Snapshots

+everyday as we walk to school, groups in pristine lab coats, smoking delicately

+tall tables in tiny cafes, proudly devoid of chairs, the perfect height for elbows supporting a shot-glass of expresso

+two men chasing pigeons from the ancient carvings about the doorway: one wielding a laser pointer, the other clapping two blocks of wood

+holy haste: a small alter boy with the big crucifix, hurrying to the back of the church

Journal

I can’t keep a diary to save my life.

I think it may have something to do with the fact that if I am happy, I like to share the happiness with others, and if I am not, I try to ignore the fact. Boring day? Why bother writing about it? Great day? I try to enjoy it as much as possible, not to duck away from the festivities to write about it.

You all know this. I hardly ever blog.

However, I am fully aware of the usefulness of a touchstone, something that will remind me, something that will bring the memories flooding back, so I am desperately trying to keep a journal of this trip. Since I fail miserably at diaries, I am further trying to make it an art journal. Note the 'trying,' because although it has lasted much longer than any of my poor abandoned diaries, I still struggle to remember to add to it, and struggle with how. I think I just need practice, because I do like it.

This is my favorite spread so far.

To the left is a record of a very nice day that I spent just wandering around, the first day I visited the Piazza di Spagna, only a few days after touchdown. I think that the colors pretty accurately represent my feelings. The butterfly drawing as a still-life of the earrings that I was wearing, with the observation “I feel beautiful here,” which means quite a bit, actually.

To the right is a page that I painted to commemorate our first visit to the beach. Now, I would like to think that I would be one of the last people to deny the power of words, but I just don’t have the right ones to describe that day. The warmth of the sun and the sand, and the cool, careless power of the water, and the easy company of some great people that were only just getting to know each other…

-Maria

The Student's Guide to Food in Rome: Part 2

Since I am still a practically destitute college student, my experience with the Italian cuisine is chiefly through the little shops which line the roads of Rome.

My favorites, and the most common, are the pizzarias and gelaterias.

Inside any of the streetside pizzerias, you are confronted with a huge glass counter, behind which reside huge rectangular pizzas with everything from ham to egg-plant on them, the choices dictated by none but the cook. Voice your choice and the guy behind the counter will slice off a hunk and charge you by its weight. Take it porta via (to go) and he will cut it in half, press the pieces goodness-sides together, and fold a  wax paper envelope around it for you.

I am getting hungry telling you about it! Contrary to popular opinion, it is just as easy to get bad food in Rome as it is anywhere else, but I have emerged so many times with a messy sandwich of crunchy crust, mozzerrella and chunks of tomatos and basil, and I am not looking forward to leaving the experience behind.

Gelaterias are  another experience all together.

First of all, there is none of this "chocolate or vanilla" nonsense. Even the humblest gelateria, consisting of nothing but a counter, has at least eight flavors, and to ask for only one will get you a confused "Solo?"

The servings are smaller, but they are much denser. The servers scoop the gelato out with paddles, but it is still much softer than American hard ice cream. The shops have cones, real cones with pointed ends, but it is much more common to savor the experience in a cup with a plastic, brightly-colored gelato spoon.

The other day, I took a long walk across the city, bought some margherita pizza for dinner, ate it by the Fontana di Trevi, was chased off by the Italian police (no eating on fountains), treated myself to some stracciatella gelato, scrambled out of the way of a lady who wanted to open her shop (I was sitting on the ledge, leaning against the door), and then made my way home with the satisfaction of a day well spent.

-Maria

The Student's Guide to Food in Rome: Part 1

This post is not about what you think it's about. This post is about my own cooking.

It's not awful. That's all I can say.

I am not a particularly discerning eater. Taste is my least cherished sense, and food is not particularly important to me (though I can certainly appreciate edible heaven when I swallow it) so I have been surviving on a monotonous regimen of supermarket supplies, the chief of which is (naturally) pasta. Until a few days ago, it was only ever garnished with butter and salt, but I got tired of that and splurged on some supplies.

Never underestimate the power of garlic.

Not only can it repel vampires, it can whisk your cooking into a whole new level. So far, I have soutéd the stuff with part of a bag of frozen vegtables and found myself with a fine new mixture with which to toss pasta, and I made a great stew with the rest of the bag, more garlic, noodles and ham bones.

The fact that this is exciting and makes me feel as if I am finally living on my own should probably concern me, but that topic is not flattering, so let me distract you with pictures of the supermarket:

Produce is sold on a very what-is-in-season basis. When we arrived, almost this entire side was covered in peaches. The next month, the smell of grapes (not the castrated grapes that we are used to, but real grapes, twice as big, with seeds) almost intoxicated you the moment you stepped into the supermarket.


You can't tell from the pictures, but this is a tiny, tiny store, and yet, the seafood ice shelf has the most incredible collection. There is everything from raw octopi to whole flouder in this pic, and once I saw a sturgeon's head, its pointed nose uselessly stabbing at the ceiling.



Keep in mind that the store in only four or five aisles wide, and marvel at the entire corner dedicated to alcohol. There is more on the other side of that wall.



 This is how we pay. There are two aisles with actual people that you can see behind the robot here, but they will stand and wait for ten minutes for you to dig out exact change, and are frustrated when you don't have it, so we feed our 50£ bills to our friend Robby as he chatters to us in an Italian voice, and he gives us back change with no problem.

Well, that's all for now! Tune in next time for Part 2: Street Food!

-Maria

PS. Notice how I didn't mention what the rest of the house is eating? It's because they're making German chocolate cake from scratch.
PPS. We make popcorn on the stove. It is awesome.

Observation

The pigeons in this city don't fly much.

The closer you get, the more nervously they move, until they are running on their pink feet, heads bobbing frantically, but they don't take off. Eventually, once you have been perfectly capable of kicking or catching them for so long that they can no longer stand it, they will suddenly move much more messily and, finally, flappily and make it to the safety of the top of some wall or something. And then stop.

I'm sure that someone could make some deep poetic statement about this, or use these feathery things as devices for some poignant philosophical declarion about cities or something, but they just dissappoint me. Especially since pigeons are doves.

-Maria

Art and Architecture: Introduction

We call him Pierluigi. He is our Art and Architecture class professor, and yet the name is so Roman, and sounds like two names, anyway, and he asked us to call him "Pier"... We can't believe his first name is Romeo.

He is not at all handsome, he wears glasses which make it seem that we are viewing his eyes from the wrong end of a telescope, and he is incredibly, astonishingly, magnificently, phenomenally knowledgable. Ask him the simplest, most specific question that you can think of, and he will still have pages to excitedly tell you, if you are at all interested.

The first class, we began with the Etruscans, the Roman's predecessors, and became fully convinced that he had dedicated his life to Italian history. He knew who. He knew when. He knew why and where. He knew who found out and why. He knew who cares and where to find more information and how to tell if the information is authentic.

We moved through ancient Rome, and as we admired the sculpture he casually told us the name of the work, who discovered it, who created it, who funded its creation, what it portrays, where it has been, why it was damaged, similar portrayals, which is his favorite...

We spent a class specifically focused on the evolution of mosaics and he told us where each color of marble came from. We went to the Vatican museum and he suddenly became an encyclopedia of the development of Rennaissance art. We are only half-way through classes!

We passed the Egyption section that day, and he dropped the fact that he was an Egyptologist, and I don't think that I have quite absorbed that one yet. Does he know everything about everything in Egypt, too?!

Not only does he know everything, but he gets so excited about what he is talking about, though heaven knows how many times he has told it.  (Did I mention that one of his books is in its second edition, eventhough it has been out less than a year?) He'll be halfway thrgouh a sentence when - "AH! See here an excellent representation of..."

I am going to try to write a summary of each class. I really love them, though three hours of lecture and walking tours can really wear you down, and I would love to have you enjoy them as well. The only problem is that I will most likely get sidetracked by researching.

-Maria

P.S Seconds after I took that picture of him, he turned around and casually translated the hiroglyphics. Oh my goodness. He really does know everything about Egypt, too!

Modern Catecombs

I love the metro. It is cheap, it is convenient, and it is an adventure.

CHEAP: I pay only 18£ for a whole month's pass, as opposed to the more than 30$ of gas for a week.

CONVENIENT: Do you have any idea how wonderful it is to slip some money and a metro pass into your pocket and just start walking? It you get tired, there will be a metro or a bus stop near by to whisk you back. If you want to see anything specific, the clockwork carriages will take you there.

ADVENTURE: Well, first of all it is underground, and makes me think of some sort of modern labyrinth, with signs and stairs and tunnels, advertisements scrolling on the walls and magazine stands crouching by the exits.

Most importantly, it is full of people, with entire universes of emotion and history and knowledge and opinion behind their blank faces.

Sometimes there are beggers, squeezing old accordiants with some little kid in tow to hold the squashed cup.  Sometimes there are dogs, since there are dogs everywhere. Sometimes there are groups of tourists, calling to each other in foreign languages about which stop they are waiting for.

Sometimes it is late at night and the metro is almost empty, with a few tired people slumped on the chairs, sometimes in each others' laps, the lights of the stations sliding over them. Sometimes it is rush hour, and the metro is so crowded that you can't even see the pole that you have in a death grip, and your bag is wedged between your knees so that there is more room at torso level. Your elbow is accross some guy's wrist and your thigh is pressed against some lady's purse, and heaven help you if you actually have to get off.

I like it, actualy. It is fun to pull my hand back from the abyss, duck under whole collections of arms at once, and slide through, cheerfully calling, "Permesso? Scusi!"  until I get to the door and leap (the occasion always calls for a leap, complete with outstreached arms) onto the empty platform, and then turn around to watch the doors close on a solid wall of people.

-Maria

Post

See! I have not fallen off of the face of the earth, nor forgotten completely about you!

<<<
It's photographic proof: me, alive, and in front of the post office box with a handfull of postcards.

Fun Fact: The postal service of Vatican City is so much better than that of Italy, that people who live in Rome will go out of their ways to send things through the Vatican post office.

Pictures and Gund

Italians walk uncommonly slowly along the street, but why hurry when it is such a nice day, and there is a park on one side of the street and ancient architecture on the other? On the other hand, though there may be seperate street lights for pedestrians, why bother waiting for the little man to turn green? Just pick your moment and stride straight through traffic -don't hurry or you'll look like a tourist- with your head held high. Timid people or foreigners who hesitate will even notice that the tiny cars and high-heeled Vespa riders automatically slow down at the sight of waiting pedestrians, and are surprized if they don't take advantage of the break in traffic.

Enough with the descriptions. You people demand pictures.

The problem is that when it comes to the famous sites, there are so many much better pictures on the internet and other places for you to look up. In fact, it is one of the small pleasures of life for me to open a huge book of gorgeous photography and be able to say casually, "Yeah, I was there."

What is awesome about being here is being here, able to touch what millions of people throughout the centuries have touched, able to experience the vastness of certain places, to note the casually perfect collections of angles in a view from a back street. Pictures really can't convey the experience. They just prove that you were there because your smiling mug has been inserted into the frame.

With the knowledge that I was about to take photos that would be exactly the same as thousands that have been taken before me, I invited my friend Bobby Gund to help me out. Somehow, the process was made slightly more enjoyable with the introduction of something that really could not be explained.

Here we are at the Fountain de Trevi.

Here we are the edge of the Spanish Steps, which are not particularly interesting in themselves, but are great places to watch tourists wander around in the heat with maps, and pretend that you are not secretly one of them.

Here we are by a magnificent fountain which caused some scandal when it was unveiled due to its sensual nymphs, but it is so big that you cannot really take a picture of the whole thing.

Here is a great one of Triton. We became rather familiar with this towering aquatic sight since we got lost together and used this piazza as a reference point. There is a street that goes right through everything called Via d. Tritone which ends here.

Did you know that unless there is a sign declaring to the contrary (I have yet to find one) you can drink the water? It is incredibly wonderful, on a hot day, to remember this when you stumble upon one of the bazillion fountains randomly scattered throughout the city.

It think that the bees, which are scattered throughout the monuments of the city, are the symbol of some rich family that paid for most of the stuff. You can even find them in the Sistine Chapel.

For your amusement: a smoking centurion. Our Art and Architecture professore, who had just finished an impassioned explanation of Etruscan art and history, had made us all laugh by suddenly admitting that he did not like visiting the Colloseum because, "Eyeh hateh theh fake Romans!"

That's all for now, folks! Tune in next time for "a day in the life," a commentary on allowing dogs on the metro, or maybe a newsclipping about how some crazy american student became a great cat burgler and stole designer clothes until she was tracked down by the police, who figured out who she was by the size of the clothes she was buying. Seriously. I didn't care about designer clothes until I was faced with streets of the stuff. Now I am wishing to be a model.

Linguistics

Me: "Biongiorno!"
Megan: "Guten Morgen. No, wait, that's German! Biogiorno."
[Pause]
Megan: "Did you sleep well last night?"
Me: "Moy bien, gracias. No, wait, that's Spanish!"
[Laughter]

Learning a new language is not simple a matter of decoding a linguistic cypher. It requires a shift of mindset. Suddenly, you cannot equate anything with its name, but must keep the abstract idea seperate and then pick which word, phrase or connotation to express it verbally.

This sounds pretty difficult, but most people don't realise that language itself is a translation of thoughts and ideas into a collection of sounds that may or may not evoke the same idea in another person. These sounds are so superficial that they may change completely from area to area; not just country to country, but even family to family.

I love my Italian lessons. I love how learning a new language is not as gargantuan a task as it may appear. It may be difficult if you are confined to vocabulario, forced to memorize a list of words and their equivalent words in English, but when the words are in context they are remarkably easy to undertand, especially since all language is a bit like the next. Remembering is the hard part, but even then it is much easier to remember what a certain phrase or word means when you are actually using it, immediately equating it with its  meaning instead of another code (your first language).

On the other hand, the strain of absorbing as much as possible stirs depths of (mostly unused) brain power normally abandoned. Hence the sudden hodge-podge of language. It've even started to use the Latin that I was sure had been lost to the abyss! Interestingly enough, I even find myself struggling for English words when speaking to my roomates, or catching myself or others gesturing instead of speaking when we do not know the Italian equivalent, although we are perfectly capable of conversing in English. This blog post itself began with rather shaky eloquence, as if English were my second language, before my first language began to flow again.

I love to hear the bambini speaking! They suddenly seem so much more clever and interesting with their little voices babbling in Italian!

Ti Amore! I love you! (Yes, this was shouted to some of my friends. Ah, the perils of being young and pretty.)

-Maria

PS. Please excuse any spelling mistakes. I am doing my best, but not only are the keyboards slightly different, but all the spellcheck programs, even on Engligh programs such as blogger, have switched to Italian!

A Note on Roman Blogging

Originally, I wasw planning on blogging about my trip to Rome in a seperate blog, Have Brain, Will Travel, with the understanding that foreign correspondence would be more photogenic and less abstract than previous entries.

However, I have not changed. The way I think has not changed. In fact, my surroundings have cetainly not changed either, in the sense that they are less inspiring or retard truth, so I found that these entries would be quite comfortable with the rest.

Of course, I will supplement anything that I write with pictures and Italian observations, so do not worry about that!

-Maria

A King and a Girl: a Journey

A few weeks ago, firmly scolding myself for getting my hopes up and barely daring to mention to anyone my intentions, I applied to spend a semester in Rome. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I can introduce myself to the world as one of the ten winners! Five of the others are from my honors class, and of the remaining four I know two, so it will be a sociable and friendly experience, as well as all the rest of the attributes related to study abroad. Needless to say, I am ecstatic.

In light of the exciting news and the fact that this blog will naturally start revolving around Rome in the fall, I decided to post an excerpt from my application essay. I hope it tides you over until I finish polishing my reflections on hate-crime, feminism (in honor of women's history month) and animal "rights."

...What do I do when I am confused? I go back to the basics. The basics are: 1) Have Faith, because without God, there is nothing; 2) Work, because even if you are not sure, as long as you are trying God will give you hints; and 3) Cultivate Beauty and Logic, because they are the way that God reveals Himself. Providentially, as soon as I had plotted this master plan out with my humble brain, the opportunity to spend a semester in Rome dropped out of the sky.

I am already determined to travel. I want to see, experience and learn everything; not only subjects, but perspectives, lives, culture and life. The little travel I have done, and the little exposure I have had to other cultures, has convinced me that seeing the world through other’s eyes drastically increases the chance of finding the truth, just as seeing an object from more than one angle gives a much clearer picture of its three dimensional shape. Not only does travel enlighten broad subjects such as life, politics and humanity, but provides opportunities to learn skills that may be a specialty of a certain region. I hope to travel all over the world, but Rome is by far my most cherished goal. At this point in time, it even holds the answers for all my questions.

 Rome! Rome is… the center of the world! All roads lead to Rome because all people need Rome- the center of truth, beauty, history and faith - in their hearts. God’s Vicar, with the keys to the secrets of individual happiness, world peace, and true Beauty lives there like any other elderly man doing his work. Cathedrals, the greatest collections of art and architecture, turn these arts to their true end: the connection of ordinary people across time to heaven. Aqueducts, the Coliseum, roads and old buildings that make the history of thousands of years suddenly as real as the local supermarket stand like any other arrangement of building materials, real enough to touch and sketch. If the source and summit of Faith and Beauty, and the true end of Work, are not here, then I don’t know where they would be.

On the other hand, Rome is like any other city. It would take a little effort to see the magic in a busy modern street; but the quest only gives the treasure more value, and the physics give the theory its truth. I could walk in the street. I could speak to people. I could see things. I could learn. I could write. I could think. I could sleep. I could grow. Maybe I could rediscover my art. Maybe I could rediscover my faith. Maybe I could rediscover the meaning of life there, in the center of it all, and by finding it in Rome, learn to find it everywhere else.

I plan on rereading the essay every now and then while I am in Rome just to remind myself of my lofty intentions. A man's word is his honor! I do not intend on making myself a liar!
 
~Maria
 
PS. Want to provide some moral support and encouragement? Comment by clicking the little blue"comments" word below!