiane

(That means "Italian shoes," but I guess Clarks aren't really Italian, are they?  Ah, well, I bought 'em in Italy, so they're Italian.)

So I went and bought new shoes the other day.  I went to the Clarks shop near the Pantheon because I've had luck with Clarks before, and it looked like they had several good pairs of walking shoes on the Clarks site.  Sadly, the selection at the brick-and-mortar store wasn't nearly as good.  Lots of very good-looking shoes, but nothing like I was looking for . . . until I looked at the side that was clearly full of men's shoes.

Now, I like a chunky shoe.  Have ever since the nineties, and have never really been able to get away from it.  Remember that scene in Can't Hardly Wait where Seth Green's character asks Lauren Ambrose's character about her shoes?  "What's wrong with my shoes?"

"Well, do they serve some sort of orthopedic function?"

Aside from the load-bearing work that my shoes, in particular, must do (which I guess does make them somewhat orthopedic in function in fact) I feel that they balance things out better visually for me.  The men's side of the store called to me with all sorts of stylish and sporty black shoes.  I waited until the shop cleared, and then asked for some help.

Of course I started with my standard opener, which is "Mi dispiace, ma non parlo Italiano molto bene, ma provo."  (This means, "I'm sorry, I don't speak Italian very well, but I try.")  She pointed out right away that the shoes I liked were for men.  I looked at the women's side, which was full of cute little flats and mary-janes with almost no soles on them, and said, "Ma ho bisogno delle scarpe da passeggio." ("But I need walking shoes.")  She walked over the women's side and pulled out the cutest, silliest little pair of what I suppose were women's walking shoes, but I just pointed at the support on the shoe I was holding and said "Maaaaaa...." ("Buuuuut....")

I pointed at another, plainer pair, just plain, tying black shoes.  Although the shop lady understood what I was going for, she couldn't let me go quite that far.  "Oh, no!  Not for you!  Not for you."  I assented, and so I got my men's shoes.  And they are sweet black sporty leather shoes and they felt like heaven the minute I put them on.  Between the new shoes and the fact that my feet have probably gotten a little used to the cobblestones, I'm doing just fine.  Only problem is, my prof Stuart admired them and said he might like to get a pair somewhat like them as well (he is pretty sartorially gifted, so it was a bit flattering).  I guess we'll just have to be sure not to stand next to one another.

At play in the fields of the dead

I was all set to bring you a post about things going on in the last week when the internet connection I’ve been using disappeared.  I’m hoping this is a rather temporary thing; for now, I’ll write it in a Word document and post it when I get a chance. 

Before I tell you about our day trip last Tuesday, I want to give you some background about me and art history.

I didn’t know that I loved art history until I was in my mid-twenties, when I took an Art Appreciation class at Seattle Central Community College.  I went on to take other kinds of classes, but I do suppose that it was exactly what community college is for; I took various classes until I found something I loved.  And I didn’t know that I loved it right away; it kind of sat in the back of my head, art history as something that I had never considered before, just hanging out there as one of the favorite classes that I’d had an opportunity to take. 

In 2005, right after my grandfather passed away, I decided to return to school.  It was becoming evident to me that I needed to undertake some sort of career path.  A few years earlier I’d thought about moving back to California, and at that time, because I’d basically taught myself how to do my job as a medical transcriptionist at the radiologist’s office for which I worked, there were holes in my knowledge that seemed to put me out of the running for even scoring an interview with any Bay Area hospital.  I’d only worked in one specialty, and I’d never had an anatomy/physiology class, so while I was good at my job and learned quickly, I knew that it would be easier to get a job sight unseen if I had an education in medical transcription. 

I started researching schools, and then I started researching financial aid.  And it became evident to me that I could do something I really, really loved and also get financial aid to do that.  So instead of going for the three-quarter course in medical transcription, I decided to check out the community college near the apartment we’d just moved into in North Seattle.  They had art history courses, three of them, the triumvirate of survey courses that included overviews of ancient/prehistoric art, medieval & Renaissance art, and modern art.   So, I began to work through them, also taking French along the way because I thought that it would be helpful to art historical research. 

And I was good at art history.  I kept thinking of questions that couldn’t be answered in our overview textbook, and I spent hours poring over different editions of the thing, trying to answer every question posed to me.  I was especially enamored with the medieval and Renaissance art, but I had a professor who was challenging in more than one way:  He pushed me to learn, which was good, but he was combative and difficult, which was not.  For instance, when we complained that the assignments for research he was giving us were based on the text three editions out of date from the one we had, we realized that he had not changed these assignments since the older edition was current.  We were told to deal with it and we all had to fight over the one tattered edition that the library held that would answer all of our questions.  He would bark at us that we had it lucky, that when he was taking art history decades and decades ago that he had to sketch the slides to know what they were, that there were no carousels of slides for check-out at his library. 

Still, I loved every minute of the actual looking, the iconography, the secrets.  And really, that’s why I got into art history, because I love secrets.  I love it when a bowl of fruit is not just a bowl of fruit.  I remember the very secret that got me hooked, which is so pedestrian to me now, as I am being trained to use iconography as a tool but not to stop there:  In Botticelli's Primavera, there are all these apple trees in the background, and the professor told me that the apples there were probably related to the crest of the patron, the Medici (who had three apples in a pyramidal shape).   It all opened up for me in that moment, that there was a secret language that we were learning to read, that I knew then that the painting had always been beautiful but now it meant in an extra way.

As I got further and further into art history, it was the secrets that kept me going.  And when I got to the UW and started studying with the art history department there, I realized that the Renaissance and the Baroque really spoke to me, because above all, the humanists were of that age, and they seemed to love words as much as I did, but more than that, they loved the ways things meant.  They loved the way that words and images interacted with one another, the secrets they told, the special society of those who could read this language. 

Soon after I made it to UW I declared a minor in Comparative Religion, yet another discipline of arcane knowledge, yes, more secrets.  I studied the New Testament, researching literary devices in each of the gospels and looking at context for Paul’s letters.  I went on to study Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam.  I started to see trends.  It is amazing the way the human mind works, the things it needs, the way that we as a world developed and the seeming coincidences of the advent of things.  The cyclical nature that philosophers apply to things.  The idea of a First Cause and how to explain it, but also how to reach it, to communicate with it.  How to honor it. 

Art history seemed so huge to me when I started that I never thought that I would find a toehold in it.  The ways things shook out, though, I discovered that I was extremely interested in the Reform/Counter-Reform period in Europe and what came out of that.  So, one might say, Southern Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  I was guided a lot by the very professors who are leading our group here in Rome, and I’m honored to have been chosen to come along.  In fact, the way things worked out for me was rather perfect, things happening for a reason, and all that.  Most of you are aware that I had two back surgeries in late 2007 and early 2008, which caused me to miss two quarters at UW.  I was devastated at the time because I felt that I’d worked so hard to get to that point, and now I was completely stymied by this physical limitation.  But it turns out that if I hadn’t been delayed by those two quarters, I would have graduated last spring, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to come on this trip with these professors.  I also wouldn’t have gotten to study with two other professors that have greatly shaped my love of my time period – a Northern Baroque scholar who left the university the quarter after I studied with her, and the professor with whom I took two Spanish art classes who encouraged me to push myself and introduced me to a greater understanding of my old Iberian fascination.  On top of all that, my financial aid has worked out pretty nicely.  All in all, as hard as I’ve pushed myself, as hard as I’ve worked, it seems like things have fallen into place for me in the best way possible with my whole education in the last four years.  I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do with grad school, and when, but my education has been extremely rewarding and challenging and has really shaped who I am.   

Anyway, I seem to have gotten off onto a tangent.  What I wanted to tell you was that in the first art history class that I took, the one on ancient art, we spent a week talking about the Etruscans.  They were an old civilization, old I think even to the ancient Romans, and most of what we know of them is attached to their burial practices.  There’s something about these practices that is completely poignant.  I remember looking at this Etruscan sarcophagus that is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and being made kind of teary-eyed by the depiction of the couple embracing each other for eternity, right there on top of the sarcophagus.  I came to understand, even in that early class, that there was always something strange and ethereal about the Etruscans.  It turns out the Romans thought so too; they seem to have thought of them as an inferior society but at the same time held them up as spiritual adepts. 

During the information meeting for the Rome program, back at the beginning of the school year, I hadn’t decided whether I’d be able to handle Rome.  Mainly it was because of everything with my back, and how out of the world I had become, between being so vulnerable due to my physical limitations and being so immersed in academia.  Then they said that we would go to Tarquinia, where there was an Etruscan necropolis, and I remember this wave of heat washing over me, that kind of shiver you get when you know something is meant to happen.  I don’t even like ancient art all that much, and really the only time look very closely at it is within the context of the Renaissance, which sought to reawaken the greatness of antiquity.  But the Etruscans are different.  I told my mother about the meeting that night over the telephone.  She might remember: even just telling her about the possibility that we'd get to go, hearing myself say that we would get to see the Etruscan stuff, it made my voice crack with emotion.

That is emblematic of how I feel about art history.  Art history might put other people to sleep at parties (and I always fear that it might at the parties I attend, especially when I get talking about something and fear that  people’s eyes will glaze over), but for me, I can’t get enough of it.  For me, too, there’s another history immersed in all of it, and it is the history of my own mind awakening, realizing that I could be good at something, that I have fallen in love with it and have loved it enough to stay with it and to be rewarded by it. 

So we went to Cervetri and Tarquinia.  We got on a bus, early in the morning, and drove along the Lungotevere out of town.  Since all of our apartments and the Rome Center are in the historic center, it was interesting to see what the outskirts of Rome looked like.  Turns out there are strip malls in Italy, too. 

The bus took us about an hour out of the city to the necropolis at Cervetri.  Cervetri was entertaining to me because as we drove through it, I realized that it was reminding me of Santa Cruz.  It was a beachy sort of town, with painted apartment buildings with flat roofs, quiet streets with front yards.  As we were closer and closer to the necropolis, it reminded me of those field trips we used to take as children to the Natural Bridges in Santa Cruz, the early morning sun shining through the dew on all the green around us while we, the sleepy students, stepped off the bus to survey the Italian countryside around us.  Except the thing is?  There are tombs here that date back to 800 BCE. 

In a way the Etruscans are the ultimate secret.  Because all we have are visual objects and not written records, it's hard to say anything with certainty about their practices; the best we can do is try to piece it together, to try to avoid assigning 21st century motivations to what we see.  Estelle (one of the professors) pointed out that with the Etruscans we see perhaps the purest form of art history (what many would call archaeology, especially archaeologists):  we have only the object as the document.  She encouraged us to remember this when moving forward with art that seems to drown in all the ink spilled over its virtues and vices, that underneath centuries of writing there is always the object.  There is always the object that speaks for itself.  This is something that I have learned from her over the past couple of years (this is my fourth course with her, and I consider her something of a mentor), but this was a poignant and memorable touchstone, a reminder of how important it is to look.  To just look, first. 

The tombs were called tumuli, these mounds that were cut partly from the “living rock” – the rock that was just there naturally – and partly built with blocks (example at right).  I couldn’t help but think of hobbit holes, of course, but sans the wooden doors.  We spent a few hours hiking all over this necropolis, peeking in all the tombs, getting excited about armchairs made out of stone in some of the later ones.  It was quite the needed break from Rome – and amazing that just an hour outside of the city there was this utterly quiet place that was lushly overgrown, mossy and dark cut through with patches of golden sunlight, with hundreds of butterflies and a clutter of cats that were half-feral, half-fed from a bag of crunchies near the museum entrance.  (By the by, did you know that a collective of cats may also be called a clowder, a glaring, a pounce, a nuisance, a kindle, a kendle, and a destruction?  I think “clutter” is more evocative than “litter,” at any rate.)

After the Etruscan art history nerd’s paradise of a mixture of Indiana Jones Exploring: Beginner's Edition and academic discussion, we got back on the bus to go to Tarquinia to eat lunch and visit the museum there.  The bus “wouldn’t go up into the old city,” the professors said, which was exciting for the prospect of just what about the old city they all wanted to protect, but also daunting because the old city was up, up, and more up, and well, my body doesn’t do “up” very well.  I managed, even if I did lag behind just a little bit, but Tarquinia was the Cervetri/Santa Cruz mix tempered with medieval Italian town, perched on a hill above a vast panorama of the sea. (At right is a picture of us below the old town, looking out on said panorama, waiting for the bus after the museum.) I want to live there someday for a little while, just escape to Tarquinia and stay for the spring.  I imagine in summer it gets pretty touristy.  I liked how quiet it was just then, in the first week of April.

We hiked up a hill to where the museum was, at quite a brisk pace. (The photo at left pictures us leisurely walking back down it after lunch.)  But it was worth it, when we got to the top, because Stuart remembered a  restaurant there from when he led the Rome trip two years ago.  He popped in to find out whether they could/would accommodate all twenty-five of us, and it turns out that he and the owner remembered each other by sight.  We sat down in this great little place:  L'AmbArAdAm was its name, and I still haven't figured out the meaning or why all the random capitalization. I looked at the décor I realized that everything that looked medieval about the building it was in probably was medieval; I keep forgetting that in this place that is possible, and that while fakery exists, as likely as not you find yourself in a tabacchi (a tobacconist, where they sell smokes and just about everything else, from stamps to bus tickets) on the ground floor of a building that is three times as old as your home country. 

The professors explained the menu a bit, and I ordered one of the best meals that I’ve had since arriving in Italy.  Though the restaurant had an entire seafood menu, which I’m told would have been excellent, I’m not much of a fan of seafood.  What I had, though, was so good that I wrote it down, so let me transcribe from my notebook:  “Gnocchetti con asparagi, guanciale e parmesan, e per contorno insalata mista, con vino bianco e espresso lungo.”   The dish was the tenderest, most beautiful little gnocchi I’ve ever had, with bright green bits of asparagus and with guanciale, which is an unsmoked bacon made of pork cheeks/jowl (I’ll spare you the Wikipedia link, because the picture that accompanies it is best not to think about.)  It was a gorgeous primo piatto, which I had with a mixed salad on the side.  My tablemate Ryan and shared a half-bottle of the house white, which was refreshing.  To finish, mainly because we had the rest of the afternoon ahead of us, we went for espresso lungo.  I suggested this in particular because of everything I’d heard about not drinking coffee with milk after about 11 in the morning.  It turns out that there is something to this; milk doesn’t help with the digestive process, so one should never really get an espresso with milk after a meal.  (This great blog has an explanatory post on the subject.)  Trouble is, I don’t usually drink coffee black, but I didn’t want to commit a faux pas.  The lungo lets a little more water run into the shot, which dilutes it a bit.  We figured we’d try it.  We did, and to me it was so rich and strong that it made me shudder like I’d thrown back a gulp of whiskey!  I never have sugar in my coffee, but in this instance the addition of sugar worked out perfectly and it was caramel-y, warm, and finished quickly. 

After lunch it was on to the National Etruscan Museum, which is housed in a medieval building with much of the architecture still intact (pictured at right), and which comprises a large collection of Etruscan sarcophagi and various grave goods. We were beginning to run short on time, so we tried to hit the most important points, the stuff that the professors wanted us to see.  At one point it was almost time to go, but Stuart told us to pass quickly through one floor and check out something on the far end, coming up to meet them on the third floor, where there were some painted tombs set up in climate-controlled conditions for us to view.  A group of us tried to tear through that second floor as fast as we could, but we kept getting stuck on things – the jewelry, the armor, the pottery, the strange little ceremonial things, the set of false teeth (!!!).  I’ll probably always remember running into that jewelry room with my classmate John and it being as though we were kids in a candy store, trying to see everything but going much too quickly, stopping short when something would catch our eye, knowing we couldn’t linger.

We had one more site to visit, and that was the necropolis itself at Tarquinia.  This one was different than the one at Cervetri; these tombs were later and had paintings throughout. (At left is a tomb painting depicting a door to the underworld flanked by figures representing the Etruscan demon of death, Charun.) We spent 45 minutes descending into darkness, letting our eyes adjust, and then emerging into blaring sunlight again and again.  We all gathered at the end of that time to talk about the way that the burial practices seemed to change for the Etruscans and what that could mean for changes in their civilization in general.  Finally, exhausted, we boarded the bus to return to Rome, arriving there at about 7:30.  My poor flatmate Kit fell when descending the very steep back stairs of the Pullman (what Italians call those large tour buses), hurting her foot and back, so it was a somewhat frightening end to the day.  We bundled her off in a cab back to the apartment and another flatmate and I walked, slowly, back to the apartment.  A long day, but extremely rewarding, and an experience I’ll never forget.  Ever.  It was at once nothing and everything I’d thought it would be, back in that first art history course I took in the fall of 2005.

The next day was spent in class, and really, I can’t even remember what I did that day afterward.  I did run a few errands; it’s become a habit for me to pick up meat (prosciutto or salame) and cheese and bread from the various stores that sell each of these products, and throw them together with some tomatoes from the Campo fruttivendoli (fruit-sellers) for a kind of antipasto lunch.  By the end of Wednesday, my throat was scratchy, and I knew that one of my profs and several of the other students were feeling ill, so I quarantined myself in my room so I wouldn’t get anyone else sick.  Sure enough, Thursday and Friday, I spent in bed, reading and watching internet teevee.  On Friday afternoon I did go to the farmacia to find some medicine, being sure to look up how to say, “I think I have a cold” in Italian.  (Penso che abbia un raffredore.)  What I didn’t anticipate, in my out-of-it state, is that the farmacista would want to know more specifics, so I resulted to pantomime to explain that my ears were clogged and my sinuses were killing me.  Whatever he gave me helped.  I seem better now, though a small cough seems to linger and may require a return trip to the farmacia armed with, “And now, I need some cough drops.  Halls?” 

This has gotten long, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it.  I’ll stop here for now, since I’ve got reading to do for tomorrow.  I am happy and getting used to my surroundings, but there is always more to learn, always new places to go.  Rome is never the same twice, because something’s always under construction, old things are always being restored.  The program assistant, Lauren, told me today that she has never seen the Ara Pacis in all the times she’s come to Rome (I think 2001 was her first trip) because it’s always been in the midst of restoration, so she’s quite excited to see it.  We’ll be going there tomorrow, along with the Pantheon.

Alla prossima volta...

Down.

I've been sick with a cold/flu since Wednesday night, so that's why you haven't heard from me.  I've had more time on my hands because I basically sentenced myself to bedrest all weekend, but I just haven't been really up for posting.  I'm feeling mostly better now, though last night was strange because I couldn't sleep well at all and I'm really feeling it this morning.  I think it mostly has to do with this old Italian cot that I get to sleep on.  Hopefully I can take a nap on the much softer couch this afternoon.

Unbound.

I forgot to tell you what sometimes happens in Rome, though I'm sure you've deduced that the following is a likely thing.  Sometimes you are exhausted and your feet hurt and you can't figure out where the stupid bus stop is to take you back to your apartment.  So you go to the one closest to the Colosseum because you checked the ATAC (public transportation) website last night.  But when you checked the ATAC website it gave you the wrong bus number, so while you get on a mercifully empty bus that seems to be headed in the general direction of your apartment, you realize when it comes to the end of the line that you are a few blocks off.  You are also in a part of town that you have not been to yet (which can happen if it is only 5-6 blocks from your apartment, simply because you have not gone east yet, because the Rome Center and the grocery store and the gelateria and all the restaurants you've eaten at are west, you see).  So you get off the bus and you are near the Piazza Colonna, and thank god for huge columns dedicated to really old and important men, because how else can you find where you are on the map?  And in trying to figure out where you are, you cross the street and try to find a doorway to stand in so you don't block the crazy Pasquetta foot traffic since the most part of Rome has the day off and is just walking around.  Milling about, as they say.  And you are a little frustrated, but you start walking, and you turn around, and all of a sudden you see a plaque on the side of a building that is telling you in Italian that ON THIS VERY SPOT in 1819 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Prometheus, Unbound.  Ta-da.  You are in Rome, and it is a Monday.

The days keep going by and I keep thinking that I will post, but then I either run out of time or out of energy.  I have a few moments now so I will post some reflections, along with some photos.

We have been very busy since I last wrote.  Last Thursday, we went to see some Imperial sites, all the ancient stuff that one thinks of when one thinks of Rome.  We started at the school and walked through the Jewish Ghetto, which runs up on some ruins (in fact, many of the buildings there—and all over Rome, really—are constructed of pieces of this and pieces of that:  It is not unusual, especially in this area, to see a building put together from ancient ruins, with a medieval tower and Renaissance structures as well, with of course modern conveniences like glass windows or an awning over a balcony.  Or a roof.

We went then to the Campidoglio, or the top of the Capitoline Hill, where the Capitoline Museums are, set alongside a piazza designed by Michelangelo.  Our first stop was in Santa Maria in Aracoeli (St. Mary of the Altar of Heaven), which was the first church I went inside this whole trip.  And what a church it is!  Legend has it that this is where the Tiburtine Sibyl prophesied the coming of Christ, so it is a pretty important ecclesiastical site, but because of its situation on the Capitoline Hill there’s a lot of temporal importance attached to it as well.  From a small courtyard outside of the church you can see vast views of Rome. 

Every once in a while, in moments like that, it hits me that I am actually here.  There is so much wrapped up in all of this because it is my last quarter as an undergrad, and I’m trying to figure out how I want to move forward with further grad work.  I’ve worked hard to get to this point, and I want to be sure to enjoy it as much as possible.  But it is also a lot of hard work being here.  The professors I have are . . . well, demanding is not the right word, but they do not want this to be a tour.  It is a rigorous academic program.  We do a lot of reading, a lot of discussing, a lot of close looking, a lot of thinking.  It is the perfect thing for being as in love with art history as I am.  But it is also mentally and physically exhausting. 

Anyway, we went on to look at the Forum, and on to Trajan’s Column and the Arch of Constantine.  It was a long day, and after nearly six hours of walking we were finally back at the apartment.  Fortunately that was our last day of class for the week, so I could rest.  I’m having particular trouble with my feet on this trip.  My back is still going pretty strong, which is surprising to me considering all the troubles I’ve had with it over the last few years.  But I’m more than a little worried about my feet.  My miracle foot lotion only does so much; mainly I just have to do my best to rest them whenever I can.  This is not always possible at the sites we go to; there’s not always somewhere to sit.  I am trying to find the balance between being worried about my own self and doing what’s good for the group; no matter how much trouble I’m having, I can’t exactly ask twenty-five people to move away from a piece of art that we’re discussing just so I can sit down.  This became a problem today, because we went to three churches and there was absolutely no sitting; it ended up being four hours of walking, standing up on a bus, and standing at the sites.  I wouldn’t trade having seen these sites for anything, but by the end of the last one my feet were hurting so badly that I felt like I might yell; when the class ended I limped to the nearest pew in the church we were in, sat down, and got a little emotional.  The combination of hurting that much and being in this amazing basilica with early Renaissance frescoes and 12^th century mosaics just made the tears spill over for a second.  Embarrassing, to say the least. 

I think I need to find some new shoes; the ones I brought are not serving me that well.  Maybe that will help. 

Ugh, I’m so sorry to complain.  I must sound like the world’s biggest ingrate.  I don't mean to.  Even with everything going on, with how crazy and wonderful and intimidating and invigorating and confusing this city is, underneath it all I feel like I’m doing what I was born to do.  To look at all of this and to make connections I’m being taught how to make.  To stand up for myself by showing up every day, being as present as I possibly can, to stay focused and be good at this. 

This last weekend was an interesting one because of Easter.  In fact, the whole first week here was different, probably, than any other week to arrive in Rome because it was Holy Week.  As such things were just a little bit out of the ordinary, a different kind of tourist, and maybe more of them.  On Sunday morning I woke up and it was raining outside, and after a bit of thinking I decided not to go with my flatmates over to St. Peter’s to watch the Pope’s Benediction.  Even though I knew it would be quite the cultural experience, I also  knew it would be physically miserable, and I’m not really a big fan of large crowds.  So, I stayed home, caught up on my reading, drank five shots of espresso made in our little Bialetti stovetop coffee maker, shaved my legs, and put my feet up.   (Shaving my legs doesn’t sound like it should be such a feat, but our shower situation is less than ideal here.  My bathroom, for instance, does not have a shower curtain; it is a “Turkish-style bath” which I guess means just that it is all tiled and you just hope it dries rather quickly.  Mainly what that means here, with no real air flow to speak of, is a dank bathroom that more often smells of mildew and mold than is strictly pleasant.  Shaving my legs in that shower means that the water would go everywhere, and I just don’t have the heart to horn in on the other bathroom during the week, when it’s being shared by so many other people who all have to be somewhere by 9 o’clock.  So, you know, shave the legs on the weekend, and don’t wear dresses by Friday, I guess, right?)

We were warned to do all our shopping by Saturday because nothing would be open on Sunday or Monday.  Today, Monday, is Pasquetta, which I think means “little Easter.”  Basically it’s a state holiday where no one goes to work and just enjoys the long spring weekend.  There were a ton of people out today.  Sadly, it rained yesterday and some of today, unusual pouring rain that didn’t stop in the short time people duck under awnings to wait it out.  That didn’t stop people at all. 

A side note:  Apparently Pasquetta doesn’t stop people from ripping you off, as my friends Lori and Connie and I learned when we went to this charming little restaurant called L’Arcano.   We were walking around, having gotten out of class late, and we were famished.  We saw this beautiful restaurant, and the menu on display outside didn’t seem too pricy.  We went in to sit, and the waiter suggested some antipasti of bruschetta.  We assented, and he sort of mumbled something about “bruschetta, a little meat, a little cheese.”  A few minutes later, this enormous platter of bruschetta, prosciutto, and mozzarella comes out.  It was delicious.  We then had some pasta (cacio e pepe:  pasta with only a little cheese and pepper) and split a quarter-litre of house white.  I thought we were being frugal.  It was a beautiful meal.  But then the check came.  € 95.  NINETY FIVE EUROS.  For lunch for three people.  Turns out, those innocuous antipasti cost €45.  The other parts of the meal were quite frugal indeed, but it turns out that the antipasti was charged per person, even though it all came on one platter.  I later confirmed this practice with a flatmate who’s traveled extensively in Italy, who said that’s usually how it was done.  Essentially, she said, they were within their rights to charge us that way, but he was sneaky about doing it.  It’s too bad, too, because I would have returned to the restaurant, and probably brought my six flatmates with me.  So a word to the wise, don’t accept offers of antipasti before looking at the menu, confirming the price, and finding out the total price of it.  Live and learn. 

I didn’t tell you about today’s churches!  Today, we visited Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (which is built on an ancient temple dedicated to Minerva, hence the sopra [“above” or “on”] part).   This church is only about two blocks from our apartment and features Bernini’s sculpture of the baby elephant with an looted Egyptian obelisk on his back.  We mainly looked at the Carafa Chapel there, but I will go back soon to just spend time in the church and look in all the nooks and crannies.  Then we took a bus down past the Coliseum to visit San Clemente, where there is a Masolino chapel that is in a sort of International Gothic/Renaissance mixed style.  It was unexpectedly closed, but would open at noon, so we decided to kill time by heading just up the hill to the fortress church of the Basilica dei Santi Quatri Coronati (Church of the Four Crowned Saints).  The original building was converted to a church in 499.  After a fire, it was rebuilt in the 11^th century in rather combative times (hence the fortifications).  It later became an orphanage run by Augustinian nuns and still houses an Augustinian convent.  It also houses a small oratory with extremely well-preserved 13^th century frescoes that tell the story of Constantine giving over temporal power to San Silvestro (pope from 314-335) after Silvestro cured Constantine of leprosy by baptizing him. 

We went into the basilica, which is under construction/restoration, and a few of us noticed a small door to the left, with a sign inviting us to ring a bell to visit the cloister there.  A nun answered the door and smiled at us, inviting us in.  As I stepped over the wooden threshold, I saw in the perfectly manicured cloister garden a rosebush bearing a single red rose in full bloom.  Of course there is a lot of significance that goes with cloistering, enclosed gardens, and rosebushes (think virginity, virginity, and virginity, appropriate for a convent).  It was quite a touching sight; I’ve seen it represented in dozens of Renaissance paintings, but to see it here in this beautiful cloister, where the nuns still live the symbolism of it, was so representative of Rome for me – a place where every day people go to work and they walk by ruins that are thousands of years old, where the art that I’m studying is twice as old as my home country, and it’s just around the corner from me, across from Pantheon Internet and what is becoming my favorite gelateria.  This is why I guess I feel like I’m doing what I was born to do, because I never could imagine loving to study anything else as much as I love this.

I’m not sure how often I’ll write, because as I mentioned before, the schedule is quite rigorous and I’m trying to keep up.   Maybe shorter entries might be easier, because I want to be sure to share everything.  I miss everyone back home a lot, and I’m still a little homesick, and I’m worried about my feet, but for the most part I’m having a fantastic time. 

A presto.

Oops! An apology

Many of you probably hadn't had a chance to read my first post yet (below), because it's just first thing in the morning where many of you are, but there was inadvertently the appearance of a choice piece of salty language in my last post.

My aim was that this blog would be for all audiences, including my dear family, and though I freely and occasionally employ such language in certain settings and among certain company, it's not polite and not the tone I wanted for the blog.  I was copying and pasting from a document I was keeping on my hard drive, and in the stream of consciousness I had it there and meant to remove it when I cobbled together a post for public consumption.

I do apologize.  Hopefully I will be more careful in the future, though you might see alternatives for said term that look more like "freaking" or "fricking" or maybe even "effin'" if I get really riled up.  I'll do my best.

Ciao!

Day . . . 3?

I'm in Rome, and it's already my third day here.  I'm still really tired.  For now I just wanted to get some thoughts down.  Some of you will have seen bits and pieces of this in other places, and for that I apologize, but I've been having a lot of trouble sitting down to write about things.  There's just so much to capture, and it seems impossible.  I will try, though.  I will.  But for now I'm just gonna jump right in, just like I've done with this city, and all will be made clear.  Eventually.


There might be utterly art historical stuff here, or just observations, or maybe even just how I'm feeling.  Right now I'm pretty stunned by all of it, and I've only been circulating in a little pocket of the city.  Mind you, at home, I've become somewhat of a homebody over the last few years due to school and some limitations with my back. So there's no frying pan from which to jump into the fire - it's more like the refrigerator to the fire.


Surprisingly, my back has been holding up.  So.  There's that.  My feet, on the other hand, well, thank God for Lush Cosmetics, their amazing "Ballo in Maschera" foot lotion, and the fact that they have a little shop across the Campo de' Fiori from my school.

On Sunday my classmate Meg and I flew into Rome Fiumicino at about the same time, and we sort of wandered around the airport in a daze trying to figure everything out.  I was so tired, having been awake for over 24 hours at that point (save a paltry 1.25 hour cat nap in the Yotel at Heathrow).  Shortly before that, on the Madrid-Rome flight, I had had the only negative experience of my admittedly low-conflict travels, wherein a brassy flight attendant guilted me into switching seats so that a pair of newlyweds could sit together.  She wanted to me to move one row up, to the bulkhead, even though I was all situated and buckled in.  “It’s bigger, I promise!  I think it’s bigger, for everything, for you!” she brayed.  Fortunately the newlywed couple were the only ones who seemed to speak English, but I was mortified.  Eh, whatever, yeah. I am bigger.  The trouble is, when I went to sit down, I realized why this would be a problem:  the bulkhead armrests don’t go up.  I was on Iberia Airlines in Business Class, where they always leave the middle seat empty, and so this wasn’t a problem when I was in the seat I’d picked out months ago after studying Seatguru for the best seats.  (What can I say?  I'm a planner.)  The whole reason that my parents and my lovely friend Tom helped me out by contributing accumulated American Airlines miles, in order to upgrade cabins for me,  was to spare my back and make sure that I was in the best possible situation in that way upon arrival for my program.  


Ah, well, at least it was only a 2 hour flight.  I found myself upset, though I'm sure that it was just being tired..  I wanted to hold my ground, say, “You’ve just vowed to be together for the rest of your lives, and you’re definitely going to be joined at the everything over the next week or two, so what’s the big deal?”  But, I didn’t want to appear rude, for fear that it would earn me worse service.  It didn’t matter anyway, because the brassy flight attendant pretty much ignored me for the whole flight except for handing me my meal.  I should have just stuck with it.

That’s one thing that I’m noticing about Rome.  People here just do stuff and don’t apologize for it.  I don’t mean that they’re rude or something, but they just live their lives and don’t worry about what anyone thinks.  Smoke a cigarette on the steps of the Pantheon?  Sure!  Nearly run over everyone in your path, crazy taxi driver?  Why not?  I need to stop apologizing for everything, for what I do, for being slow, for being ME – but we know that this has been true since I was 15 and working at that bistro in downtown San Jose, when one of the waiters I got along with the best yelled at me every time I apologized. 

A better arrival in  Rome, as far as first nights go, could not have been choreographed.  We stayed at the Hotel Abruzzi, which is right on the Piazza della Rotonda, outside the Pantheon.  It was a quaint little hotel, two stars I think, 149 € a night. (Although, now that I'm looking at the website, it says 3 stars -- not that I really even have ever stayed in enough hotels rooms to know the difference between stars.  It's usually the Motel 6 for me, ya know?) Small room, but it’s European and that’s to be expected. 


The windows opened right onto the piazza, where massive crowds were gathered.  Apparently Italy had won some important football match and the whole city was a little crazy, but we didn’t know that, just got caught up in it.  There was a babble of human noise that was anointed by the gurgling of the fountain, which is a large basin with a looted Egyptian obelisk that Clement VI had added to it in 1711.  When I was lying down and Meg was in the bathroom, I started to hear the strains of that really famous Andrea Boccelli song (which I admittedly find very beautiful, even though it is so popular and overplayed and when I think of it I think of people like Carmela Soprano).  I figured that one of the restaurants was pandering to the tourists.  After a while I went and looked down into the courtyard and there was this guy there in the middle of a vast ring of people, actually singing opera while a PA played background music, right then and there.  We mused as to why he was singing in the piazza on a Sunday night for a huge circle of onlookers, but then he missed a couple of notes, just by the teensiest amount, which was telling.  

Once we were somewhat settled in to our apartment on the first day, we met the rest of our class and our professors for a really good meal our first night at this place called Trattoria Moderna. Stuart (one of the professori) said that they really tried to go for a Roman menu.  We had risotto with sausage and, I think, pecorino cheese for primo piatto, and then veal saltimbocca for secondo piatto, and then for dolce this apple cake that is an old Roman traditional dessert. Plus really good wine. It was all perfect.

Other than that I have been sort of on my own for meals. I went to the grocery (which was an adventure in itself!) and picked up some breakfast stuff because they don't really eat breakfast here, but I do stop at a bar (cafe) and get a macchiato for 0.80 € (about $1.07) on the way to class. For lunch a few of us have been going over to this little place off the Campo for these things called suppli, which are a Sicilian street food: rice and meat sauce molded around a ball of mozzarella with the whole thing rolled in bread crumbs and thrown quickly in a fryer. They are quite filling at 2 € (about $2.69) so that's what I've been having for lunch, and we eat it sitting by one of the fountains in the Campo de' Fiori. All in all my appetite has been surprisingly low, especially for all the walking I am doing. But maybe that will change once I'm more used to my surroundings. For sure I will probably be the only one who LOSES weight while I am here.

Tomorrow begins the BIG walking and the site visits, and we are going to see the Arch of Constantine and the Column of Trajan. I got lost yesterday and looked up and there was Sant'Ivo della Sapienza, Borromini's masterpiece of architecture, just sitting there in the middle of the block next to a trattoria and a gelateria. In the books it looks so separate from everything (mainly because they usually show the inside of it), but I love that it is all in the middle of the street (much like everything else in Rome - there really is no right of way, except at the big streets).

Today I have to catch up on reading, so I'm spending the afternoon at the apartment. It is a gorgeous 17th century palazzo (I think) that has been subdivided. They promised us an extant fresco, but it is a rather dingy and boring 19th century fresco that we would sadly trade in a heartbeat for good internet.

I got a room all to myself (I told them all how badly I snore, and they seemed all too happy to let me have the private room). It is a little monk's room with an old Italian bed and a thin mattress, but it hasn't been too bad. A bathroom connects my room to the kitchen, and my room overlooks the center of the building with the courtyard below, so I hear everything that goes on in this place. Someone here owns several of what I have decided must be large exotic birds who squawk often (and quite early - around 6am the last couple of days). At first I thought they must be monkeys at first but I don't think they let you have them in 17th century palazzi.  There is also a new puppy in one of the apartment who howls his loneliness during the day.  It is a little hard on my slightly homesick heart.

More later, of course! Homework now, because I need to sleep early, mostly because I didn't sleep much because of the monkeybirds last night.