Rome Day Two

In an attempt to just get this written so that I'm up to date, I'm going to try to keep this brief.  I've been procrastinating writing for the past three days because it seems like I have a lot to catch up on so rather than agonize about it further, I'm going to take the Band-Aid removal technique into hand and just do it... fast. 

Last post I discussed Monday, our long first day in Rome next up is Tuesday the 8th, which was a half day.  We met in the lobby of Hotel Tiziano at 8:30 after satisfying our hunger at the hotel's ample buffet breakfast of cereals, fruits, ham, cheese, bread, a variety of pastries and beverages.  Not the best spread I've seen but certainly varied.

Our locations for the day were all on the south side of the Tiber river in the Trastevere area.  Before getting down there, though, we stopped a couple blocks away from the Campo di Fiori to look at the facade of a building and I discovered my first Roman film crew.  According to a guy wearing a vest emblazoned with something like Hollywood Special Effects team, it wasn't a film shoot, merely something for publicity but it looked like a lot of setup for a publicity op.  They even had one of the giant fill lights that look like orbs and are used to light up the park at night during ACL. 

The first real stop was Santa Maria in Trastevere which was the home of many beautiful mosaics by Pietro Cavallini.  The ceiling was not lit very well but with my 1.8 lens on a half second exposure I was able to see the actual brightness of the ceiling's gold leaf and the panels filled with pink, green, and blue.  There was also a really nice statue of St. Anthony of Padua with notes all over it containing, I'm guessing, prayers and requests to the saint.

After that, we went over, very briefly to San Crisogono, a small chapel with beautiful floors and a dead lady in a glass box, like Snow White but old.  I think we found out later that she'd died in the mid1800s and was beatified in 1920.  She had a small altar and while we were there, a priest was holding a mini mass for about eight people.  At first I thought it was a funeral so I thought it would be impolite to take photos.

The last stop that day was Santa Cecilia in Trastevere.  It's choir loft houses a beautiful Cavallini fresco of the Last Judgement but getting to it is a bit of a challenge.  It requires talking to the nuns who live there (under a vow of silence) and getting permission to go up, eight at a time in their little elevator to see it.  It was worth it, as it was very pretty and the view down into the main section of the church was nice.  They also sell beautiful cards and nice lavender soap (I think they make them themselves) so I bought a brick of the latter.  Even just sitting in my room it perfumes the air.  The photo is the ceiling in the church but I'm not sure who painted it.

That was it for the class stuff that day.  I joined Ann and her boys and Lawrence for lunch at a small place that Ann was familiar with from her previous trips in and it was very good.  After that we walked over to the hotel that Lawrence will be staying at when he returns to Rome with his wife so he could show us (Ann) one of his favorite restaurants.  It looks like a nice spot and it might be interesting to find again.  I don't remember what it's called but I think it's something like "The Cistern".

After that, we took the tram back to the hotel and, after sitting around contemplating what to do with myself for the rest of the day, I went off on my own to explore.  I ran into a tiny gelateria on a back street who knows where and grabbed my gelato for the day, lemon and frutti di bosco, I think... and wandered around taking photos down driveways and into courtyards.

I managed to find a couple of big things to cross off my list including the Trevi Fountain (which was swamped with people, mostly tourists, mostly eating the expensive gelato sold right in the square around the fountain).  I found this Japanese woman amazingly diverting, as she was wandering around with three cones (with mini cones on top) in her two hands, looking for her family so that they could claim them as their contents melted down to her hands as it was very hot that day.  It was a great place for people-watching.  People contorting themselves in odd positions to get the right photo, a priest in a long white robe carrying a backpack and roller blades, and kids, bored at looking at old stuff (I'm guessing here).  I found them all much more interesting than the fountain, but here's a photo of it for good measure.

My next goal was to find the Spanish steps as they're just a bit farther north than the fountain but I wasn't trying very hard to get there in a direct manner, mostly just wandering wherever it looked interesting to go.  As I was standing at a large intersection getting my bearings, I saw a parade of cars pass, the first of which was flying the Chinese flag.  I'm guessing the ambassador or something like that was headed off, followed by about 7-8 other cars.  I went off in the right direction and found myself going up a slight incline, waving at people I passed and  ran into one of the four or so Aveda salons in Rome... which is situated, interestingly enough, directly at the top of the Spanish steps themselves.  The steps were nice but I didn't find them nearly as nice as the steps in Paris up to the big cathedral where the scavenger hunt in Amelie was filmed, as they don't go up steeply enough to actually see the full flight of steps from the base.  To see them properly requires being on the 4th or 5th floor of the buildings facing them (I'm guessing, anyway).

I wasn't aware that the area around the Spanish Steps was the high-class shopping district in Rome or the home of the Plaza hotel... but it is.  I wandered around, window shopping and wishing I had the money for the beautiful jewels in the shops and telling myself that it didn't matter that I didn't have the money as I didn't have anything to wear them with.  Oh well.  Apparently the Cow Parade is in Rome... again (?).  I found two of them near the base of the Spanish Steps and a few others around later on, one of the ones near the steps was cloud patterned and had a swastika carved into it (by someone other than the original artist, I'm guessing).

As I wandered through the high-class shops, I ran into what appeared a retrospective of police vehicles in Italy including an old car, motorcycles, and even a new SWAT type van with one of the iRobot (makers of Roomba) bomb robot things.  It looked like they were preparing for a big event.

The shop windows and displays are beautiful in Rome, an art in themselves.  Ties are artistically curved to show off their sheen and patterns and placed with careful attention paid to color coordination with the others in the display.

I arrived at the area in front of (what I later learned to be) the Parliament building to see a small gathering of people waiting around a smaller group wearing all black with black and white patterned scarves around their necks and heads, with "PALESTINE" embroidered on them in red, green and black lettering.  I wasn't sure what was going on, but I felt it would be interesting to stay and watch and see what would happen.  

What ensued was a dynamic performance by fourteen men and women discussing the state of things in Palestine, individual stories of Palestinians, and occasional bursts of song.  It was performed primarily in Arabic and Italian and only occasionally in English but the performance was enough to understand the idea of the stories without necessarily comprehending the meaning of the words.

The performers were diverse, though most appeared to be in their twenties or thirties and they were lead by an older woman who spoke both Italian and English and (presumably) Arabic who spent much of the performance sitting in the audience, watching.  Each of the members played a role, speaking a story or translating it from Arabic to English or Italian.  The performance moved through a variety of emotions; sorrow, joy, despair, anger, betrayal, hatred, fear, hope and love.  

I sat through it all, taking over 200 photos of the performance.  At the end, they joyously paraded and danced around their "stage", hopeful for the future of Palestine and its people.  They ran through the audience handing out more of the scarves they wore.  I got one while I was looking through my images, placed over my shoulders by one of the performers with a thank you.

After that, I wandered back in the direction of the hotel, called Ann as she'd been talking about this restaurant that, for 15 euro, gives you a huge anti pasta selection she was planning to go to that night so I could find out where they were and if they were still going.  Some of the other students had been talking about going, so I thought there'd be more people.  Ann and her sons were waiting with Lawrence in the Piazza Navone for one of his old students to join them for dinner.  I found them there and, after waiting a bit longer, we headed for the restaurant without him.  It was tons of food but I didn't think it tasted nearly as good as what the huge tables of Italians around us were having smelled. Oh, and on the way to the Piazza Navone, I saw my second film crew for the day.

After that we went to my second gelato stop for the night, a small place near the Pantheon that had really good gelato.  I think I had strawberry and peach.  That's a guess.  Afterwards, I headed back to the hotel and went to sleep.

Two Days of Not Much

Nothing much of interest today or yesterday.  We stayed at Santa Chiara both days and had class.  Yesterday, we had to meet Ann at 10 am for her class, during which we discussed the use of wood for statues in the Renaissance period, namely that it was more often used indoors, in life-sized sculptures, was painted, and that the previous two added to its realism and ability to imply that the people from the bible were actually people and were better able to bring viewers into the stories it tells. 

Then was lunch, a rice and bean soup with broccoli, I liked it a lot, followed by thinly sliced pieces of salami, prociutto, and other meats, and a caprese salad of extremely bright red, sweet tomatoes, insanely fresh and soft mozzarella cheese and chopped basil; very delightful and Italian. 

For photo class at two we watched the touching film “Life is Beautiful”.  Some of the scenes had been filmed just around the corner here in Castiglion Fiorentino and a good chunk of it was in the nearby town, Arezzo, which we visited last week. 

Dinner was spaghetti ragu, a nice tomato based meat sauce (not the nasty jarred stuff we have in the states), followed by sliced turkey with gravy and their fennel salad.

At dinner Ann broke the sad news to us that there would be no laundry service this year.  Apparently whomever they had doing it in the past was too expensive and not quite reliable, so they just decided to cancel it completely.  This means that we have to either hand wash all of our own clothes, or take the long hike down to the local Laundromat and pay an exorbitant sum (5, 7, or 9 euros per wash load depending on the size of the washer, plus 4 or 5 per dry) to have it washed for you… soap included, apparently.  I chose the latter (the following day, Thursday), mostly because I can’t stand the feel of line-dried clothing.

After dinner I had my most disappointing experience with gelato save, perhaps, the night I didn’t get any: some odd flavor called A.C.E., I think… which I’m completely baffled by.  It’s extremely bright orange and has a picture of an orange, a lemon, and a carrot on the name placard… it sort of tasted like orange sherbet but not quite; and a lighter orange apricot.  Not bad, but not great, slightly peachy, as you would expect.  They looked pretty together on the cone, at least.  Oh, and although I took my camera with me, I neglected to put the “film” in, so without a memory card, I had to ask a fellow, Vanessa, to take this shot for me. 

Today we got to sleep in until our class at 10:30 during which Ann asked for volunteers to create the shapes of buildings so that we could see the difference between building design/city planning from the viewer’s point of view, which was more common early on, and from a bird’s eye/god’s eye view as we do it today and became more common in the late 1400s.  Lunch today (sans A&M) was a cold rice salad with celery, peas, wedged hard-boiled eggs, and pieces of sausage that had the consistency of a hot dog, followed by parboiled cold vegetables (which tasted like celery), and pizza.  The rice was good, I just avoided the celery, I ate one of the carrots but couldn’t get past the fact that it tasted like celery, and had three pieces of pizza.  It wasn’t very hot and wasn’t as good as some I’ve had, but it wasn’t bad.

After lunch we went through the second and third set of images for photography, the five from Arezzo and the five from Castiglion Fiorentino.  Of the former, I had one in the top ten, a photo of Amanda, one of the students in the program.  I was very happy with how it turned out and she seems to like it.  Of the latter, I had none that made it into the top twenty but I like the one below of Beth (the blonde) another in our group, despite her seeming horrified over it. Oh well. Enter my chance to wash clothes, which was important, as I’d run out of clean underwear and was quickly running out of other necessities, like everything else.  I took Twilight Watch down with me to read while I was waiting, and in very close to an hour, I had washed and dried most of my clothes… a green cami managed to stay out of the wash and two other tanks hid from the dryer with my linen pants that needed to be line dried.

Skipped out on the last day of Italian lessons, as word was she was going over numbers, which I’d had plenty of thanks to the copy of Rosetta Stone I have.  Dinner was spiral pasta in pesto which the cooks failed to prepare enough of, which was sad, followed by thinly sliced roast beef, mashed potatoes, and a nice salad. 

Gelato tonight was an old favorite after yesterday’s semi-failure, strawberry and peach.  I had been thinking of getting strawberry with this gorgeous looking dark chocolate but they ran out before I got up to the front.  When we left after eating, she’d replenished it. :( Some other day, perhaps.

On the walk back home, we discovered a heart with a cross made out of flowers on the street in front of our facility.  We’d noticed someone tracing the shape out in chalk when we were leaving for the gelateria but weren’t sure what the purpose was.  We did decide to take some photos of it (see below) and a police officer was kind enough to shine her headlights on it to give us more light. When we got inside and inquired further, we were informed that there was a confirmation ceremony at the church next door tonight and it was set up for the procession to the church.  I even got to see the procession just a few minutes ago as I was typing the blog content up!

Tomorrow is Florence trip #2.  It’s going to be another early morning train, 6:55 am.  Since it’s almost midnight now, I should be getting to bed.  Until tomorrow!

Three Days in One!

So, the weekend was pretty slow.  There were no classes or planned trips, so it was just spent doing what we wanted to on an individual basis.  The most exciting thing this weekend was the opening of the Medieval Festival.  Although not nearly as grand in scale as the Renaissance fests in the states, none of them are in a bona fide Medieval castle... or actually in Italy with Italians.  Though all of the shopkeepers/ food vendors/ performers were dressed up in proper garb, most, if not all, of the guests were dressed in modern attire. Small shops selling jewelry, pottery, prints, and swords both hand-made and (I think) mass produced are in an area around an archery field.  On the other side of a wall is the area with all of the food, including a whole boar, with its head on display and tiny birds rotisseries over a fire, drinks, and tons of tables with benches to sit at. 

In a third area a little camp is set up and there are stairs that lead up to the central tower where, for 1.50 € you can climb some rickety stairs for a view of the fair and the entire town and valley.  I have yet to make the climb.  It's a lot of stairs.  Ann says she may get us a tour of it later on in the trip.

We aren't served lunch at Santa Chiara on the weekends, so this weekend was (unintentionally) the lunch at the town's pizzerias themed.  Saturday we went to Sfizzeria, a grab and go slice place with many choices for very little cost, 1.30 € - 1.50 € each.  I had a slice of basic Margherita fresh from the oven which was fantastic.  Sunday we had lunch at Roggio's which is a sit-down restaurant that sells a lot of pizza but we all opted for pasta.  I had the pici with boar sauce I mentioned Ann having when we were in Florence.  It was very delicious.

 Dinner Saturday was nice.  The primi was pasta with tomatoes and olives, very nice and light.  The main dish was a really flavorful roast pork loin with roasted potato wedges and a light salad of thinly sliced vegetables... which I didn't each much of because one of the main vegetables was fennel, which they use a lot of here.  Sunday's primi was pasta in a spicy tomato sauce followed by the main course of roasted chicken with french fries.  Not the best but different.  It was followed by our second dessert, in honor of someone's birthday, a cake of some sort that was very yellow and delicious.

Saturday's lovely gelato flavors were peach and lemon (a repeat) which was a refreshing flavor combination.  It was happily eaten sometime between lunch and dinner.

Sunday was the first gelato disappointment I've had since I've been here... I didn't get any.  I was completely unable to get a trip up to the shop into my schedule.  I did, however, have a really nice pastry at Hermes, a cafe next door to Roggio's.  It was an interesting oval shape, with a rim, with a thin layer of apricot (?) jam and some slices of pear.  It was eaten quite happily shortly after lunch.

Today we had our first (and only) quiz, for which we needed to learn to recognize fifty different important buildings, paintings, frescoes, statues, etc... I found it to be pretty easy.  We prepped for our trip to Siena tomorrow, and went over our chosen ten images from our trip to Florence last week.  We voted on them to pick our favorites and one of my images was one of the top nine.

Lunch today was a really nice rice and vegetable soup followed by baked white fish with cold green beans in a vinaigrette dressing and fried vegetables. Dinner started with  short penne noodles in a cream sauce with pieces of sausage and vegetables which was followed by very thinly sliced beef that had been cooked somehow and was served covered in tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese.  It was served with green peas that were very buttery and delicious.

Today's gelato was a bit of a change.  Strawberry, which is nothing new for me, but it was topped with a creamy ice cream called variegato amarena, which I think is something like vanilla topped with cherry sauce though the translation just means variegated cherry.  The cherries were very tart and delicious.

Tomorrow is Siena, home of my patron saint, I suppose.  Apparently her head is on display somewhere in the city.  We'll be taking our only chartered bus there, as it's difficult to get there from here.  We leave at 7:30 AM and are staying through dinner.

Sorry about the gap in posts, I'll try to avoid such a long break to avoid posts this long in the future.