Florence IV

I couldn't stop after only 3 roman numerals, so a forth post on Florence was inevitable. Plus I have a few more pictures for you guys. Enjoy!

Florence III

Well, I've safely returned from my trip around Italy, so I thought I'd fill everyone in. Before I went and got lost, it rained/hailed a bit. For some, this means having to sit inside and mope about not being able to see the city. For me, this means clean air and richer colors everywhere, making for stunning photography. And that's not counting reflections. Honestly, I can't tell you exactly what it is about puddles that just feels so wonderful. I think it's being able to look down to see the sky.

At any rate, I had my camera with me the whole time, and took a bunch of photos. These are just a few.

Florence was actually pretty touristy the first day, though perhaps it was just the part of the city we were in. Once we got to area near our hostel it settled down nicely and we saw more "real" people. It still kind of bothers me when I see large groups of people loudly speaking English.

In general, Florence was a lot like Rome, at least more so than the other cities we saw. It was pretty hilly, and the streets were just as narrow. One of the biggest differences was the street paving, of all things. Rome has these cobblestone streets that make it a real pain to walk. Florence was pretty well paved though, despite the fact that the pedestrian traffic was a lot less dense.

As wonderful as Florence was, though, we decided that a full day was longer than we wanted to stay, so we decided to move on by noon the next day. But that's a story for another post.

Chao!

Florence II

My room here in the hostel (ostello in Italian) has a computer, so I'll be able to make a quick post. Yesterday a whole bunch of us, who were all going to different places and intending to all leave at different times, ended up taking the same train up North. Most of them got off at Siena, and then a few more at Arezzo, leaving just the three of us: Amy, Nicole, and myself. When we first got here, it felt very touristy, but as the afternoon wore on and we moved to other parts of the city, it started to become more genuine. For the 19 euro price of our hostel, Archi Rossi, we got a dinner and breakfast included. The dinner was, while not extravagant, certainly enjoyable, and quite filling -- it was quite huge for the price. Of course, I got to enjoy this only after gettinig lost in Florence for a tad over an hour, but I got some excellent pictures as a consequence. Without my computer cable, I have no way to upload them, though, so you're just going to have to take my word on it for now. However, here are some other pictures I just found on this computer and thought you might like to see. Again, I didn't take these:

These are Santa Maria dell' Fiore, more commonly known as the Duomo (Italian for Dome), as it was the first dome constructed in Europe since the ancient Roman Empire.

Florence

I'll be getting up early in the morning to take a train to Florence, one the cities I've most wanted to visit. This is our only four-day weekend, so I'm making sure to take advantage of it. I won't be bringing my laptop, so I really doubt I'll be able to post over the next few days, but you can expect some great news on Sunday night!

My shoes are wearing out

It's true, the treads are almost gone. I'm starting to wear down into my feet. This is an unfortunate turn of events.

Short Story

This afternoon I received a call from one Evie Scogin. Looks like Ms. Scogin wanted to take a walk up the Janiculum to seem Rome from above. As I too am fond of both walks and Rome, I was happy to oblige. Take note: these events took place within the viscinity of 5:30 pm, as the sun was beginning to set.

So we set out after I gave fair warning, as we had many, many steps to ascend, and we soon arrived at the top of the the hill, and snapped a few pictures. This was not enough for Ms. Scogin, however, and we soon pressed onward.

As I had walked this route before, I was aware of what to expect, and I guided toward a certain well known church in the area: St. Peter's Basilica, also known as the Vatican. After a short time we rounded a corner and saw the church beautifully silhouetted against a rich blue sky, Venus neatly completing the composition.

We wound through streets, always keeping the luminous dome in sight, a beacon toward our final destination. And what a destination that was: St. Peter's piazza at night, gloriously aglow, the twin fountains gushing, the collonade serenely embracing. We explored for a bit, snapping photos and exchanging pleasantries with the Swiss Guard, before deciding to be on our way.

We once again ascended the Janiculum, and were struck by the view. All of Rome stretched before us, three thousand years of history spread beneath our feet. The beauty was exhilarating, and we stood for some time in quiet awe.

Eventually though, driven by our hungry bellies, we made our way back down the hill, and to our respective apartments. There we would eat and be filled, but not soon forget how lucky we were to be in this place.

Some Words

So I've been here about a week and a half, so I thought I'd give a little status update on me. Adjusting to being on the other side of the world has been surprisingly easy, I think that just enough things are the same for it to not feel too strange. I mean Rome has running water and internet, wine and cappuccinos, hobos and supermarkets; in a lot of ways it's exactly the same. The differences though are pretty distinct, and when the realization hits it hits hard. The language, the culture, walking absolutely everywhere (so far I've ridden the bus only twice since I've been here), having zero fast food or movie galleries or tv. They aren't a lot on their own, but they add up quickly.

It was Wednesday and Thursday of last week when it hit me, and I was in a pretty bad mood both those days. The biggest thing was the language barrier. I loathe going into a supermarket to buy Pringles or whatever, I want real food from real people. There's a butcher, two bread makers (breadsmiths?), a dessert shop, and a general store -- all located on my street and within a 30 second walk. Not to mention all the restaurants. Supermarket, please. This is way better than wal-mart.

Actually, there's a lot about this place that's vastly superior than anything I've experienced in America. I guess the best way to put it is density: there's so much packed into so many tiny places. The roads are about 15' wide (that's two lanes plus parking -- Romans are insane) with shops lining both sides. The shops are about 25' wide and maybe 50' deep, so there's a ton of them crammed onto every street. Then, for four or five stories above them there's housing. This means that you walk down your stairs and suddenly you're in the middle of the shopping district. Below my apartment is said dessert shop and one of the restaurants. I've actually been in neither of them, but I can smell the food cooking as I descend the stairwell. But I digest.

For all it's advantages, it's still a place far from what I'm used to. Typically I'm fine with leaving my comfort zone, but I guess everyone has their limit. For me the biggest problem is the language barrier. I want to be able to walk into a shop owned by someone I've really gotten to know, hold a conversation about the whatevers for a bit, buy some things and go. Instead I just walk in, stare at the illegible labels for a bit, point at what I want and mumble incoherently. Then they give me the thing and scowl at me for being a filthy American. I wish this were an exaggeration.

I can tolerate this up to a point, and that point is about a week into living there. Then I get generally pissed off at myself for not being to talk with anyone. However, then I just go buy some ice cream and feel better. You would be surprised how much a little gelato with friends can help a sour mood. Or perhaps not, girls seem to have figured that out a while ago. And the best part here is that by the time you've made it home and up your 8 flights of stairs, you've burned it all away.

But I'm doing better these days. I've learned my abc's, I'm pretty good with numbers, and "hello", "thank you", and "excuse me" are part of my repitoir. Things are looking up for me in the Eternal City: I was even able to haggle for a bargain at the flea market today. And of course, having 21 of my closest friends here with me really helps, I honestly have no idea what sort of a mess I'd be without them.

Afternoon Snack of Champions

Doug tried to tell me how great nutella is, but I didn't listen, foolish me. It's basically chocolate peanut butter, which you eat on absolutely everything. Europe's got the right idea.

Shopping

I went to the market today, and found a stand selling all sorts of fine art wares. I decided to get some antique wooden coasters for my new apartment back in Auburn! Yay Doug, things for us! This is my first "souvenir" purchase since coming to rome. 13 Euros.

Gelato on Tiber Island

4:53 p.m. and about 60 degrees. I am sitting on Tiber Island, Leaning back on the embankment rocks, without a single cloud that can put a damper on the sky’s persona. Lying back and looking up to watch the erratic and random flight paths of the bird’s silhouettes in the sunset; Erratic, yes of course, but elegant in their own right. Wind from my right, I can hear the gentle flow of the river clash with the untimely event of a crazy Italian driver hitting his horn. The screeching of the trains pass by every three minutes or so; a lot less often, compared to the fluttering sounds of the speeding motorbikes. (watching them are quite amusing… ) I just ate a crème and strawberry gelato down here with Allen, Eric, Page, and April. Strawberry was excellent. Crème was alright with the cone. Not much more you can ask for at a particular moment, sitting on, arguably, the most important historical island, the sun setting in front, and the river flowing from the right with the Ponte Sisto in the back ground. Always in good Company.

Piazza di San' Pietro

I was expecting to spend my morning in the American Academy in Rome Library, but I have to jump through a few more hoops before they'll let me in. Instead, I went with one of my professors, Karen Rogers, to the Vatican. Most of the time that the large piazza out front, which looks something like a keyhole, isn't very densely crowded. Today, however, it was absolutely packed. Turns out that on Wednesdays the Pope makes his address to the people of the world, and pilgrims from many countries had shown up to hear him. Unfortunately I hadn't brought my camera with me, so I didn't get any shots of it, but it was incredible to witness.

San Giovanni

After visiting "my" church of San Clemente, we took a trip to a little place called The Lateran, the official church of Rome. I'm a visual person myself, so here's a picture.


So there you go, the primary church in the heart of Christendom. It's pretty impressive, and although it's hard to convey scale in photographs like this, I'm going to give it a shot anyway. Here are a series of shots showing the girls I went with today standing next to one of the columns you see on the first photo.















Yeah, we're talking pretty friggin' huge. And the amount of detail is nothing less than stunning. I do love column capitals, so how about some Composites?


What a crazy amount of detail for something 100 feet off the ground. And of course it only gets more spectacular on the inside, but I don't have time for that right at the moment. Instead, let me leave you with one last image to try to convey the sheer size of this building, bearing in mind it was first built in the year 313.

Photosynth: Colosseum

When I was wandering about the Flavian Amphitheater, I came across this series of arches that, in their incomplete state, created an amazing space. I spent several minutes just walking around among them, and decided to start taking some pictures. Well, now I've bound them all together into a photosynth. In case you haven't seen my previous photosynths, this is like a 3-D panorama -- it binds together photos so you can see where they were taken in space. It's kind of hard to explain. You should be able to click on the image below to download photosynth and play with it yourself. I think this one is my best yet.

San Clemente

Today was not just spent at the Colosseum, instead I went with some friends to some churches very special to us. San Clemente was one of them. This was a church I spent several weeks researching for my professor, Carla Keyvanian. I had practically memorized the plan of the building, and new so much information about it. And so now, finally, I witnessed it in person.


The church really isn't spectacular from the outside, at least not for a Roman church. What makes San Clemente so fascinating is the layers of history it holds. There are five different parts of the building, reaching back as far as 200 or 300 years BCE. What's really cool is three of these layers are churches: a pagan temple from about 100 CE, an early Christian church from about 300, and a Christian basilica on top of that. Three different levels, three different churches. For a few euros you can take a tour down through the levels, but we didn't feel that we had time for that today. I'm going to leave you with a photo of the church's spolia: column capitals that were taken from wherever they could be found. In the middle ages, artisans no longer had the expertise to make new columns, so they would just reuse them from older buildings, leading a mix-match of styles.

The Colosseum

(Did I spell it right, Carla?) Anyway, this was where I spent the better part of my day today. The plan was to spend a few hours in the morning in the Colosseum and then hit up a Catholic service. I mean, when in Rome, right? Well that didn't work out, mainly because there is just too much to see and do inside the Colosseum. As soon as I walked in (wearing my church clothes, no less), I instantly felt compelled to draw, so I picked a nice little seat and set to work. I didn't want to do the exterior or the main floor of the interior, they seemed too overdone. I really wanted to work on the rings of passages around the perimeter, and try to capture the depth that I could see in them. It took a little over an hour (I think), and here is what I ended up with.


Remember you can click on the image to see it bigger. I was surprised and pleased by the number of people who stopped to look over my shoulder for a few moments or to say how nice it was. I don't think it was the best work I've ever done, but I was pretty happy with it.

Shortly after, I wanted to try one of the drawing types we practiced before we came to Rome, the birds-eye axonometric. It's nothing fancy, and only took about 10 minutes, but it really helped to understand the space some more.


Sketchbooks are great, and I take mine most places with me. I think that the opportunity to take notes and sketch out problems and questions is always valuable. And after all the drawings I did over the semester, I've come to realize that you never really know a place until you draw it. To steal a phrase, a drawing is worth a thousand photographs.

Although I got some of them too.

Flavian Amphitheater

Have you ever heard of this thing? It's a pretty obscure title for this one Roman building. It was made way back in the year 80 c.e. and it's still mostly standing today. Here's a detail picture of it:

I'm sure you wouldn't recognize it from this, how silly of me. How about this one?

Any better? Ok, one more, how about now?

Surely now you have an idea of what the Flavian Amphitheater is. Well ok, in case not...

The Forum

Well, today we spent our time seeing some more of the sights. I got up, packed my camera, and headed out, but I left my memory card in my laptop at home, so it was more or less dead weight to me. Needless to say, I don't have any photos from today, so sorry kids. I wanted to post up something though, so here's the map I made last night for how to get to the Campidoglio, the capital buildings of Rome, where we were meeting this morning.


It was pretty fun to make, but I didn't have time to write in street names. Grr. It was ok though, we got there on time anyway. So the Campidoglio has for a long time been an important place in Rome, but it became what it is today when a little guy named Michelangelo completely redesigned the place into a beautiful piazza surrounded by three buildings. A nice composition, you might say. From the capitol hill, we walked down a hill to the Roman Forum, the seat of power in ancient Rome. Today it is just a ruin of course, but the scale is incredible. We're talking columns made of a single piece of stone forty feet long, and weighing in the neighborhood of a thousand tons. Absolutely rediculous. A quick sketch I did in the forum:


From here we visited such structures as the Basilica of Constantine and the complex on the Palantine. If you know what those are, you understand how impressive they were. If not, let me just say that these are intense. We're talking the scale of a football stadium, made nearly 2000 years ago. In a way, you just kind of go brain dead, because if you try to think about it you just feel overwhelmed. Especially because we saw so much today, it became a sort of information overload.

After that we walked (despite the fact we had already walked like 10 miles today) to Isola Tiberina to a certain little gelato (ice cream) shop. Yes, Carla, it was incredible, and thanks so much for the recommendation. We also met Scott Finn (our professor) wandering around, and talked with him for a little bit. So then we went home, slept, and now are looking for a night out on the town. Being a bunch of architecture dorks, that means going into historic Rome and seeing all the buildings at night. I'm especially interested in the Pantheon. Ok, talk to yall later, chao!

Thoughts for the day:
Sucra means Sugar.
Italian city cleanup people are somewhat attractive for some reason.
Grafitti is ugly.
There is too much trash in the river.
Cappucinos and gelattos are amazing.
The architecture is stunning.
I wish we knew Italian.

That's all for now. Read my other blog and post comments!
Bye Americans.

Evie

Apartment

Ok, so I just removed my contacts for the first time in like 36 hours, and wow it feels good.

So after we were shown our apartment, having both rested and showered, Zach and I met up with Alan and Katie and headed out to see our neck of the woods. We were really hungry, but given that it was ONLY 6:30 we knew we couldn't eat dinner yet. Crazy Romans and their late dinners. So instead we found a little gelato (ice cream) shop owned by this awesome guy named Georg. He would speak to us in English and Italian, and we would do our best to reply in his native tongue. After eating, we walked around our neighborhood for a bit before meeting up with Amy, Ashley, and Nicole, and proceeded to try to find dinner. We asked gelato Georg for advice, and he pointed us to Piazetto Pizzaria, whose house wine was some of the best I've ever tasted. And here's a photo of our apartment.

Arrival

Once in Rome, we were shown to our apartment, and it's pretty huge. Perhaps obscenely so. We're talking 15 foot ceilings and 7 foot windows, with a front door that reminds me of a Fallout Vault. The hot water didn't work though, so Jamie, our handyman, came by and did what he could with it. It works off and on now, we'll be having an electrician by later to work on our hot water heater.

Hop, skip, jump

Well, at the end of the day I made it to Rome.

The trip from Atlanta to Detroit was largely uneventful. I was by myself, beside two business men, against the aisle. I just kinda sat around and read a little. Oh, and I realized that I'm really terrible at European geography, so I started working on a map of Europe. I'll post that later. Image: the Detroit terminal

From Detroit to Amsterdam was better, I was on the aisle with two seats between me and the next guy, so plenty of room to spread out. I was again by myself. However, I met some other college students who just happened to be in architecture school in Ohio (I think). They also just happened to be heading to Rome. So I think we may end up hanging out at some point while we're here.

So we arrived in Amsterdam, and I must admit it was a lackluster welcome to Europe. The airport was fine, in its Dutch industrial-aesthetic way, but we were completely encased in fog the entire time. We couldn't even see to the edge of the airfield. Well, we arrived earlier than expected, about 6 am local time. That would have been great except that it didnàt speed up the departure of our 10:25 am flight. So the five of us hunkered down to try to eek out 3 1\2 hours of sleep, but to no avail.

Well so some time later we boarded our flight and I was thrilled when we finally broke through the mist and I saw blue again. Unfortunately, now the clouds were below us, a featureless blanket of white.

So they tell me Europe's a pretty place, not that I'd know.

Countdown: 2 Days

Just tonight and tomorrow, then I fly to Rome. I went by AAA today and picked up some guide books and maps, I guess that's when it really hit me just how soon it is. Apparently it's going to be a bit warmer in Italy than it is here, which is good because it's been freezing here! When was the last time we even had snow? Everyone always refers to the "blizzard" of '93, and that's the last time I can remember having very much at all. Of course it's all melted now, but it was really nice while it lasted.



































I even got to make myself a nice little snowman. Not too shabby if I do say so myself.