bittersweet

God saying hello at the Vatican

The sky was throwing red lights onto the buildings as a thunderstorm gathered.

At the weekly flea market at Porta Portese, the chandeliers were hung on racks like dresses.

An art exhibit made of thousands of "garbage men" to boost awareness of how wasteful we are was surprising beautiful, especially in the rain.

Matt and I went to Renzo Piano's Auditorium to hear a concert by the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. We heard his music playing in a cafe in Assisi and I got his name, and then, weeks later, we found out he was peforming in Rome! One of those odd twists...

We went to the Vatican for Easter Mass. We got there early, and watched as people (young and old) literally ran to get good seats. We ended up with pretty good ones ourselves, I thought.

Thousands and thousands of people

Matt and I went to a light show done by modern artists at a Renaissance Villa right behind Campo. We waited in line for about an hour, and randomly got into the second to last group of the night!

We weren't supposed to take pictures but I snuck some at this exhibit, where you layed on mattresses on the floor surrounded by billowing white curtains in a room flooded with black light.

One day when we were working in studio a group of dancers started dancing midair off of a billboard...

When they were done dancing, they painted in the letters

There are so many things I still want to do in Rome, but I have no time left to do them. We technically have about two weeks left, but in reality I have four days- the days left after the project is done. It's so strange to think that soon my everyday world will become memories of things that I won't be able to experience again for years, if not ever again. I don't know how what comes next will be able to compete with what I've already done this semester.

left behind: keys at 4 a.m.

the apocalypse

today we witnessed the first sign of the end: hail, tons of it, coming down extremely hard. After staying up for all hours doing studio work, anything would probably seem like a sign from God, but this is what we got.

These are two clips of the hail I took with my camera. For some reason they became really pixelated when I uploaded them, but they give you a general idea.

After a week of hell, we had our final presentation of our five boards on Monday afternoon. I stayed up all night Sunday night, but it wasn't really as bad as other all nighters have been- I had all my stuff, I just wanted to do it right.
Monday morning we still had to go to history class, however, and our lovely british teacher walked us all over Roma- from the Pantheon to the Aria Pacis Museum by Richard Meier back to the Pantheon and a bunch of other places too. People fell asleep sitting on the side of the road listening to her lecture. Her class are actually really interesting, though. It's like being on a tour with a tour guide (which I always loved). We learn all the interesting stuff as we're actually looking at the subject. Everyone says its like being on the history channel.

Today we went to the national museum of Rome (I don't have the energy right now to write that in Italian). It was full of frescoes, mosaics, and statues from Roman villas. They were all very beautiful....however, the museum was a half hour walk from our apartment in freezing rain and hail....so I broke down and bought a Mcdonald's breakfast sandwich. But it didn't even have real bacon on it, it was canadian bacon. Ah well.

My favorite fact so far from her class is learning how the present Romans (and all those since Roman times) never really tear anything down, they just use it for their new buildings. A lot of piazzas and buildings in Rome have their particular shape because they built on the foundations of Roman theaters or basilicas. The word they use for this kind of translates to 'englobement.' They just surround the old building with the new, and use it as support. Part of our studio is the tower of the temple that was attached to the first permanent theater built in Rome. There is a curved apartment building behind studio that used the curved wall of the stadium seating in the theater, and the street slopes downward because it was built over the seating!

I don't really have a lot of pictures for this post, but I do have the scanned pictures of my presentation boards- an analysis of 4 famous sites in Rome, all handrawn. First here are the presentations on the wall.

Mine went horizontally but a lot of people drew theirs vertically.

And here they are:

glimpse

I am so glad you ended that sentence with torch....

Today I went to Saldi(!), the first day of the month long sales in Italy. I wanted to buy boots to fit in with the locals (everyone wears boots here, they are beautiful). I found some at moderately priced stores- hard to find on the Via del Corso, where people are lined up for blocks to get into Gucci, Dior, etc etc. It's probably the best day to go pickpocketing.

This picture shows how the street was completely full of people. (Look towards the back- the dark color is one solid crowd).

I took some pictures for Manda of the store windows:

I was going to post pictures of my apartment, the studio, etc, but both Mo and Vikki already did...so if you want to see what my apartment looks like, you can see a nice description there. However, I liked my picture of the Campo di Fiori so I will post that.

This is the view from studio. Most of the students live in an apartment right on the campo, you can see it in the picture (just another window, hard to point out). I will eventually put a picture up of my street, it's about a 10 minute walk from the campo and studio. I live with 4 other girls- Mo, Vikki, Rose, and Lauren. I like having the smaller apartment (everyone else is in apartments of 10 people on the campo), because there is more privacy and I get to use the kitchen a lot. So far I made dinner twice, but I'm not sure how good it was. Italians don't really sell tomato or other spaghetti sauces, because they use so many other random things in their pasta. Needless to say, I am not that good of a cook.

Speaking of food, there are markets every day in both the campo di fiori and outside my apartment too, where they sell fresh fruits and vegetables, along with fish, meat, random spices, and kitchen utensils. You can also buy a pair of boxers with part of Michelangelo's "David" on the front... At the supermercato, everything is insanely difficult to find, because there aren't really labels or aisles- there are different small rooms with different foods in them. I still haven't found the eggs. The ceilings in the supermercato are vaulted and frescoed though- quite a surprise to see when you are looking for shampoo on the top shelf.

And randomly:
The evil lock on our door that is impossible to get open whether you are outside or inside. It took us about a week to figure out how to use our keys. Italian doors have locks where you have to turn the keys at least four times. Our front door is horrible too- you have to pull the key out a tiny fraction of a millitrillionith of a millimeter to get it to work. Too far and it won't work, but if, for some crazy reason, you just stick the key in all the way like for a normal lock, it won't work either.

This is the building right out my living room window. It's painted in my favorite shades of blue and green. I love how a lot of the buildings have color- lots of oranges and yellow. Even the dirtier buildings have shades of color where various paint jobs have worn off over the years.

And finally, Adam's lesson on how to use an adaptor correctly:

I Pazzi Genti (crazy people)

Mo and Matt, both taking pictures at their waist level. Fortunately, Mo is below Matt's waist level so there was no blocking of pictures.








Adam was kind enough to let me take this picture while he was "doing his laundry".......aka letting his fabulous metro side show through.

I wasn't too happy with Mo's sketches, so I ate....her.

hello roma

Rome is......people, noise, cobblestones, crazy driving, gelato, raw meat, wine, piazzas, bad mattresses, funny locks, beautiful architecture, tiny shops, and the language barrier.