Classes started yesterday. I am taking Italian Cinema and Experiencing the City. Both professors are excellent and very interesting!! For cinema, we have a morning lecture, which was about Italian history leading up until the end of WWII to give us perspective into the time the movies were made. Then, Monday and Tuesday nights are the film screenings, and last night's was Rome: Open City. It's an old black and white movie with subtitles, so reading and watching at 8pm at night is a bit much...but the movie itself was pretty decent, especially since our program director had warned us that it wouldn't be. It was about the Italian resistance during WWII (apparently Sesto Fiorentino was a major base for partigiani (partisans, the ones against facism).
I absolutely LOVE my other class. Our professor is really chill and talks to us at meals and wants to get to know us as well as teach us. We have a lecture in the morning, then go into town with an assignment. Today, we took on public transportation as our prof told us to get from the villa to the place where our tour of the city as a group had been two nights prior. That was quite the adventure in its own. Then we toured a couple of churches (including Santa Croce which is where Michelangelo and Galileo are buried) and got gelato and walked the same tour we'd done the other night. Only this time, he pointed out all of these things about Florence that I never would have thought about-like how it basically has been commercialized down exactly for tourists and not much else. Like the view that we overlooked the other night is perfectly sculpted for us, and how only at Ponte Vecchio is the riverfront even really acknowledged and a key part of the city. The most interesting thing that I learned was about how churches would actually cut frescoes out of their walls and move them to "better" viewing areas. One in particular was moved in Santa Croce to put in Galileo's tomb, which is ironic considering how long the church condemned him for his scientific studies.
As for the rest of things here, the food at the villa is still amazing, and I've now had "Fruit of the Forest" and chocolate hazelnut gelato. Alcohol and wine are incredibly cheap (I bought a bottle of white wine for 1.15 euro yesterday!!) but food is more than it is in the US. Tomorrow is a trip to Cinque Terre, which I am SO excited for. I also am planning to visit Lucca on Sunday, and hopefully make it to Il Palio in Sienna on Monday.
1 comment:
Sooooo with all the cool stuff you're doing, I'm totally jealous of that! :) But going to the beach with Adam and Jessica was awesome, they're a lot of fun. Your classes sound great, and that's an interesting thing to know about the city and it's comercialization for tourism. Learning about other places is just too much fun...sigh. Even my Spanish class is getting fun again, my profesora is hilarious and not so annoying. :) Keep enjoying it all, I'm loving living vicariously through you!!
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