Viaggio in Italia

So I've done quite a bit of traveling lately... The weekend before last a roommate and I spent the weekend in Umbria, mostly in Perugia but also in a little medieval hill town called Gubbio. Last weekend three of my roommates and I, along with a Brown friend in Florence, spent four days in Barcelona. And then today I just got back from a little day trip to Parma, which is just an hour away from Bologna. All of it has been awesome, but by this weekend I really felt like I needed a break from traveling to just chill in Bologna for a little while. With the weekends full of traveling and six hours of class every day during the week, I'm feeling kind of exhausted.

But now our nearly-month-long spring break starts next weekend, and my roommates are stressing out trying to figure out travel plans. I'll have a little over a week before I meet my parents in London to head to Morocco, and I'm not sure what I want to do with that time. We were talking until recently about going to Sicily, and maybe dropping in on other parts of the South on our way down there, but my roommate's mother basically told her she wasn't allowed to go to the South because she thinks it's too unsafe. (The idea that southern Italy is too unsafe seems a little ridiculous when I have friends studying abroad in places like South Africa, Egypt, and Israel. Not to mention the fact that my roommate is twenty and half a world away from home, yet she still lets her mom decide where she can and cannot go in Europe. But I digress.)

Anyway, now we're lost as to what we should do for that period. There are financial limitations to consider, since it's kind of last minute and flights across Europe are expensive. Plus, we all have different ideas about where we want to go. Eric really wants to go to London and Berlin, but Dana's just been to London and isn't so hot on Berlin. She wants to see Austria and Switzerland. I really want to see Budapest, and Dublin. And certainly southern Italy.

Dana's proposing a compromise where we go up to Trieste, in the northeastern corner of Italy, then take the train from there to Vienna and then to Budapest. I appreciate her willingness to figure out a compromise, but I'm wondering whether it might be better for me to kind of ditch them and travel on my own. I like traveling with friends, but having to compromise three or more ways over every little decision, when everyone involved has different interests and priorities, gets a little tiring. I'm realizing that I don't have all that much time in Europe and if I plan to accomplish all that I really want to, I'm going to have to come up with a strategy and maybe branch out on my own. It's a little tricky because Dana's mom is really set on her not traveling alone, so if I go off on trips by myself it may mean leaving her all by herself in Bologna. But I also don' t want to organize my plans around her interests just so that I can be her constant chaperone.

We'll see how it goes. Tomorrow, I'll post some of my photos from Barcelona, Perugia, and Padova. Right nows it seems like there's so many that I can't even handle them all. But I'll be sure to get on that tomorrow.

So it's been a little while since I've updated this, and lots of different things have been going on... I'll try to summarize as thoroughly but concisely as possible.

On the academic front, I've still been shopping around in different classes and trying to figure out what to take. It's not an easy task. Aside from my contemporary history class, which I really like, the others are survivable at best and often absolutely horrific. The common trend seems to be that the professor will make a point in the first five minutes and go on to reiterate that point in different ways for the next two hours. I usually last okay for the first 30 minutes, then spend an hour and a half twitching in my seat and wanting to gouge my eyes out. I went to a class today called History of Christianity which was that way, and I wouldn't take it if someone paid me. My Italian literature class is also pretty much that way, but unfortunately I feel like I have to take it to fulfill the literature requirement for my Italian studies concentration at Brown. Anyway, I knew the semester wasn't going to be academically thrilling, but I didn't know the classes were going to be literally torturous. Oh well, I'm going to keep looking around.

Meanwhile, Bologna is still pretty cold, but it's finally been sunny for the past several days. Last week, I brought my camera on my usual run around the park near my apartment. Here are a few pictures:

Last weekend, we took advantage of our first long weekend to make a few day trips from Bologna. We managed to hit up three different regions (including Emilia-Romagna, that is) in three days. On Thursday, Dana and Eric and I went to Lucca and to Pisa, both in Tuscany. Pisa is kind of schifoso (gross) aside from the leaning tower. It seemed to be a city full of just tourists and immigrants trying to sell useless things to tourists. It's odd, because from the train station you walk for like thirty minutes through these dirty, graffiti-strewn streets, and then finally you come into this pristine park where the tower is, with all its gleaming white buildings and perfectly-trimmed grass. We walked to the tower, stayed there for about ten minutes taking pictures, then turned around and headed right back to the station and got on the first train back to Florence. I'd say Pisa's probably not worth visiting... any picture of the leaning tower printed from the internet would give pretty much the same effect.

Nevertheless, because I went, I've got to post a couple of pictures:

Lucca, on the other hand, is really pleasant. It's a super small city surrounded by a Renaissance-era wall. Fun history fact: Lucca was the site where Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus met to form the first triumvirate. Anyway, it's just a cute small town, if a little touristy (that is, the most dominant presence there was a big group of American high school kids, everyone seemed to speak English, menus and signs were translated into English). It was nice to see, though I couldn't image living there -- it's much too small. As in, you can walk from one end of the city to the other in about 15 minutes. I guess a lot of the people who are considered residents of Lucca live outside the main city, in villas spread out around the surrounding hillsides. In sum, I was satisfied with it, but I think there might be other small towns in Tuscany more off the beaten track.

On Friday, we all went to Modena, which is just around twenty minutes outside of Bologna. It's famous as the place where balsamic vinegar is produced, and, less known, as the place where Ferraris are made. Despite being a pretty familiar name to a lot of foreigners, Modena doesn't feel touristy at all, and we didn't see any other foreigners while we were there. I adored it; I think it's my favorite city of all the ones I've seen so far in Italy. It's similar to Bologna in its feel, its architecture and its cuisine, but it's much smaller, more quaint and clean, and without the sometimes-overwhelming big city feel. We also managed to stumble across another chocolate festival, which was fortuitous. I really wanted to have a meal there, as it's supposed to have amazing food, but we were there at kind of an awkward time, mid-afternoon after restaurants close for lunch and before they open for dinner. So I definitely want to go back. It's the kind of city where there isn't lots to do necessarily, but it's lovely just to wander around and soak up the ambience.

The other day trip we made was to Padova, maybe the second big university town after Bologna. It's actually in Veneto, which is a little odd because it doesn't feel at all like Venice. But I guess nothing feels like Venice. We spent most of the time there looking at different churches, because those are the main guidebook attractions. They're beautiful churches, to be sure, but wandering around churches gets old after a while. It's especially odd, too, when it's Sunday and people are trying to pray and hear mass, and you feel like an intruder going in and taking pictures and wandering around. Still, I was really impressed with Padova too. It's full of students, and has a lively, energetic feel despite being rather small. Another city I wouldn't mind spending more time in.

Right now, my roommate Dana and I are planning a trip to Barcelona for next weekend, which should be awesome. Our other friend in Florence is going to come along too, and my friend Morena in Leon (Spain) might come and join us there. I'm really excited about my first trip outside of Italy, and I've been wanting to see Barcelona for ages.

Tonight, my roommates and I and a couple of other kids from the program are going to see a soccer game, Bologna versus someone else. I don't know, I'm just going because people always say that going to see a soccer game is one of those things you have to do while you're in Italy. Bologna isn't even one of the major teams (it's Serie B, versus Serie A which contains all the important teams like Inter Milan and Juventus), so I'm not sure whether there'll be any rabid fans like the ones you always hear about. But it should be interesting anyway.

Oh, and sometime I have to write some more about my Italian roommate. Matteo is absolutely hilarious.. my roommates and I get such a kick out of him. He cuts out little pictures from magazines and puts them up surreptitiously in unexpected locations throughout the apartment. He also makes miniature pieces of furniture out of corks and wire. He has conspiracy theories about everything imaginable. He throws out random phrases and sentences in Italian just to confuse us, then yells out "Scherzando!" which means "Just kidding!" And when we stop him while he's talking to ask him to explain an unfamiliar word he's just used, he purposely gives some random unrelated definition just to laugh at the looks of puzzlement on our faces. Well when it's put that way it seems kind of mean, but it's pretty harmless. Basically we're just bewildered by each other all the time, which makes us laugh. Right now, he just gotten back from putting up cartoon drawings he made (vaguely political, or maybe not, it was hard to tell) all over the city. Yesterday he spent the afternoon making his own lemon soap. Classic Matteo... we don't know what to make of him.

I need to make the time to update more often and also to take more pictures! I'm sure there'll be more to say this weekend.

This week we're finally starting university classes, which is really exciting. Technically a lot of the classes started last week, but for some unknown reason our Brown-run orientation classes continued through all of last week. The Brown staff insisted, though, that it doesn't matter if we miss the first couple of lectures. I get that it's not the end of the world, but I still don't get why they had orientation overlap with the beginning of the semester.

Anyway, orientation is finally over - well tomorrow, officially, with my history oral exam (a little frightening). Now I have the gargantuan task of picking out a few reasonable classes out of a sea of hundreds. At the end of last week I went to an anthropology class on Italian culture and society that seemed like it should have been fascinating, but instead was terribly boring. A professor sat at a big desk and spoke into a microphone in a monotone voice for two hours. With that kind of set up, I think any subject matter would be boring.

First, Italian university is a lot different from American universities. Italians, like pretty much all Europeans, apply to university under one department (facolta') and take classes only in that department during their college careers. Classes are pretty much unstructured, with just a reading list handed out at the beginning and an oral exam at the end. Attendance isn't mandatory, but most of the Italians I've spoken with say they attend class. We foreigners get to take classes in any department we want, but it's a little confusing because a lot of the meeting times overlap and even the school breaks are different. It's hard to know what to expect out of the oral exam at the end... I think they vary a lot depending on the professor. The Brown program told us to look for professors we could understand easily and who seemed welcoming to foreign students. It's a tough balance, though, because I need American-friendly professors but I also don't want to take classes made up of all foreign students.

Today, though, I went to a class that I really enjoyed. It was just called Contemporary History... there are four or five different courses with that same title, all taught by different professors, and I guess every professor chooses a slightly different focus. I had no idea what to expect heading into mine, but it turns out it was a class full of philosophy majors who apparently have a history requirement. It seemed a little more intense than a lot of the classes here: he said we'd split up into smaller seminars partway through the semester, and there will be a written and an oral component to the final exam. The professor was really lively, though, pacing around the room and shouting and waving his arms around. The course has two points of focus, a little random: globalization and the emancipation of women. I think we do globalization first, then women's emancipation.

Today he spoke kind of vaguely about how globalization began with the discovery of America. That was basically the main point of the entire lecture, rephrased in a million different ways. My sense is that that's the Italian lecture style. To an American it seems like they're all a little overly long-winded. There was one point I really enjoyed, though: the proof that the indigenous Americans were less technologically advanced than the Europeans is that they never figured out how to make cheese. He was completely serious when he said this, and it struck me as a totally Italian thing to say.

So right now I'm thinking I'll end up taking this class, assuming that the professor seems accommodating to foreign students when I go talk to him in his office hours. The best part, though, is the history department building. I think it may be the prettiest building I've seen in Bologna. Oddly, it used to be a prison until the 1950s, when it was taken over by the history facolta' and the bars on the windows were replaced by glass. It's a beautiful building though, rust-colored and all porticoes, that opens up into a little courtyard where all the students hang around, reading and eating and talking, in between classes. Next time I go I'll be sure to take photos and post them.

Tomorrow's a full day of shopping classes, so let's hope I find some interesting ones!

So second week in Bologna.

Most of it has been classes

Here are some photos from our day trip to Ravenna, a small neighboring city that used to be the western capital of the Holy Roman Empire.

one of ravenna's famous mosaics

Pug in a blanket! This is the second time in Italy I've seen a dog in a stroller. There was no child in sight, so the stroller was clearly meant for the dog. I just can't get over this trend.

Statue of Garibaldi, a must for every town

On our way back to the train station we stumbled across a random extremist right-wing protest. 'Via Prodi' means 'Go away, Prodi,' the current center-left prime minister. These people support Berlusconi, currently leader of the opposition and maybe returning to the presidency soon.


There were even members of the Lega Nord, the real extremists whose main platform is anti-immigration: they want to kick all the immigrants out of Italy. They also believe northern Italy should secede from the rest of the country and start its own country called Padania. I've always heard about the Lega because they're so extreme, but it was hard to imagine people actually belonging to it... but here they are.