Week 16 - Last week in Italy

 

Boungiorno Friends and Family,

Sadly this was my last week living in Italy. I can’t believe my time here is coming to an end and I will soon return to the US. There have been so many fantastic memories made here and I am glad I will have these blogs to look back on and remember what my time in Italy was like. 

The last week of school mainly consisted of finishing up our class work and getting ready for the final presentation. Aenya and I were very happy to be done with our project but also enjoyed putting in our final additions. While finishing up our project we also had the stress of packing our bags and making sure we were ready for the next part of our trip. On Thursday we were finally ready to present our project.

Our project for the semester was to examine the city of Orvieto and identify a need within the community that we could fix. Another thing they emphasized was making sure we included the Corpus Domini celebration into our design. Aenya and I chose to focus on the design of a space within a piazza, which is a pillar of many Italian communities’ culture. Piazzas are essentially large open spaces within cities that act as a hub for the community.   They are often surrounded by shops and restaurants. Our project proposal was adding seating areas to a main piazza in Orvieto. The piazza we chose is currently overtaken by cars and parking spaces, so our goal was to reduce the amount of vehicular traffic by taking away a few parking spots and introducing a stepped seating area with built-in greenery.  The process of creating a final project without the aid of computers was a flashback to freshman year.

Our finally presentation went very well and we even had one of the reviews come up to us afterwards to tell us that our project was his favorite.

On Friday we had the opportunity to share our work with the community. We spent most of the afternoon setting up for this event and it was quite the endeavor. We set up all the work we had dine from the beginning of the semester including our investigative work and our seminar projects as well. After it was all hanging up I was quite surprised at all the work we had done this semester. It was treating seeming everyone’s work and I enjoyed learning about the projects my classmates had worked on.

That evening we had our final meal together at a restaurant in Orvieto. During the meal our table played a game where we showed our favorite photos from each month. We each had several hundred photos to go through.

The next morning we got up at 4 AM to head to the airport by a bus that the school had ordered for the students heading back home. However, instead of getting on the plane to go home Aenya and I booked plans to stay in Europe for about another month. Unfortunately our flight wasn’t until 5:30 PM so we had a very long day at the airport. Come back next week to find out where we went!