A Heads Up

To my adoring fans,

 I apologize for the lack of updates lately. We had midterms and papers due two weeks ago and then as soon as my last mid term was handed in I left for a week long vacation. Unfortunately now it's back to the old grind with papers and reading and I'm jetting off to Sicily for the weekend. I promise by early next week to write about Brussels, spring break, and Sicily. So hold tight until then!

On two evenings in Roma

I've had a really busy week writing my first Art History term paper about Giotto's Bardi Chapel. I actually just finished the first draft of it about 15 minutes ago. So I apologize for not posting sooner. I have a lot I want to say about my weekend in Rome so hopefully I will remember it all. 

 Rome was absolutely amazing. It is easily one of my new favorite places. I was totally bewildered by the different layers of history juxtaposed throughout the city. The atmosphere is urban without being a huge noisy metropolis like London or New York (although I really love both of those cities too, don't get me wrong) and it has lively vibe even in the bad weather (it rained all weekend). Although one thing I didn't like was the lack of sidewalk. Maybe that's an Italian thing though since that seems to be a foreign concept in Florence as well, more so in Rome though. There isn't a concise layout to the city either, there are a lot of side streets and twists and turns in the road which was charming but also a little inconvenient. But I still loved the overall aura of the city and I really wish I could have spent more time there. But I have a feeling I'll be back someday, especially after throwing my coin into the Trevi Fountain. :)

Anyway, we left the Villa at 7:30 am and arrived in Rome around 11:30ish. We had about an hour to unpack at the Hotel Smeraldo before our tour of the Forum began. Our tour guide was a teeny little British woman named Angela and she was an adorable little bundle of knowledge. I couldn't believe how (relatively) well preserved the ruins are. I kept trying to imagine the movie Gladiator while I was walking around trying to put together what it may have looked like during the time of the Republic/Empire. Then we went on a walking tour with Professor Mariotti and we saw Trajan's column, Obeilsk's column, and the Pantheon. Unfortunately I forgot my debit card at the Villa and had no cash on me so when I went out to dinner with a big group of people in Campo dei Fiori I put everyone's wine and pizza on my credit card and I got cash back in return (success). After dinner a couple tipsy friends and I (see first picture) decided to venture to see the Trevi Fountain at night. What took us an hour should have taken about ten minutes, but we had fun aimlessly wandering around trying to find the fountain. It was totally worth it too, I don't care if it's super touristy, the Trevi Fountain is breath taking at night. We all got gelato and sat around telling each other about our significant others in front of the fountain (precious I know). We eventually decided to wander back to the hotel so we could meet up with the crew at one of the bars. Once again we got hopelessly lost for about two hours and once we got back to the hotel we immediately crashed. We had to get up at 6 30 am to go to the Vatican the next morning anyway.

 As a non practicing Catholic I was still blown away by the Vatican. I bet that tiny little principality is more wealthy than the entire country of Italy (not even kidding). We took a tour of the museum and saw the statue of Laocoon and Raphael's School of Athens which I was really excited about (and the Sistine Chapel obviously). I climbed up the continuously shrinking staircase up to the top of the dome and while I felt mildly claustrophobic on the way up We were rewarded for our struggles with an awesome view of the entire city. I thought with the unnaturally well manicured lawns, palm trees, fountains, and tiny little vehicles driving around that the Vatican property looked kind of like Disney World. Going inside the actual Basilica was cool too, it is overwhelmingly ornate though (but still beautiful). I also got to see the Pieta there! You really don't think about the huge art collection the Vatican has until you see it there.

After the Vatican a big group of us headed over the Colosseum in the pouring rain. Then I was really trying to recall scenes from Gladiator since the Colosseum is now a hollow shell of what it was back in the day. I still don't understand why the level underneath the arena needed to be so intricate and complicated. Wouldn't be a lot easier to have one big space? Oh well, I'm obviously not an ancient Roman architect. What do I know? Well even if it is a hollow shell, it's a cool hollow shell. You can really tell how influential its design is for stadiums and arenas and such. We may or may not have had a gladiator battle using our umbrellas (total tourists)...

After the Colosseum we headed to a Dominican Church called San Clemente which was really interesting since the foundations of a medieval church and Roman mint lie underneath it and you can go down and see them. It was kind of scary and labyrinth-ish but cool. There was an alter still sitting in the Medieval church and there were random ruins sticking out of the wall. I'm still baffled by how one can build on top of something else, do you just cover it with dirt? I need to stop asking questions.

That night two girls in the group had birthdays so we did a little bar hoping, we went to an Irish Pub (they are all over the place here) and had Strongbows (most amazing beverage ever, it's hard cider). And then went to a place called Sloppy Sams and then ventured back to the hotel eventually...

  Saturday morning we didn't have anything planned until 2 so my friend Ariel and I walked back to the Trevi Fountain to see it during the day and then walked over to the Spanish Steps and window shopped in all the designer stores. We were having a hard time picking a place to eat so eventually we just decided we would go into the next place we found and it turned out to be the most expensive one we had seen! We didn't realize until we sat down and saw the menu. We ordered wine thinking they would bring us glasses, but we got a whole bottle! Well, we didn't want our money to go to waste so we drank the entire thing between the two of us. Thankfully our buzz wore off before our tour of the Villa Borghese. The private collection of the Borghese family is mind blowing, lots of Bernini and Titians (Apollo and Daphne is there! One of the most beautiful neo-classical sculptures you will ever see) I am a total sucker for neo-classicism so that was really cool to see. After the Villa Borghese we hopped on the bus to head back to Florence around 5:15. 

 This weekend I will be venturing to Brussels, return for mid terms and then leave again for a week for Spring Break. Then the program will be halfway over! I can't believe how fast this whole thing is going. It seems like just yesterday I was delayed at O'Hare for over eight hours. O:-) I will do my best to update when I get back from Brussels if I have enough time between studying for mid terms. I will do my best. Ciao for now!

Two Weeks Later...

 Sorry about the slow update. I've been having some problems trying to log into my account. As I've expressed a couple times, our internet here can be really faulty and I let my room mate use my computer to log into her gmail account and since google runs this website, her gamil account automatically showed up in the log in for blogger and wouldn't let me sign in as a different user. Obviously though we have since fixed the problem. I hope all is well with everyone.

So what has happened here in the past two weeks? Two weekends ago I was very excited about having some quality time in Florence to explore the museums and just wander around. Most of the people in the program opted to travel other places that weekend but since I'm planning on doing a lot of traveling in the upcoming weeks I wanted to spend some quality time in Florence. Friday afternoon a couple girls and I went to a chocolate festival at Santa Croce, needless to say it was wonderful. They had every kind of chocolate in any kind of presentation you could imagine. I bought a chocolate fork and shared it with another girl because while it was really tasty, it was way too rich to eat on my own.

 Saturday I had planned on doing some solo exploring and museum hopping which I was really excited about. Unfortunately on my first stop at the Uffizi (after getting to see some awesome work by Titian, Botticelli, and others that I didn't even know was there) I really suddenly became sick and had to drag myself back through the cold and rain to the bus then to the villa and spent the day in bed :(. Thankfully it only lasted 24 hours.

Last Monday was my first day of my teaching internship at a local elementary school, "Scoula Vittorino da Feltre" here in Sesto. When I walked into the classroom the kids looked at me like they were star struck with their mouths hanging open and gasping. One of the kids pointed at me and said, "una vera ragazza Americana", or, "a real American girl." I've never had so many instant admirers, it was adorable. They are all really sweet kids, although there is one trouble maker named Tomaso, (go figure) who had to go sit a desk in the corner for misbehaving. I have a feeling he sits back there a lot. My advising teacher is Professor Michela Moscato and while she is quite good at english, I've had to help her with a couple things. Teaching things to a teacher is quite a change of roles and really made me feel smart, haha. On my first day they were reading, "Jack and the Beanstalk" in their work books, it was broken up into little frames to make it easier for them to follow. The teacher asked me to read it once the entire way through and then repeat it one frame at a time, allowing them to repeat it after me. Then they took turns reading it student by student. They didn't understand that, "Fe Fi Fo Fum" doesn't really mean anything in English, I tried to explain it was just a non sense word. I noticed they have a really hard time with the, "th" sound since it doesn't really exist in Italian. They also translated it into Italian for me, they are insistent on helping me with my Italian as well.

I'll be going to their class every Monday for an hour to help them with their English and the teacher wants me to bring my own lesson plans. This past Monday since they are learning about telling time and past tense verbs, I brought in a couple copies of, "Hickory Dickory Dock" and we did the same thing with me reading it once all the way through and then they read it one by one. I also told them after to underline all the verbs and since they were all in past tense I told them what the present tense of the verb was, which gave them a little better understanding of what it meant. There is one very shy kid named Andrea who obviously struggles with english who thought the word, "bear" was a verb and I told him it was an animal. Everyone also had a hard time once again with the phrase, "Hickory Dickory Dock," thinking it was a common English phrase. They also tried to translate it in Italian for me and when I was reading it back to them they all laughed at my American accent and tried to imitate it. The kids are all really adorable and really eager to learn for the most part. I think it will be a experience I will really enjoy and always remember. Hopefully I will be able to get some pictures so I can show you my class. Also, any lesson plan ideas would be appreciated since I have no idea what to do for next week...

This past weekend I took a day trip to Arezzo where they filmed the movie, "Life is Beautiful" with Roberto Benigni and we went to a cafe on one of the streets where they filmed the movie called "La Bella Vita." The main purpose we went there was to see a famous fresco cycle of the legendof the true cross in the Bacci Chapel in the Church of Saint Donatus. They also have a "true cross" by Cimabue hanging right in front of the chapel. We also saw the house of Giorgio Vasari, the initial chief architect of The Uffizi. He obviously had some interesting frescoes in his house as well. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures because cameras were not allowed in these places.

Saturday we went to the Science Museum of Florence where they had a special exhibit on Galileo's telescope. It kind of ended up turning into a physics lesson (my favorite,) but it was still cool to see Galileo's telescope, they also had his finger displayed there like a relic of a saint. He initially was not allowed to be buried in the church because he was considered a heretic. When they finally moved him into Santa Croce apparently somebody went in a broke off his finger though...

Saturday night we went to the Florentine Opera and saw a production of, "Lucia di Lammermoor." It was very Romeo and Juliet-ish, except set in Scotland between two rival Catholic and Protestant families. The soprano who played Lucia was amazing though. Although her lover Edgardo was about four inches shorter than her and it was kind of funny to see that. It was sometimes hard to follow since the subtitles were obviously in Italain, but it wasn't too hard to get what was going on. Although for awhile I thought Lucia's brother was the man she was supposed to marry and that the priest was her father...

Tomorrow morning my group is leaving at 730 am (so 1230 Wisconsin time) to go to Rome for the weekend. I am super excited, anybody who knows me well knows I've always wanted to go there. Our Art History professor is going to be our tour guide for the most part (although I think in the Vatican you need to use one of their guides). So I will definitely updated as soon as I get back. Hopefully there won't be anymore two week hiatuses in between entries...

Italy gets Baracked

Let me say as a disclaimer that this post is not an attempt to impose my political views onto anyone. These are simply my personal observations of what inauguration day was like abroad.

Being able to watch the inauguration here in Italy was a little difficult to make happen, but I am happy to say I was able to hear the 44th President's inaugural address, thanks to MSNBC radio. Some technologically savvy boys were able to hook some speakers up to one of their computers so we could listen to the radio broadcast in english. We then found a channel that was showing a live broadcast, which of course was in Italian, so we muted the sound and watched and listened to the speech from two different sources.

 

It was a unique experience to listen to the speech via radio with everyone in the villa (professors included) downstairs in the cantina. It creates a totally different vibe for the recipient and I felt it his speech had a more powerful effect on me personally because I really had to focus on his words as opposed to seeing his speech accompanied by his posture, body language, and also how the audience was responding (I opted not to watch the muted speech on TV because the sound delay was a little distracting). So as my dad my say, I had an old school experience (excluding the fact it was being broadcasted from a computer as opposed to an "old school" radio) and it was really cool to listen to it with input from 20 other students and my professors. Although during the speech everyone was intently listening to the new President's first official address to the people as Commander In Chief.  I wish I had the ability to use language like President Obama does, his rhetoric is really unbelievable. 

It will be interesting to see now that we have such an internationally popular figure as President how the rest of the world will view Americans. Whether just or not, nobody can deny that the world's opinion of us, especially in the last decade has not been a favorable one. My room mate has already had a conversation with a total stranger, who approached her while she was running, about President Obama. He stopped her, gave her a hug, and told her how happy he was that we finally had a new President. I think it's safe to say that the general world population would agree with that statement.  The way the rest of the world views our country is important and we have elected a leader who for the most part has earned a lot of respect and hopefully will succeed in rebuilding our reputation domestically and abroad.

To completely change topics now, I signed up for an internship to help teach kids at a local elementary school english. I think the students I will be teaching are in 3rd grade, so they won't know too much english. The teacher said bringing songs, nursery rhymes, and things like that are usually a big hit with the kids, as long as the words are relatively easy to understand. I'm sure they will be able to help me with my italian as well. 

A lot of people in the program are traveling this weekend, but I want to stay here in Florence and do some more exploring before tourist season. Starting the first weekend in February my weekends will consist of non stop traveling until after spring break. Hopefully this weekend I will make it to some museums. Although tomorrow morning my art history class is meeting at The Uffizi (I still can't get over my art history lectures are on site at the works we are studying) and it will be my first time there. :)

Ciao for now

Mi Amo Firenze, Sesto Fiorentino, e Lucca

So I've been super busy since my last post so hopefully I'll be able to post everything. Professor Mariatti took us on a tour of the major monuments/churches in Florence and we got our bearings a little better and went to explore on our own. Florence is not a very big city, we walked from one end to the other in about 45 minutes. But there is a ton to see in this relatively small space. The Duomo would probably be the closest thing to the center of the city which is convenient because you can see it no matter where you are (for the most part). I will definitely be doing a lot of exploring on my own. Professor Mariatti has been working for five years to get us free museum passes for the semester and so we can go to all of them an infinite number of times for free (the art history nerd in me is super happy). 

Classes started on Wednesday and they actually all seem interesting. I'm taking my Italian class pass/fail since I don't get degree credit for it though. They will be more work than I initially thought and I don't want to stress over a class that, while beneficial for my Italian, doesn't count towards graduation. I'm taking a Shakespeare's Italy class that the english nerd in me is really excited about (even though I have to read "The Tempest for the fifth time). We will be performing scenes for everyone at the end of the semester and then writing a paper on our experience. Compared to the two six page papers and presentation I need to do for my European  lit and film class and the two papers for my Art History class seems like a piece of cake. I haven't had a lecture for my Birth and Origins of Renaissance Art class in the tower room yet (where all my classes are, minus Italian), but I have had an on-site lecture at the Baptistry of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore (The Duomo). It was amazing, Professor Mariatti continues to hook us up with amazing benefits. We got to go inside at 8:30 and it doesn't open to the public until 10 so we were the only ones in there. The Byzantine mosaic on the ceilings and the romanesque architecture were beautiful. Then we went into the museum of the Basilica where a lot of the original statues and things are displayed. The facade of the church is not original, it was constructed in the 19th century in the same basic style as the rest of the structure with more ornate frescos and sculptures. I am going to love being on site to study these works of art every Thursday, even if it means waking up at 6:50 to catch the train.

Thursday night was my first night going out in Florence. A huge group of us went to a pub called The Fiddlers Elbow (which was an Irish Pub) and I got my Strong Bow. :) Then we went to a club called Astor. 

Saturday was my first day trip. A big group of us woke up at 7:30 to go to a town called Lucca. It was the perfect day to go, sunny and relatively warm (compared to how it has been). The medieval wall that surrounded is still standing and so we walked around the entire thing. We went and looked at a couple different churches and got pizza and gelato. The highlight of the day was easily climbing the Torre Giagni (I'm not sure if the spelling is right on that). There were two trees going on top of the tower and we climbed up there and enjoyed the amazing view. It was almost surreal, hopefully I can load some of them here. My internet enjoys being difficult. 

Today I went to a park where a lot of girls go running and they told me would be a good place  to exercise (I'm going to try to keep on top of that while I'm over here).  It is another beautiful day here (it's sunny and nearly 50)!  They have paths to run on at the park so I jogged/walked for about an hour and just admired the beautiful scenery. Even in the middle of January, everything is still green and warm. I'm excited to see the flowers bloom in the spring. I then decided since it was such a nice day to take pictures in the Villa's garden. It's massive. It has multiple fountains and sculptures, a hedge maze, a walking path covered by trees, a stream with a cute little bridge,  and Bruno the gardener's pet chickens. 

Well at least I got to upload one picture. I have so many more I want to post. I guess you will just have to take my word that this place is beautiful.

First Full Day at the Villa

Well I finally made it here after some plane mishaps. My flight out of O'Hare that was supposed to leave at 2:33 didn't leave until 9:15ish and therefore we missed our connecting flight in Frankfurt to Florence. We got into Frankfurt around noon and took a 4:45 flight to Florence from there. We got to the Villa around 6:30, about a half hour before dinner and it is BEAUTIFUL. I can't believe I live in the villa of an Italian Count (his family has rented it to Wisconsin and Michigan for this program for 23 years). I live in one of the "tower rooms" and I have two other room mates (Kate and Kelli) who are both from Wisconsin. We also have our own bathroom with a lot of storage space (major plus). We only had time to take our suitcases to our rooms and then we had dinner (pasta and chicken, the pasta was awesome). 

I didn't really walk around the villa until today. We had a tour from Professor Marriatti (Art History) and she showed us the Count's private rooms and the garden (which is beautiful, even in the winter). I will definitely do more exploring outside in the HUGE gardens (including a hedge labyrinth and an English garden) when it gets a little warmer out. I did a little wandering on my own then. There are so many paintings, frescos, and sculptures so the villa feels a little bit like a mini museum. 

All of the classes will be taught in the actual villa and we got a rundown at our orientation this morning of what they will be like. Every Thursday morning the other students in my Art History class and I will take the train into Florence before 8:30 to meet Professor Marriatti on site at the places/pieces we will be studying and we will have discussions on Tuesday afternoon. I'm also taking a Shakespeare class specifically focusing on his plays set in Italy (go figure). At the end of the semester we will be acting out scenes from the plays we've studied for the rest of the group on the stage in the garden (scary). I'm also taking a film class (which supposedly counts as an Art History class. I hope that's true because I can only take one of the two Art History classes offered here), and third semester Italian. Classes start on Wednesday. Tomorrow We are being taken into Florence and go on a walking tour and then we have to get ourselves back to the villa. It shouldn't be too difficult because there is a bus that stops right in front of it.

My internet won't let me post my pictures right now but I will try to put some up soon. Ciao for now. 

To whom it may concern...

 This is my first Florence blog entry! Apparently its the best way (next to facebook) to keep in contact with people from home. Well, I don't leave for another two weeks and six days. So unfortunately I don't have any exciting stories to share yet. This is just the set-up post. I'm still in Madison finishing up my exams this week and then coming home to celebrate my 21st birthday and then christmas shortly after that. 

 I still can't believe how fast this semester went and I will be living in Italy in less than a month. Even though I'm beyond excited to go, I'm going to miss good old Wisconsin. The longest I've ever been out of the country is two weeks so it will definitely be an adjustment. 

 The 30 other Wisconsin students, 30 Michigan students, the professors, and myself will be staying in a villa just outside of Florence. We will have classes there as well so it will be a very unique living experience. I'm only signed up for on Florentine Art History class right now but hopefully I'll be able to get into more. Along with art history I'm taking a Shakespeare, film, and italian class. 

I don't really know what else I can say for the time being. I will update hopefully soon after I arrive in Florence!