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!