Week 2 - Rome
Ciao friends and family,
Week two has brought many new and exciting experiences. I started classes this week and am slowly adjusting to this new classroom format. I have had to learn to be more flexible and mobile with my work style instead of sitting in the classroom. Many of our classes treat the city as our classroom and we will often walk around the city during class time to dive deep into the relationships this city creates. I really enjoy getting to see how people interact within this community. For example, every evening you will see family and friends strolling the Corso Cavour (the main street) greeting their neighbors and stopping in at local shops.
I am taking four classes this semester. My two architecture classes are exciting because they allow us to study the city from a much more in-depth perspective. Generally, when we are working on projects and we do site analysis, we just get on Google Maps and study basic relationships that appear from the sky view. Since we are living in the city where our project is located we are walking every street and exploring all the nooks and crannies. Our primary project is to create an addition to the city that will help the city celebrate a religious parade that happens in June. Currently, we are in the research phase so we don't know what this project will look like but enjoying learning more about my temporary home. I am also in an Italian class where we are starting to develop a basic vocabulary so we can ask for certain things around the city. In class, we learned that there are 140 hand gestures in Italian that accompany the words we are using. Finally, in our Italian History class, we are being taught that Italy's history is built upon the history of severally ancient civilizations so it is necessary to look at the surrounding countries to fully understand the history of Italy.
This Thursday, I was able to participate in a pasta workshop where we made pasta from scratch. We started by making dough with just simple ingredients, water and flour. We also made another pasta with egg, water, and flour. From here we rolled our our dough after letting it rise and placed it on a chitarra. We then took our rolling pin and pressed it into the strings of the chitarra to slice the pasta into its spaghetti shape. Our instructors then cooked up our pasta, and we had a very hearty lunch. I was surprised at how simple the process was and could see myself potentially making more in the future if I have the free time.
This weekend we traveled to Rome which was such an overwhelming experience. This city has history layered one on top of another on top of another. While we were there we were able to hit some of the highlights and learn about their architectural and historical significance. We visited the Colleseum, The Roman Forum, Piazza Venezia, Jewish Getto, Pantheon, Piazza Navona. After our tour ended I went to the Museum of the Stadium of Domitian which was located under the Piazza Navona (history right on top of history). It was really amazing to see how much the ground elevation had changed over time allowing for the city to grow right on top of the ancient Roman ruins. It also makes it difficult for nothing new to be built because archaeological studies have to be done any time someone digs. There was so much to take in and so much that I didn't get to see as well. I will have to come back on another free weekend to see more because there is certainly more I want to see.
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