Il torre and the back of la cattedrale.


Just one of the many incredible views inside the Cathedral, I think the ceiling was my favorite part.


A view from inside the cloister of the tower, and the cathedral.


The ruins of war: melted frescoes and partially destroyed statues.

Svezia, Costume, Pisa e Un lezione di Fisica

Ciao Tutti!
I’m already coming up on the first of my vacations next week, our fall break, and for the Italians La Festa di Ognissanti, (All Saint’s Day) and I will be spending it visiting my aunt in Sweden. It’s amazing that I’m already hitting a benchmark, another reminder that my time here is flying by.

Last week was another full one, my classes are all picking up, I have lots of reading to do and papers to write but I’m still finding all of my classes incredibly interesting. In our Studio Art class we are following the same guidelines that Renaissance artists followed. During our first lesson we made ink pens out of feathers and our own silver point pencils and sketched with pieces of charcoal. It was amazing. Later we are going to the Accademia to sketch the actual David.
In the search for the perfect café last week, a few of us stumbled upon a little Libreria (bookstore) that is also a café, bar and live music venue at nights. After enjoying a cappuccino sitting down without being bothered by anyone but the owner’s dog during lunch one day, we decided to try back that night when an Italian folk group was playing. The music was amazing and it was the largest group of happy Italians I have seen since being here, everyone was dancing and smiling and the atmosphere was really fun.

Friday we took a trip to Palazzo Pitti, deciding to take on the eight-museum complex that was the Medici’s home for almost 200 years in baby steps. After looking only at the Galleria del Costume, the museum of the history of Florentine fashion, we felt culturally satisfied and also inspired to shop a bit. I’ve been pleasantly surprised lately that the overall number of tourists seems to be going down along with the temperature. Even while we browsed the jewelry store windows of the Ponte Vecchio it didn’t seem overly crowded.

Saturday brought with it my long awaited trip to Pisa both to see the sites and to meet Melissa and Luca, two of the connections I have in Italy. Pisa is reminiscent of a smaller cleaner Florence, it is closer to the coast and full of less people but has similar architecture and is situated across the Arno just like Firenze. The area with the Leaning Tower, the Cathedral, the Baptistery and the Convent is where all of the tourists convene, but even so the sight is impressive. Pisa has the best lawns I’ve seen yet in Italy, and it makes the white marble buildings pop, the aesthetics were also helped by the blue sky and 70 degree weather we were graced with on Saturday (out of nowhere). While most tourists rushed madly into each of the buildings and museums the lawns turned into a kind of replacement college campus and many students were just lying out, soaking up what might be the last warm day of the year. We saw only the inside of the cathedral, a beautiful piece of architecture, less intense than the one in Siena, but just as beautiful, and the Cloisters which are famous for being hit with a bomb during WWII when all of the frescoes inside literally melted off the walls from the heat. Today it is in the midst of being restored and the half destructed artwork and architecture blend with the extremely graphic and base artwork depicted in what is left of the frescoes to leave an eerie, sad feeling with any visitor.

That night I enjoyed a true Italian aperitivi version of dinner with Melissa and Luca and their friends from the University of Pisa Physics department. I definitely picked up some new Italian vocab listening to their conversations about work, and enjoyed being a part of someone’s everyday life here.

Yesterday, after being extremely confused by daylight saving’s time, (which no one mentioned to me, and apparently the U.S. isn’t doing for another week?) my friend Castine and I did something I’ve been wanting to do since I got here: go to a movie. We saw Ratatouille dubbed into Italian and it was extremely bellino, and it let me have a little more interaction with my favorite Italian age group. Happy Halloween to everyone out there! Eat some American candy for me!

Beautiful Pictures of Siena

L'auttuno arriva

Fall officially arrived this weekend, and after lying on the beach last weekend, it feels a little bit more like winter to me. Yesterday I stood in line for four hours after deciding it was about time I saw the Uffizi. Florence’s most popular museum, the Uffizi is 45 rooms of artwork once owned by the Medici’s. This four hour wait sounds like it would just be boring, but instead it was boring and freezing, two of my friends and I took turns standing in the cold and running to get coffee or tea, or just find someplace to stand that was warmer for a couple minutes. Katherine called it quits after two hours, but Hanna and I were both too stubborn to leave, and we were rewarded in the end with an amazing collection of art, housed in another of Florence’s most beautiful buildings. I saw Botticelli’s original “Birth of Venus,” and “La Primavera,” two that I was really looking forward to, along with a lot of other historically significant Italian art. It’s amazing that one family used to own all of that, and more, it’s really incredible that I have only been to one actual museum so far in Florence, I feel like everywhere I look is art.

I spent Saturday in Siena, another adventure dampered a bit by the frigid wind, but we got to see some beautiful architecture. Siena reminded me a little of a miniature, cleaner version of Florence. With a duomo and a Piazza with a really similar looking building to the Palazzo Vecchio in Piazza della Signoria. We mustered up the courage to pay the six euro entrance fee to the duomo (we are all feeling the terrible exchange rate and curse of being students with no income living in Europe) and were extremely glad we did. An older American woman leaving the church when we first arrived was rambling to herself, and us, that the nearly ten American dollars she just spent definitely wasn’t worth it to see just another church! But I think she may have been blind, or just crazy, because the interior of the church was one of the most intricate I have ever seen, the entire structure is striped between the green and white marble that is usually only on the outside of Italian churches, every floor tile was a different beautiful design, and their were sculptures in every spare corner including a bust of every single pope that circled the entire thing, it was incredible. The church wasn’t very big but we spent over an hour just walking through it, taking pictures, and trying to get them to turn out without a flash, it was so hard to capture, it was all just too much.

After lots of sightseeing this weekend I’m pretty wiped out before the second week of my first semester classes, but I think I can manage with three day weeks, and I already have “fall break” next week. My first real solo traveling European adventure to Sweden, it should definitely be an experience. I should be starting to audit my University of Florence class sometime soon as well, I am going to see if I can audit a mass communication course, something I would never have the chance to take at Smith and I think would be incredibly interesting given the state of the Italian media.
Un abbracciano a tutti!

Una Giostra nella Piazza

Today there is a Carousel in the Piazza della Repubblica, for no apparent reason. It is beautiful. I sat by it for an hour today and read my book and watched the Italian children run up to the cavallinos, begging for a ride. I want to babysit an Italian child and feed her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and have her grow up and remember her cool American babysitter that introduced her to this foreign delicacy.

It has become fall, there is a chill in the air that has forced me into a scarf and jacket and sweater combo and has me stopping at every shop window for the perfect pair of Italian stivali (boots) and drooling over the thousands of different colored guanti (gloves) that look so warm and stylish at the same time.

I find myself missing places to go sit and read. At home I grew up in Starbucks, which—say what you will about it—knows something about atmosphere, and for 3 bucks you can have a warm place to cuddle up with your latest novel all afternoon. At school in Northampton, café’s line up to provide students with the ideal study environment/escape from the harsh New England weather. While Florentines love their espresso, and it is extremely good espresso, they drink it standing up, and if you dare sit down without ordering food you can expect a dirty look from the cameriera (waiter).

Our University courses should start in the next few weeks and hopefully that will introduce me to what the students here do for fun, besides late night partying at the discoteca, which isn’t really my thing. This weekend they are calling for storms and rain, I don’t have any travel plans currently so I think I will finally take advantage of my museum pass and the bad weather and look at some indoor art, while still keeping an eye out for the Italian literary loner hangout of my dreams.

Cinque Terre

Trovavo Paradiso

This weekend I heeded some advice from other people who have been to Italy and planned a trip to Cinque Terre in the Liguria province where it is apparently perfect temperature all year round. We hit it at the exact right moment, right at the end of “high season” for the tourists, but when the temperatures were in the high 70’s to low 80’s all weekend, warm enough to swim in the Mediterranean, and not intense enough to lie on the beach for two days straight without sunscreen and not get burned!
I will definitely post pictures because I can’t even describe how beautiful it is there, five towns that cling to the cliffs over the sea and you can walk between all of them on paths, find little rock coves to sunbathe in, or just jump into the Ligurian Sea (I think it is the Ligurian, or the Mediterranean, or whatever they are all connected anyway). Our spontaneous weekend turned out perfectly with us finding a three bedroom apartment for rent in the tiniest town of Riomaggiore for only 150 euros (which split between 9 girls was cheaper than any hostel). We made our own dinner for the night of fresh pasta and pesto, salad, peach slices wrapped in prosciutto, chocolate, wine, strawberries and mascarpone. It was a really amazing night and we definitely all bonded.
Riomaggiore doesn’t really have an actual beach but we found a huge rock jetty of these giant flat marble stones and brought a lunch out there and just laid around and jumped in the sea when we felt like it. Sunday we took the train to the largest of the five towns, Monterosso, which is more touristy but has actual sand beaches as well. Katherine and I got home late last night exhausted and covered in a fine layer of Mediterranean sea salt.
I slept incredibly well, remembering how much lying on the beach can take it out of you, and woke up this morning for my first day of the real semester. I went to three classes today: our required stylistics course, Italian literature, and the history of Florence. All of them were amazing and I was reminded during my literature class how much I love my major and the reason I am so in love with Italian literature. Learning about these things that I have been passionate about for so long in the language I have slowly been falling in love with is incredible. Sorry if it sounds like I am writing a college essay here but I’m really happy that I am enjoying even the academic aspect of being here. I will only have class three days a week at the Smith Center this semester, and don’t start auditing my University of Florence class for another couple weeks. Every time I look at the date I can’t believe how fast the time has been going, I’m coming up on my one month mark but still feel like I could spend the entire year here traveling as much as I have been and not see it all.
I feel as if I am getting more comfortable with the language, although every time I have a grammar lesson I realize how much I still don’t quite understand, and I also am getting much better at navigating the city and the transportation systems. It has also been difficult keeping in contact with people from home with the lack of available wireless here, which is proving a bit frustrating, but slowly I am figuring things out. Right now I am sitting outside of a café that lets you use their wireless if you buy something, Katherine and I had some cappuccinos, but there are also a lot of students bumming the wireless on the sidewalk next to us. I can’t wait for my family and friends who are coming to visit me this year so I can show them such an amazing place. I hope this blog is proving useful and/or interesting for you guys, and if any of you have questions or want to drop me a line you can email me anytime! maggie.mertens@gmail.com
Ciao!

Photos of San Gimignano and Il Giardino di Boboli

The view from outside of San Gimignano, doesn't it make you want to buy a vineyard and stay there forever?



The girls.



Those medieval buildings in one of the piazzas.




Me with the second best gelato I've had so far in Italy.



One of San Gimignano's infamous towers.



Il giardino di Boboli! One of many many fountains. Buontalenti loved his fountains.



We felt Italian sitting up on those big grassy hills and reading our Italian books.



One of the Medici mansions, some more fountain, and a view of the city I'm sure they paid a lot for.



More garden, do you see that castle way up in the background?



We stayed at the gardens all day and I'm pretty sure only saw 1/10 of it because everywhere you turn there are little hidden paths like this one.

A Slow Transition.

Gradually I am feeling myself grow more accustomed to life here. Sunday morning I woke up late (9 a.m., but to my Signora I am the “dormita” the sleeper of the house) and sat in the kitchen drinking my coffee and eating my toast while my Signora cut up apples for a dessert she was making.

Saturday was a long day, I planned a trip to San Gimignano after being reminded of the town my mom loved so much by my History of Florence professor last week. Four friends and I ended up taking the long, winding bus ride there. San Gimignano is significant because it is a medieval village that still has 17 of its 42 towers intact. Back in the day when Italy was constantly at war with itself people built towers to protect themselves and to throw boiling oil out of at their enemies. Today they make for lovely places to see panoramic vistas of the Tuscan countryside.

San Gimignano is beautiful because of both the countryside and the village itself. The buildings have been maintained beautifully and it still retains the quiet mood of a little village while also being a popular tourist destination. We had a fabulous lunch, and gelato that rivals that of “Vivoli,” the best gelateria in Florence. Then we went to the Museo di Civico where tons of religious art, beautiful frescoes and the “Sala di Dante,” a room where Dante once mediated a village war, are all housed. The museum is also home to the only tower in San Gimignano that you are allowed to go up. Although to reach the top we had to climb hundreds of stairs, the view was worth it. We stayed at the top of the tower for almost an hour just taking in one of the most beautiful panoramas I’ve ever seen. After descending I went on a hunt for a leather bag maker where my mom had bought me a purse a few years before. After giving up hope a few hours later we finally stumbled upon it and I pulled my purse out showing the man at the shop (who makes all the bags with his son) and told him my mom had bought it from him for me two years ago. He smiled at me and asked “Buona?” ‘Is it good?’ And I told him I loved it. After falling in love with several other of his bags I finally settled on one that I could carry my books and computer in to and from school. He gave me a small discount and after asking if I was English or American he took my hands in his and said “Saluta tua madre per me.” ‘Say hi to your mother from me.’ I left the shop beaming after making my first big Italian purchase.

Needless to say I went to bed exhausted that night and Sunday morning took the day at my pace, deciding to spend some time in my own city. I took advantage of my museum pass paid for by my school and went to the Boboli Gardens, sort of the Florentine Central Park, except that it was all once owned by the Medicis and their sense of grandeur is felt in every square centimeter of the place. I read my Italian novel that I am stumbling through, wrote in my journal, and took pictures of only a few of the incredible statues and vistas the garden is home to. We are still experiencing unseasonably warm weather here, and I feel like my summer vacation has been extended indefinitely, and that’s not such a bad feeling.

Another batch of photos...

Another view of the Arno, one of my favorite places.


The next view are from San Miniato, the church at the top of the hill where I had my Art History and drawing classes.








The view of the Chianti countryside, taken through the bus window, multiply this beauty by about 1,000 and you have the real effect.





And the view from Fiesole on the outskirts of Florence.

Che bellissima fine-settimana.

Friday we had a drawing lesson at San Minato, one of the most beautiful places I have been in Florence yet, we drew the architecture of the church and I decided that it was a fabulous way to learn and I will be signing up for the Studio Art course first semester—which starts in a couple weeks. I believe I will also be taking an Italian literature class, an Italian language stylistics course, and a history of Florence course, plus auditing one class at the University of Florence of my choice that I will be required to write a paper on at the end of the semester. I honestly hadn’t even really thought about the schoolwork that would be happening here, but I am very happy to have a schedule and to be back in an academic setting, learning about the environment in which I now live. Orientation will be another two weeks of classes and by the end of it my Italian should hopefully be back up close to the level it was at when I left Smith last spring.

This weekend was an excellent opportunity to see more of the Tuscan countryside and I definitely took advantage of it. Saturday I went to Chianti with three of my friends, we decided to go to a little town called Greve, where we heard there might be a wine festival going on. We decided to just hop a bus and leave the city early Saturday morning and see what Greve could offer us. It turned out no wine festival, but a little market was open until two with food and clothes and really beautiful leather bags (no Mom I didn’t buy one yet). We found out once the market was done though, that Greve is extremely tiny, with not a whole lot to do inside the town. The views on the way up and down were the highlight. I will post some pictures that I took out of the bus window and I promise you I did not edit them one bit—that is the Tuscan countryside folks. We did have an excellent lunch, some amazing dessert, and a little wine though, before getting back on the bus for some more panoramic views and hairpin turns.

That night we decided to try our luck in the city on our first real Saturday night in Italy. A friend of a friend had tipped us off to a bar that a lot of Italians go to called (of all things) Joshua Tree. Lucky for us it is very close to my and Katherine’s apartment, and there happened to be a Florentine soccer game going on so it was packed with screaming fans. If you want to learn some fun Italian words, watch soccer here. We immediately decided we will be buying our purple t-shirts and going to a game, hopefully next Sunday. It was great and the bartender made us free shots because along with her we were the only girls in the place. It was probably the nicest an Italian girl has been to us since we got here.

Sunday Katherine’s sorellina (little sister) Nora visited from Rome, where she is attending language school for a few months. We decided to get some more l’aria della campagna (country air) and headed to nearby Fiesole to have a picnic and do some reading for our classes. Fiesole is beautiful, you can just walk and walk and walk and everywhere you turn there are ancient Etruscan ruins or an amazing 360 degree view of Florence way down below the countryside. We got some sun and some reading done and had some paninos before heading back the città.

I got my first Italian cold this weekend, which might keep me in tonight but I didn’t let it stop me from traveling. I still find myself missing home sometimes and don’t know if I will ever get used to the idea that this is my home for another nine months, but as they say “Vediamo.”