Northern Tour- Day 5

After a restful night's sleep in my own private hotel room, I get up early in the morning for the 45 minute bus ride into Genova for the day. There are obvious signs of the rain showers that were passing through all night long, and now the storm clouds threaten to rain upon the morning as well.

Driving along the coastal cliff sides, I can see from the bus window these dark clouds over the ocean. The clouds themselves are displaying some beautiful contrasts in color and shade, and a temporary break in the clouds allows the sun to suddenly burst through in magnificent rays of light, highlighting a spot of the ocean below as if God himself is touching the water and making it holy. This rare scene along the coast was so beautiful that it had everyone on the bus completely entranced. One girls behind me, upon waking up from a short nap could barely believe what she saw before her, just laughing and saying that it was "too ridiculously beautiful to be real."

view of Genova from the top of this weird "elevator" thing we went on.

Genova, which one of the major port cities in Italy, is also home to the largest aquarium in Europe and, looking for a different experience today, we all decide that this is one opportunity that we cannot pass up. It was cool, and I really enjoyed watching the dolphins and penguins, but I think that I have definitely been to at least one or two bigger aquariums in the US. Plus, I accidently mis-read my watch and got out of there a good 45 minutes earlier than I had to, and could not get back in because we were not issued actual tickets. So instead I went to this glass shirical greenhouse called the "Biosphere" and sketched for a while. Luckily, since I was the only one in there for a while, I got to go in for free and was able to do whatever I wanted. 

One of my favorite sights of the day was when we got a special tour of the Teatro Carlo Felice, which is Genova's theater and opera house. This is the most complex stage set up I have ever seen. The ceiling is 100ft high from the stage and the floor is 100ft below the the stage, which allows for immensely complex scenes to be raised and lowered throughout the performance, on 3 by 5ft panels that can move together as a whole or individually move up and down, or even pivot in any direction. I got to see workers building the set for the next Opera to be shown there and was amazed by the depth and precision they go through to make a stage set that will just be torn back down into scraps after a few performances.

After a full day of touring we head back on the bus to our hotel in Varazze.
Some rainy weather has once again left this place in a blanket of fog, rising and moving along the mountains as if some magical force were acting upon them.

Of course! I say to myself.

This is the place where clouds are born! Why didn't I realize this before? It seems so simple now, that a place which has captured the hearts and imaginations of artists and writers for centuries would also be a nursery of the sea and sky.

Back in Varazze I have a lot of preparing to do. This was actually the last day of the official tour and tomorrow we are all (minus Ezio, Tom and Susan Mills, and the bus) going to take a train from Genova to Cinque Terre for a weekend of mountain trails, cliff diving, swimming and hiking.

Northern Tour- Day 4

After spending the night in a nice hotel in Bologna, we eat breakfast in the hotel before setting out for the day. For the record, this hotel has the BEST hot chocolate I have ever had. When I asked for it, they brought me a small pitcher full (about 3 or 4 full servings worth) of a thick, rich and creamy hot chocolate that tasted like they had just melted a fine semi-sweet chocolate bar and whipped it together with some cream for just the perfect amount of richness, but enough of that.

Bologna is perhaps the most "Americanized" urban cities that I have seen in Italy thus far. This is largely due to the fact that it is, in large part, a college town. Bologna University, with a student population of around 30,000, is actually the oldest university in the western world.                             (above) The leaning tower of Bologna 

It was officially founded in the year 1088, which just astounds me when I think about how Columbus didn't even discover the Americas until a few hundred years later. But despite it's age, it really just feels like any other typical college town anywhere. During the tour we stop in to see the University's Museo di Anatomia Umana Normale, which is an anatomical museum of wax pieces made in the 18th and 19th centuries, a large part of which is dedicated to the study of baby delivery, which was the first of its kind and highly advanced for its time.

After a visit to the Giorgio Morandi museum, we head over to Le Corbusier's Pavillion de L'esprit Nouveau (the New Spirit), built for the Exposition des Art Decoratifs held in Paris in 1925, but torn down the following year. In Bologna they have built a faithful replica based on the original plans in 1977 for the use of study by architecture and design students. It is an exhibitional building: a standardized housing project designed according to Corbu's "purest" manifesto which shapes social habits and philosophy of living spaces rather than following previous social models. While I don't agree with Corbu's "ideal" living standards, and shudder to think of how horrible it would be if he had been able to carry out his plans for an "ideal" city (think of those massive standardized housing projects built in communist Russia), I still appreciate his design skills in being able to build a very inexpensive house made completely out of cement, but still with open spaces which are opened up to the outside world and have a lot of natural sunlight filtering through. My favorite part of the house is a very small outdoor pavilion that has a tree growing in the middle of it, which is poking through a large hole in the cement roof of the pavilion. The only thing I would have changed about this space is to have grown some grass in the ground instead of putting in the cement tiles it has now.

Once again we get back on the bus and head out on a 3 hour plus journey, crossing the Appennine chain again, and enter a small region called Liguria, situated in the narrow strip of land between the mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. Traveling along the "Riviera di Levante," a road that was rediscovered by English travelers, such as the poet P.B. Shelley, I find myself amongst a beautiful landscape, ever changing and never getting old, mountains and hills on my right, coast and sea to my left.

Finally we reach our destination, Varazze, a small, quite coastal town where we will be lodging for the next two nights. After dinner I head outside for a stroll in the cool sea air. Though it is only 9:30 by my watch, the sky is already pitch-black and I only see a couple of other people out and about. The beach is completely deserted, but the moon and the few buildings in town that still have their lights on give me just enough light to walk by, so I go and climb out along this boulder jetty jutting out into the ocean. Shrouded in the darkness, I stand there in quite solitude, absorbing everything around me and contemplating on all the things that had passed before my eyes in the last couple of days. I thank God especially for all the blessings of this life. For being with me everywhere I go, and I pray that He help me to grow in wisdom, understanding, humility, grace and above all, love. Love for friends and enemies alike, love for family and love for strangers on the street. It is love which connects us all and binds us together with a chain 10 times stronger than any act of hate could ever be. Through this love I can feel the presence of all my family and friends standing behind me, keeping me company in this cold, dark landscape in an unwavering wave of love and support. Looking out into the darkness at the vast ocean in front of me, I too am reaching out my hand to all my loved ones back home, sending out all my love and happiness across the seas to reach you, wherever you may be.

Northern Tour- Day 3

After another night in Siena, we departed early this morning for Firenze (Florence), about an hour and a half away by bus. Firenze is a bustling tourist city absolutely full to the brim with rich, elaborate Renaissance art and arcitecture. Indeed, Firenze is the gem of Tuscany. The city of Medici. The city of the Renaissance. From Giotto to Michelangelo, from Dante to Boccaccio, from Machiavelli to Galileo and Leonardo DaVinci, Firenze gave Italy her greatest artists, writers and scientists and out of her soul was born the whole of humanistic aesthetic. Vasari attributes it all simply to the purity of Tuscan air, which is probably as good an explanation as any.

the Firenze duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore

During our short excursion through Firenze, we go to the Convent of San Marco, which was completed in 1445 for the Dominican monks at the expense of the Medici family, who were wealthy bankers and art patrons. In each cell of the convent there is a different fresco of a devotional image painted by one of the monks who lived there. Though the rooms are roped off to prevent people from entering more than a foot or two into the space, Tom Mills, always the advocate for getting into places for artistic purposes by any means necessary, defiantly goes into the roped off are to sit down and draw his favorite painting. At on point the security guard walks over and peers into the room to see what is going on in there but says nothing about him actually being in there, which just astounds me. I am beginning to see how, in this country at least, artists are regarded with a certain reverence and often are able to gain privileges and access to places that are closed off to the general public. I really like this idea and I wish the concept were a lot more wide-spread, especially in the US where artists struggle to gain any sort of respect for their studies.

Loggia dei Lanzi in the Piazza della Signoria

The last place I stop by to see while in Florence is the Piazza della Signoria, where they put all of including the Perseus; the Rape of the Sabines, Donatello's Judith and these famous sculptures, Holofemes and the copy of Michaelangelo's David, placed in the same location in front of the town hall for which the work was originally intended. Of course, being an art student in Florence, I, as well as a couple of others in my small group, fell it the properly stereotypical thing to do to pull out our sketchbooks and attempt to do some studies of these masterworks. Such a world-famous work as the David can be rather intimidating to even attempt to capture when it is standing right in front of you, and in doing so it is important to accept the fact that your sketches will never be able to do the work justice. Instead, they are meant to be used to study the form and proportions of the body in hopes of gaining an understanding of what it is that gives the David its power and life force. It is rather surprising to note how big his head and hands are in proportion to the rest of his body, which in my mind is an anthropomorphic style meant to symbolize the surety and strength of his hands with a rock and sling, as well as his intelligence and sharpness of mind.

With about a half hour left before we have to meet up with the rest of the group and head off to our next destination, I decide to sit down on the floor of the piazza right in front of the David and continue doing sketch studies, accompanied by Chris, who was working in water colors. Being that there was a constant stream of tourists and large tour groups coming into the piazza, we found ourselves in a rather awkward position to be situated, and if I hadn't had someone else to do it with me, I doubt I would have had the courage to keep it up for very long. It's an interesting feeling when any artist is doing his own work in a public setting such as this. Chris,who has done this a lot more often than I, tells me that he has always felt that whenever he is doing any sort of sketching or painting in public, he feels as if it almost becomes like a performance piece as well. No matter how much you try to ignore the people around you watching and commenting on your work to their friends, you must realize that you are inevitably making a spectacle of yourself, and do your best to try and not let that effect your work. Indeed, the entire time I sat there, already being fairly self-conscious about my rather rough sketchwork, I had to hear tourists behind me making comments (probably not realizing that I speak English and could understand everything they were saying) and it is rather funny that of the few times I turned my head to look around me, I saw people taking pictures of the pair of us working just as much as they were taking pictures of the David statue.

Florence is a beautiful city, and a wonderful place for any artist or art historian to go and study, but it is all together too touristy for my taste. One girl in my group actually lived here for about a year as a painter's apprentice and she says that she never really had to learn any Italian the entire time she was here because the mass of the tourist industry makes it so that all the Italians living here must learn how to speak English for their benefit, which in my mind is a rather sad stae of affairs for the people, the culture and thehistory of this place. At 5:30 we leave Firenze and, crossing the Appenine chain, we reach Bologna, the capital of the Emilia-Romagna region, where we spend the night.

Self Portraits- series #1

I'm starting a series of self portraits that all represent some aspect of myself

*note*
yes, I did take all these pictures myself, but if you can't tell, all the better

This series I call "Spaghetti Western"

I think this is my favorite picture in this sort series

the name "Spaghetti Western" came from a bunch of western style films that were made in the first half of the 20th century by Italian directors. Often using Italian actors (except for the main "hero" character who had to be American) and filming in parts of Italy that resemble the landscape of the American West. Except for the main American actor, the actors would often say their lines in Italian, and then it would be dubbed over for the American audience.

obviously, I applied different effects to these pictures in order to get a different feel from them. Kind of just playing around to see what sort of stuff I can do with the image to get a different reaction to each one.

for this one, i juxtaposed the image of myself with the images of my bedroom wall, which has pictures of my family and friends, as well as other objects, who are an integral aspect of myself. even though at this point many would hardly recognize the person in the mirror as being me, the wall, in a sense, represents some of the things that got me to where I am today, even though I sometimes cloak these things in a protective, but still fancier, "jacket and hat"

Ok, seriously, enough with the BS "artist's statement." Truth is I just like how the image of myself looks on the wall with all my other pictures, because you almost don't even notice that it's actually looking into a mirror at first, like it could just be a wall poster or something.

Northern Tour- Day 2

We spent the first night of our tour in a modest hotel in Siena and awoke early this morning for our tour with Ezio. I had been looking forward to this return since we had come here for the Palio in mid-August. This enchanting city has quickly won the hearts of the entire group. According to legend, Siena was settled by Senus, son of Remus, twin brother of Romulus, the mythological founder of Rome. It played a significant role in the history of Italy especially in Medieval times, for its convenient position along the pilgrimage road called Francigena, in the middle of a hilly landscape called Crete. Its buildings and lanscapes, as well as traditions such as the Palio di Siena, are still very much unchanged since Medievel times, and its strong sense of community ties and responsibilities has led to the city being able to boast the lowest crime rates and the lowest drug addiction rates in the entire country. Luckily, since we got to see the Palio a month ago, we were able to see these community ties at their fullest and experience the true spirit of Siena rather than the small glimpse the average tourist take away on any other given day. Thus far, if I were able to choose any place to live in Italy for the rest of my life, it would be a close tie between Siena and some more remote coastal/mountain region.

a small side street in Siena I went to to draw, 

it was surprisingly peaceful, the only sounds coming

from small birds chirping above me.  

In the late afternoon/evening we had plenty of free time to use as we pleased. After a short nap I ventured out by myself to explore around the town and perhapsdo a little more shopping for special treasures to bring back home to family and friends. After much searching and deliberation with myself I finally picked out 2 beautiful cashmere and silk scarves and a cranberry colored wool fedora hat for myself. Together with my other purchases of the day, as well as what I bought yesterday, I have already spent an alarming amount of money so early in the trip, though I don't regret a single purchase and am rather pleased with my wares.

At night I go out to get something to eat and on the way pass by an old man begging on the street. I am always torn in these situations because I don't really like just giving money to people when I don't really know what they are going to use that money to buy. And though I would really like to help them out in any way I can, I also must realize that I don't have the resources or the money to help every begger I see. I turn back around anyways and go to ask the man (in Italian of course) what he would like to eat, be it some pizza, a sandwich, pasta or something like that. He tells me that he would simply like a piece of some cheese pizza, which I am happy to oblidge, for I was just going to get some myself. I leave him there and go to this pizza place that has some truly excellent pizza that I had tried the night before that is much like the American style pan pizza, only better. I get a slice pizza margherita (cheese with tomato sauce) for him and a slice for me with salami piccante (like pepperoni, but bigger and spicey-er), which wipes me out of all the money I had brought with me for dinner. Heading back, I inevitably get lost amoung the darkened streets and by the time I find my way back to where the man was standing, the pizza is barely still warm. We sit down together on the side of the street to eat our pizza and we talk about life and what I'm doing in Siena and such. I am rather disappointed when I learn that he doesn't much like the pizza I got because he has a hard time digesting the bread of the thicker crust this pizza has on it, though he is still rather pleased that I got it for him and am keeping him some company for dinner. Though I am sorry that I can't do more for him, I am glad to see in his eyes the spark of joy he got from someone reaching out and treating him with dignity and respect. I am sad to think of how much he reminds me of my own poor Granny and Grandpa and the hardships that they have gone through with their living situation. I can only hope and pray that this man finds happiness and blessings for the rest of his life, for surely he doesn't deserve having to endure such pain and hunger living here on the streets, he is just as good a person as you and I.

When I get back to the hotel, I turn on BBC World News and hear of nothing but economic crisis-es sweeping the American, and in turn, World, economy. 

Don't I know it. 

Northern Tour- Day 1

Traveling through the hills of Chianti to Siena, I make an attempt to read my book for Art History, but it's impossible. The views I am passing by are just too beautiful to keep my eyes focused on anything else. Here was the second short stop on our Northern Tour. Amoung these lush hills and valleys lies the small town of Greve, which is renowned for being the most important Chianti wine trading center in the world. Annually, they have a wine fair called Rassegna del Chianti Classico with wine-tasting, wine-blessing, and lots of festivities. Today we came just for that reason. 

For 10 euro you get a wine glass and 8 samplings of any wine of your choice. Not wanting to drink quite that much wine, I decide instead to observe what other people are drinking and hope to find something special to take back home to the States with me. The first one I try already seems to be a good choice. I swirl around the deep red wine in the glass and observe how the legs form and smoothly drip down, then I stick my nose in the top of the glass and take a deep breath, inhaling the rich aroma of the wine and getting a feel for the make-up of it. Finally, taking a small amount into my mouth, I swish it around a bit and let it settle on my palette before swallowing it down. This one is fairly light, stable, with a hint of fruit and a nice, almost peppery aftertaste. Good for a romantic dinner or a New Year's toast but perhaps too spicey for a late summer/early fall dinner wine. I have found that I actually have a very sensitive palette for these things. Now I will be the first to admit that I don't know a heck of a lot about different wines, but I can still easily detect different flavors and "punctuation marks" (my own term) in the wine that many other people dont really notice. I don't actually drink wine very often,(usually only on special occasions) but perhaps this fact actually increases my sesitivity to all its various flavors, I don't know. One notable wine I tasted today is called "La Futura." It is a very robust, deep red wine that's rather hard to describe in terms of what they put in it. As Tom Mills (a wonderful RISD drawing teacher who is here on sebbatical for the next year and a half) rather aptly put it: "It's like drinking the blood of the cow." And indeed, it really does have an almost bloody taste to it, kind of like eating a rare steak, and just as pricey at 40 euro($60) a bottle. I try other rich wines that are quite good, fruity, but a little dry for my liking, and one which has a rather surprising taste to it that is remakably different than any other red wine I've ever had. I don't quite know how I feel about it and others in my group are quite divided in their likings to it as well, some liking it so much that they purchase a bottle for themselves and others hateing it so much that they grimice and say it's the worst Chianti they've ever had. Another variety, which I had never seen before and am sorry I didn't get the chance to taste for myself, is an bright amber colored wine that is apparently made from honey, though I am told that, while it does have a very strong honey flavor, it isn't actually very sweet like I would have thought it would be. One of the last wines I tasted is also quite good (I only remember that it was a #44 Chianti) and I immediatly got the sense that it was the type of wine that would perfectly complement some fancy pre-dinner bread and cheese. Deciding that this would be a good type to bring home at Christmas time for my family to try, (for surely my Grandparents will be visiting and they never seem to fail in bringing some excellent breads and cheeses for us to try) I set about trying to find a store in town that was selling it.  Alas, after searching store after store, including the quite large Greve Museo di Vino, I could not find this particular wine model and I settled on a lesser quality, but still comparable Chianti. I will continue to look for this model elsewhere in hopes of finding a bottle sometime before I leave Italy.

Earlier, we had gone to Cortona, a small town in the moutains just south of Greve, to see the Museo Diocesano, which holds a small collection of paintings, with a few true Renaissance masterpieces. Sadly, this is just one more beautiful little town with a rich history that seems to exist purely through tourism, although they are quite well known for the high quality leather products that come from there, as well as their own special way of curing prosciutto (ham). Before leaving Cortona I stopped by a little antique store where the antique dealer, a nice old man, was more than happy to converse with me about all of his various treasures, and I was happy to further  work on my Italian speaking skills since he didn't seem to understand a word of English.

Though it had been drizzling fairly all day, this did not dampen our spirits and the cool moutain air was a welcome reprieve from the heat and humidity we have endured in Rome. Now coming down from Greve, the sun is just peeking out of the coulds and a deep fog is rising from the valley, enhancing depth perception beautifully, while at the same time diffusing light and masking parts of the landscape. As the writer Goeth so nicely puts it: "Even when one object is only a few steps further away than another, the difference in depth is clearly distinguished by a different tint of light blue. . . . I no longer saw Nature, but pictures; it was as if some very skillful painter had applied glaze to secure a proper gradation of tone."  Snaking around the hills and valleys of vineyards, these "earth clouds" produce a most enchanting effect, I don't believe I've ever seen anything else quite like it and I hope that it is not the last time I get to enjoy such a sight. It all just takes my breath away.

Una Storia di Villa Pamphilli Park

We are explorers of the world. Out on a journey of discovery.

Provisions: Lanterns, water, sketchbook, and the ever-present 

                      digital camera/camcorder.

Destination: Adventure.

The park is situated just a couple of miles away. Across the Tiber, through Trastevere, and on top of the 8th hill of Rome. It's quite peaceful up there. The grass is quite dry for lack of rain but the more desertic plants are thriving and keeping it overall, green. Situated at regular intervals along the trail are life-size sculptures of various dignitaries and nobles from yesteryear, though most of them have already been decapitated. Coming upon the grand palazzo, with its piazza of elegantly cut maze hedges, we take a different turn, towards a large fountain which greatly resembles a giant sand sculpture, its walls formed seemingly by dripping wet sand so that each drop freezes where it falls, as well as the sculptures of mythological sea creatures guarding the inner heart of the fountain. This being one of the only dry fountains I have come across in Rome, we step inside to get a closer look. 

We can tell that the center part of it is an old well from which the water was probably originally drawn. Peering inside, lo and behold! There is a staircase spiraling down into it! One by one, with lanterns in hand, all 6 of us gingerly climb up and in, disappearing from sight as far as the rest of the world can tell.

The bottom of the well, dark and cool, houses the large pipe once used to bring in

 the water, after the well dried up. And the pipe continues on into a deep, narrow tunnel, which seems to absorb all the light emitting from our lanterns, soaked up by an inky darkness. There's no telling where this long forgotten passage underground leads to, or at least where it once led to, for unfortunately, about 50 feet back, though I could hardly see anything at all, the pass came to an abrupt end, only allowing the pipe to continue on.

After the darkness of the well, the sun seems to be beating down on us especially bright and hot, and we yearn for the cool reprise we know awaits us deeper into the park.

Eventually, we come upon it. Another fountain, on the edge of a small cliff, full to the brim this time with remarkably clear, frigid water spewing out the top into a pool abut 4 and a half feet deep, and draining down the center to cascade down the cliff and into a man-made river, which, after going through another series of waterworks and falls, deposits into a large pond, teeming with little red-eared slider turtles, ducks, and even a family of swans. 

While others strip down to their underwear and dive into the fountain's pool, I sit on the edge and stick my tired legs and feet into the water, where they soon become numb from the cold. Though not wanting to fully immerse myself, for I had no towel or change of cloths with me, I submitted to the heat and took off my shirt so that I could submerge it in the frigid water and then put it back on my over-heated body. What a sweet reprise it is to have such an effective cooling agent out in nature! The only thing we had to worry about is making sure no park police are around to see us, for swimming in a public fountain, as we were told by another man who had come with his dog (a cocker spaniel named "bimba," which means baby girl) to swim, would land each of us a fine of 200 euro, or about $350.

Afterwards, we went down to the river and, wishing to cross it, decided it would be a good idea to scale across the statues, plants, and waterworks at the head of the river where the water was pouring out. With much care and effort we all managed to get across unscathed (save for a few cuts from large thorny bushes) and without damaging anything.

Moving right along we finally came upon our final destination of the day. 

Wild fig trees.

Growing fairly short, with low, wide-spread branches, these trees are very easy to climb and pick their sun-ripened fruit. Soon enough we had gathered a significant pile of the fresh fruit and were trying to find ways to transport them all back home without getting too much of the plant's milky sap everywhere, which tends to irritate the skin. 

Crossing through a large field where these unusual Italian trees grow straight and tall, only branching out at the very top, where they always seem to form a perfectly shaped canopy, we exit the park. Promising a happy return later to further explore its outreaches and see what other surprises still lay in store for us to discover, but in the meantime, we sure do have a lot of figs to eat.

  Happy trails,

        ~Rachael

 

(Photos courtesy of Aiden Vitti, using her Nikon D60)