A Town Called Canzo

There is a saying in the small town of Canzo: Non fai Milanese. The phrase expresses the desire of one person to never again see another person do a certain, usually dirty or stupid, thing. While there are many local stereotypes between the regions of Italy, I came to believe the implied meaning behind this phrase as I stared at the brown smog cloud hovering above Milan from the top of a mountain. Che schifo. There are two American guys in my Dante class, exchange students who go out to drink every night and then sit in the front row, stretching and yawning, taking awful notes. Despite the fact that they are foreigners, the phrase above seems to describe them pretty accurately.

Last Friday night I attended a Halloween celebration at the house of another exchange student. My good friend Giovanni picked me up in his dad's car to drive me to the party, and after we found a place to park and bought wine at a dark store that was open after 8 with a mop in the doorway, we arrived at the party. I stole the hat from a witch (Sara?) and wore it most of the night as we drank and danced, and after the carabinieri came around 1 (some things never change) we went out to a bar for a couple more drinks. Finally, Giovanni and I said goodbye to the revelers and headed home.

Saturday night there was a huge Halloween party for exchange students at the Giardini Margherita. I had studied for most of the day and was really looking forward to it, but about an hour before the party I had a startling revelation. If I wanted to see the inside of a bar with a bunch of Americans and other people who speak English, I would have stayed in the United States. I came to Italy to travel, to meet people and to experience the culture. I did not come to drink and dance every night. The thought kept me from leaving, and instead of drinking last Saturday night, I went on couchsurfing.org and planned this weekend. And let me tell you, it was so, SO, worth it.

My weekend started on Wednesday. After I finished my lessons I returned home before heading to a meeting of a group which is building a small sailing boat for a festival in the spring. The group is composed of a professor, four Italian engineering students, and me . Before leaving I asked my house mate Giulio if I could borrow his road bike, which sits in the cantina gathering dust, so that I could make it to the building in 10 minutes instead of half an hour. He said no and would not budge, and I was angry because I knew the bike would be safe and I could keep it in the same room we worked in and heck I even had a u-lock! But no. I wanted to argue with him real bad, but when I get angry it becomes really hard for me to talk in Italian, so I just picked up my back pack and took off on Red Ruby, my ex-bike.

After the long ride there, and after putting the chain back on a few times after it had fallen off, I arrived at the engineering department. I walked into the factory where we meet and did not see anyone in the gray light coming in from outside. I left a note on the front of the boat (prow?) and began the trek back to my house.

On the way back, just after I had hopped a curve onto the sidewalk to pass some cars, the front brake fell off. The brake got tangled in the wheel, the bike stopped on a dime, and I went over the handlebars and onto the pavement. Everyone in the cars that were stopped at the intersection saw me, but no one, NESSUNO, even rolled down their window to ask if I was alright. A man walking on the sidewalk came up to my bike, glanced at it and glanced at me, then actually stepped over my bike and kept on walking. I was bleeding, but what hurt worse was the lack of concern that I was feeling from all the natural born citizens of this country around me. Ouch.

Then it started raining. I looked at my map and figured out which bus to take back and boarded, but the bus took a turn I wasn't expecting and dropped me off near via Ugo Bassi. I decided to just start walking, and opened my umbrella so that I would not get wet. And this was where my day began to get better.

Last week after getting coffee with my friend Kaitlin we walked past a cheese shop (formaggeria) that had big wheels of parmagiano reggiano, pecorino, and other varieties whose delicious names I have forgotten in the window. My bus ironically dropped me off near this shop, and after my second crash on Red Ruby I thought what the heck I'll buy some cheese. Cupping my left hand, which had an ugly bloody gash that I wanted to keep away from the cheese, I went into the store and asked the very serious and official looking man behind the counter for some parmesan. He responded by asking me if I wanted parmesan that was one year, two years, or five years old. I got the last one and somehow opened my wallet and paid with one hand. On the way home I ran and caught a bus down via Masserenti so that I didn't have to walk all the way on my hurt knee.

Our kitchen table after my fifth dinner. Giovanni always
brings wine that he gets from farmers (contadini), and the
bottles don't have labels. The farmers get mad because
he constantly forgets the bottles at my house.

Wednesday night I had also planned to have my fifth dinner for my housemates and friends, Italian or foreign, and I decided to go ahead with it despite my 'wrecked' condition. I have a fear that if I skip one dinner then I will never get around to having another one. My room mate Davide's friend Mario, who was staying with us for several days while he worked at a festival, is a chef, and I asked him to cook for us that night. I had gone with him to the store earlier and bought a bunch of food, and when I got home he was whistling and moving around in our small kitchen. People began to arrive at 8 before I had even stepped out of the shower, and I strongly urged them all to try the Parmesan. My goodness, I did not think cheese could taste that good. That wheel of cheese has been sitting in a dark room attracting mold for a quarter of my life. At this dinner for the first time, I had more Italians in my house than foreign students. We drained four bottles of wine and ate pasta alla carbonera. The last person left around midnight. Che bella serata.

Thursday morning I went running through the wet streets and walked to class around 1PM. I went there a little early and sat in the seat where one of the Americans usually sits, and as people came in the Italians I have met in the class began to sit beside me. I talked to them as our professor got ready to deliver the lecture, and I don't know where those guys sat but it wasn't in the front!

After class I rushed home, sent some quick emails, packed and ate super fast and took a bus to the train station. I bought the cheapest ticket possible for Milan and read Dante while I waited for the train. It was a long trip to Milan, but finally I arrived and witnessed the massive central statione (stazione centrale) whose ceiling hovered above me with greek gods and signs of the zodiac. I got help from two smiling girls who bought my ticket for the metro for me and hopped on a train. The train rushed underground in a city I had never been in and I was tired. That is a good feeling.

Around 8:30 PM I arrived in Cernusco sul Naviglio, which is a little town on the outskirts of Milan. I was staying with a guy named Stefano on Thursday night, and he drove to the small metro station to pick me up since I was dazed and confused. The night was dark, the roads were made of stone or cobbles, and it was sprinkling outside. We ate and talked for two hours at a restaurant. I had a calzone, which is the same kind of concept as a calzone in the United States except more like two pizzas stacked on top of each other. Stefano told me about his friend who had died of cancer the month before and a strange text message that the man's mother recieved after he died in which was written praise for the virgin and the child. Strange but true. When we headed back to Stefano's apartment, I found that he had laid out a cot with sheets in the living room for me. What great hospitality. Before going to sleep, I read Stefano my favorite passage (so far) from the Commedia: the story of Ulisse where Dante talks about the limits of human knowledge.

The morning after Stefano took me to a cafe in his town, and while there I had THE BEST cappucino and THE BEST croissant I have ever, ever eaten. It was in a small bar near the main piazza. The cappucino had nice designs traced in liquid chocolate on the milk foam floating on top, and the croissant had chocolate on top AND on the inside, just like all of the best foods in the world. Stefino rode the train in with me to Milano, and we parted at a bus stop in the rain with tons of stores around us selling Gucci, Armani, and other fashion junk. There were so many advertisements in Milan: on the streets, at the metro stops, on cars. Milan is the industrial and finanacial heart of Italy, and most of the Italians I talked to (including those in Milan) told me it was an ugly city. However, I came here to see Italy and I plan to take the bad along with the good.

Me with the most delicious croissant and the most delicious
cappucino in the entire world.

After I left Stefano I headed to the Pinacoteca di Brera, a world famous art museum. While there I saw many famous paintings by Carvaggio and other Renaissance artists. I really enjoy art, but I am getting very tired now of Christian subjects in painting. The church paid for all the paintings back in the day, and artists have to eat too, but sometimes I could really use a breath of fresh air. My favorite painting in the whole museum is called 'The Kiss' by Hayez. It shows a man that looks like Robin Hood dramatically kissing a girl before ascending some steps. I had not noticed it in the museum, but Friday night my host Valeria pointed out to me that there is the shadow of another man in the background, and that Peter Pan and the girl are kissing before he has to leave because of the other guy. This painting became the centerpiece for the reunificaiton of Italy in the 1860's when it was painted by Francesco Hayez, but I'm not really sure why.

Il Bacio, Francesco Hayez

I left the museum for a couple of hours at lunch and rode the metro to meet another girl Chesa from couch surfing for sushi. Since I am using this website to find places to stay, I don't have to pay for a hostel and have more money for food. I ordered this beautiful plate with several varieties of raw fish, which I ate while I talked in Italian to Chesa and her colleague from work. Afterwards I walked Chesa back towards her work, and we stopped in a Pastacceria so that I could buy some dessert. I decided to try the baba (pronounced baBA), which is some kind of small croissant dipped in rum. I did not know that before, but had a good time eating it.

After lunch I returned to the museum and finished looking at the art but began to skip all the paintings with religious subjects because I have seen MANY of them thus far. After I saw the last painting (Leornardo da Vinci, Sposata della Vergine maybe) I walked through the narrow streets with balconies looming over me back to the Metro, took it to where I was supposed to meet Valeria, and found a cafe' where I began to read the fifth canto of Inferno. In this canto, Dante meets the two fated lovers Paolo e Francesca, who were killed right after their first kiss by Francesca's husband. The story went well with the painting.

The duomo in Milan. I walked around it eating bread,
killing time before meeting with Valeria. It really is like
a big piece of sculpture, and there are a lot more edges than
the duomo in Florence.


The Galleria di Vittorio or Sala di Milan, this is a big
shopping place right next to the Duomo where there are four
amazing frescos representing the continents of Europe, Africa,
America, and Asia towering over an enormous McDonald's and
stores with expensive silver stuff.

Valeria called me, and I walked through the cold dark Milan air to meet her next to the Metro. She gave me a big hug and showed me all the wine, cheese, and other food she had gotten for the night for us to eat. We headed back to her flat, and I was immediately required to amass heaps of admonition on two tiny kittens who, with their meowing and cuteness, reduced me, a full grown man, to my knees. Another couch surfer and some of Valeria's friends came over, and we ate risotto and cheese and drank wine, and we talked and played music and did a little bit of dancing until 2 in the morning, when I crashed on Valeria's couch.

There were two particularly amazing people at the dinner that night. The first was a guy my age from Great Britain working in Germany and applying for a job in Milan. He was VERY british, like the guys in Trainspotting, and he told hilarious stories about his pet parrot. The other couch surfer there, Luise, lives in a small town in Germany and came all the way to Milan to see the Last Supper by Michelangelo. She brought all different kinds of German chocolate with her, which I heartily ate without abandon. While she did not know English very well, her voice was the equivalent of a slow, soft waterfall on a person's ears, and it sounded like she was placing each word like a feather on my head. What a beautiful night.

Saturday I woke up early around the same time as Valeria because she had to go to work in a shoe shop (oh they love them shoes in Milan, its like a fashion capital of Italy or something), and I took Valeria and Luise for croissants and cappucinos. I wanted them to eat more croissants so that we could stay there longer and keep hanging out, but alas I was destined to leave on the train headed north.

I ran to the station and caught the train for Canzo after breakfast. Canzo is a tiny town between the tips of the wishbone that is Lake Como, and I bet it would get the best of both worlds if some geologic event were to rip that lake in half. While I really do try to study on the train, and to study in general, the scenery was often too much and I couldn't help but look out the window. My host for Saturday night, Davide, met me on his bike at the station, and we would have mounted the bike together to ride but we had to go uphill. The plan was to steal his sister's car, load up on food, and go hiking, and that is exactly what we did.

There are times when I have to catch myself and tell... myself... that I am really in this country. When walking through narrow, lovely alleyways is the norm, that is just a norm I can not get used to. We picked up the car and Davide drove like a bat out of the Inferno to the super market. I bought food since I was being hosted and we went to his place. Davide has two houses next to a cold stream that comes down off a mountain that looks like an Appalachian mountain but with many more rocks sticking out of the top and sides. The house I slept in had many, many spare rooms and beds, yet I was the only one staying there.

We made sandwhichs, devoured them, and started walking uphill right from his house to the top of the ridge right beside it. The hike took two hours to reach the top, and during this time I said something like "Berlusconi..." and we proceeded to have a great long discussion in Italian that began with "oh yeah, it is real easy to pass laws in Italy, the problem is that they are hardly ever enforced and the justice system is the the shoots." Leaves are falling off the trees this time of year, and on the way up the steep rocky path I caught a few of them for good luck. As we neared the top, the trees began to give way to the grassy peak. I reached for my camera, realized I had forgotten it (sorry 'bout that), and decided just to look at the view.

On the peak nearest to us there was an enormous cross that is lit up at night, and on the next peak was an ugly gray tower which I later found out serves to transmit RAI television broadcasts. That mountain is called Mount RAI, how appropriate. In one direction from the ridge villages were nestled in the valleys and spaces between the mountains, and in the other was the brown cloud that is Milan. We made it to the big cross, rested, and ran down the other side of the peak through the grass without stopping. I was so happy.

We hiked to Mount RAI, pondered the gray tower for a while, and decided not to take the long way back because dark was approaching and we had already been hiking for 4 hours. From that point forward, we followed a steep rocky path down hill, and the stream we followed, which was the same one that runs beside Davide's house, grew in volume and vigor. My legs began to feel funny, and we rested at a building when the path finally began to turn to cobble and we drank water coming out of a fountain in the side of the mountain. L'acqua dolce.

On the way back to Davide's, we stopped at his friend's and I got to drink tea with sugar in a dimly lit room. After I returned to the house, Davide left me to take a badly needed shower, and when I got out he was no where to be found so I threw on my sweaters and hunkered down with Dante for about an hour. When he returned, we made pasta with melted hunks of cheese and sauce his grandmother had made, and I answered more questions about the United States.

In the middle of washing dishes, I got a phone call from Martini and talked with him in a rushed voice for half an hour. He is coming tomorrow (Thursday) from the United States to visit me, and I am so excited! The Atlantic Ocean is a long body of water to cross, but I am going to make it worth while. I have planned for us to go to Venice and stay with people this weekend, and for next weekend we will go to explore the Ligurian coast!

That evening Davide had planned to go out with some of his Italian friends. I had no real idea where we were going and I honestly thought about staying sober and studying, but the fact that I would be with Italians was the real pivotal point in my decision making (I swear, no really...). We drove very fast to another town to pick up Davide's friend Francesco and then went to a party in a building in the middle of nowhere where I drank and danced with many people who I couldn't hardly understand. Halfway through the night I acquired a cap similar to the man in Hayez's painting, and I felt pretty unassailable.

The next morning I woke up 20 minutes before the train came, slurped down a cafe moka, threw some food in my back pack, and headed for the station. I was very sad to say goodbye to Davide and his town, and I honestly wouldn't have minded hiking up the mountain to have another taste of that water, but duty calls. The ride to Milan was long, the walk in the rain with an umbrealla over my head through the urban streets to the main station even longer, and the last leg to Bologna beyond description.

Today the sky has steadily dumped rain on the streets and red roofs of Bologna. This morning I met with a professor who studies floods in Italy and with his master's students, and the whole way to the building I had to weave carefully in and out of traffic on my bicycle with an umbrella over my head. Honestly, when I came here I thought that the weather would be Mediterranean fresh all year, buuut I was wrong.

While the rain does put my transportation prospects in a questionable state of safety and reliability, it does help keep me inside and studying. I have finally accomplished my goal of finding two science classes whose credits I can transfer to UNC to finish my Environmental Science degree as well as two arts/humanities classes which will allow me to explore more fully the culture of this country. Although I had to explore and attend several classes which turned out to be no good, all of my professors now are very helpful and willing to work with me, whether I am one of several exchange students as in my Dante class or whether I am the only exchange student, as in all the other classes. Finding courses to take has been the most difficult part of my year so far, and now it is over and I can breath again.

Last weekend I took off for my room mate Marco's house in a small town called Monte Cerignone, which is close to Urbino near the coast southeast of Bologna. The days I was there we spent at least half of them in the kitchen. I ate amazing food cooked by his mother with names I can't really pronounce, but I will try to relate some of them to you right now. The first night I was there we had tripa, which is basically cow stomach. It smells awful but tastes wonderful, and one side of the strands of stomach has these cilia-like brushes with a slightly chewy squid-like texture. I mopped this up with bread that was either from a local bakery or had been baked by Marco's mom.

Basically all the food I ate last weekend came from close to Marco's house. Unlike in the United States, where there are many environmental groups pushing for people to eat local, in Monte Cerignone it was completely normal. Much of the food was even scavenged from the surrounding hillsides! It reminded me of the farmer's market in Seattle this summer where people would sell greens they had 'gathered' from the woods at very great cost, but here it was the usual. Marco's mom was in the kitchen probably 70-80 percent of the day, either cleaning up or cooking or eating.

The first morning I had a bowl full of hot milk with coffee poured into it and a heap of locally made lemon biscotti which I broke and plopped in the milk and then scooped up with a spoon. After breakfast Marco began to give me a tour (un giro) of his amazing country. We started with a trip to La Repubblica di San Marino, which like Rome is an independent state with its own citizens. We somehow found a place to park and walked up to this castle on the top of the hill. To get to the castle, we had to pass shop after shop selling all kinds of tourist goods to the groups of visitors in the cobbled alley ways. We made it to the top of the hill near the castle, and I could see the country stretch out like a carpet all the way to the Adriatic Sea. A little bit of rain came down but it was clear enough to make out monuments and towers in the towns lining the coast. One of those swivelling telescopes allowed me to figure out which towns they were, and I could see all the way to Rimini and the bars and discos which line the sandy shore.

We headed back down the hill a different way and Marco drove us back to his house. Like all other Italians, he drives fast and kind of crazy, but everyone was driving like that so it was okay. Often I think people are insane in this country when they have completely normal conversations while swerving in and out of oncoming traffic, but when everybody does it I would have to call it normal. Back at his house, we had passatelli with very densely packed heavy whole grain bread (pane integrali). Passatelli is amazing and very easy to make with the right ingredients. More on this later.

Marco's house is more of a tiny villa placed tightly next to other flats on a steep hillside. We had to park by a storage shed where Marco's dog stays, cross a bridge over a stream that looked like it had seen better days (like, 2000 years ago), and walked up a steep cobbled street past doors of neighbors all of whom Marco knew. Monte Cerignone only has a population of 600 people, and they all seem to know each other and to wave or smile.

After lunch we headed to Urbino so that I could see the Palazzo Ducale (http://www.palazzoducaleurbino.it/). All of the streets and alleys reminded me of Bologna except that they were all steeper and more narrow. The palazzo had a large collection of paintings from the 15th century when Duke Federico da Montefeltro brought Urbino to its greatest time of artistic growth in the Renaissance. My favorite painting was the ideal city (la citta ideale), a beautiful symmetric depiction of a piazza devoid of people.

Saturday night I went out on the town with Marco and his friends, all of which have lived in this small town their whole lives. We started off getting in a van out of the cold night and drinking plastic cups of beer in the back while the driver wound up and down hill to another nearby tiny town. I got to meet Marco's friend Fabbio ('Oh yeah!') and we had a two hour long dinner with some weird rice dish and pasta and wine under a heated outdoor tent at a table with 50 people. Afterwards we walked through throngs of Italians while Marco and his friends called out to people they knew. At the end I was very tired and happy to go back to my cold room in Marco's house and get under the layers of warm sheets.

On Sunday I went to a soccer game between Monte Cerignone and another small town. Marco expressed his disgust for both teams and then told me he was definitly going to see the game. It was cold, and rainy, and although the teams were rivals there was very good sportsmanship. There were less spectators than players, but when Marco's team lost at the end of the game (Porcha Troia) and after every goal there was an incredible celebration. By incredible, I mean that the players came from off the field to tackle the player who scored, and at the end there was a definite mosh pit. Most of the time I was silent and did my best to understand what Marco's friends were talking about, but it was very hard because they spoke so fast. I learned how to say bad words in Italian the right way, which is important.

The train ride back was long, but I got a lot of reading done for my Dante course and got to see the sunset (tramonto). Last night, as I have done every two weeks, I made another dinner for my housemates and friends, and this time I made passatelli! The recipe, like many others for Italian dishes, is very simple in preparation, but the key was getting the right ingredients. I had to have a special kind of crumbled bread from Marco's town to put in the batter or it would not have come out correct. I put this together with eggs and a heap of grated parmesan cheese, and rolled it all up together on my kitchen table, which we have to use for a cutting board sometimes, in front of all my friends. It was like one of those Chinese restaurants where the food is made right in front of you! After this I put the dough through a ricer, which makes it into a pasta-ish shape, and then boiled it in broth for three minutes. It was delicious, I did good.

We talked last night and drank wine and beer and ate cheese, bread, and grapes until after midnight, then Marco and I waved goodbye to a group of very nice German girls I have met and made jokes while we cleaned up our devastated table. Yesterday, before I made the dinner, I had to make a rather miserable trip to Florence (waking at 5:30 AM after going to bed at 1) to Florence to get a letter for fingerprints. The fingerprints are part of my application to the Peace Corps, and while it was very easy for me to get them in the United States it has been quite difficult to obtain them here in Italy. But, like all other plans, they will come with time.

It is still cold and rainy outside on this Friday night, so I think I will stay home and read Dante and wake up early to go back and see the Uffizi in Florence tomorrow. My Italian is coming along: I can read a paragraph straight through and get the idea without having to read it again. But with matters like this where a task depends on me I am not a very patient person, and I wish I had studied Italian more hard core in the United States. Now I have to take a semester of French for the Peace Corps, which I had kind of wanted to do. I leave you with a phrase I already know in French but continue to mispronounce to my friends, and which I think holds for my state at this point in my Italy adventure: C'est la vie.

Dante and a view of the Dolomites through rain and mist.

Whenever I walk into a restaurant, a library, or an apartment here in Italy, every person there is able to identify me as an American withing five minutes. I don't know what it is: it might be the way I walk, the way I talk, the Italian I am still working on, whatever. In the small library of the Dipartmento della Filosofia e Letteratura this week I went to photocopy some essays from books for my course on Dante. After some loud discussion with both of the workers at the desk (who were by the way actually very nice), I went out to use the photocopier. And the alarm (like at the exit of Davis Library at UNC) sounded. Naturally, I went back to get it checked out. The alarm sounded again. Both of the people waved me on, and when I went out of the library to walk to the photocopy room the alarm sounded... AGAIN. Then I discovered I needed a specific card to make copies and that the machine was in the library. I went, paid one Euro to get photocopies, went back to the machines, discovered that the Euro only paid for the card, went back to put money on the card, finally made the photocopies, and returned the books to the front desk. The alarm sounded EVERY TIME and each time the students in the library would raise their heads to look at me with this blank look that told me nothing about what they were thinking and left it to my imagination to decide what their thoughts might be (pity?).

Here in Bologna I have taken so many steps to learn Italian. First of all I want to say that THIS IS WHAT WORKS FOR ME. I am NOT saying anything about other people with these statements. That being said, I surround myself with the language as much as possible and do my best to remove myself from situations where I might talk English. From the very beginning, I set out to live with all Italians so that I would be speaking the language here in my apartment, and I found this place outside the city center while most exchange students would rather live within. Also I have foregone many of the programs and parties for exchange students in favor of other activities where I might better learn Italian, going instead to seminars or concerts and running with my housemate Marco instead of participating in the sports programs for exchange students. Every weekend there are organized opportunities for exchange students to go on guided trips to different parts of the country, but instead I do my own thing by using couchsurfing.com to go on my own to different parts of Italy and meeting Italians when I get there who I stay the night or weekend with. While many students in my Intensive Italian Course might continue to think of it as just a course, I make an effort in class to listen and work on the group activities, and I have used the Grammer Book for the class to study unfamiliar tenses which I see in my reading. This weekend I closed myself off from the rest of the world for quite some time to focus on reading Dante, which is more like reading a lot of comments about Dante, and while I did not understand much of it I eventually will. In class, I sit apart from other exchange students and make an effort to talk about the class material with other Italians. Every two weeks I have a dinner where I invite Italians and exchange students so that they might travel in harmony down a path of love and understanding. Last Friday I bought an Italian dictionary in Italian so that I might look up words but instead of just a regular definition I can also use this to learn the language.

This would be my advice to anyone who wants to live in Italy and learn Italian, which to me means not only learning the language but learning to live within the culture and get along with the people. Take EVERY STEP that you can to make sure that you learn the language, and even then the learning will occur slowly.

DESPITE all of these steps, my grasp of the language is still fragile. On the train back from Bressanone yesterday, I was talking to a student from the university in Parma who had spent the weekend biking in the Dolomites before beginning classes, and I almost jumped out of my seat with joy when I used the trapassato condizionale (-assi)! But then I forgot the word for worried (preoccupare) and looked out the window for five angry minutes trying to think about it, but more about this later. The words coming out of the television on this beautiful morning, while the sun is rising between the apartment buildings I see off my balcony, are still foreign to me, but I can now catch about 80% of the words, whereas a month ago they all seemed to blur together like a great witches brew that I was getting ready to be thrown into. I am learning, and my language skills are improving, but veeery slowly (or seemingly so). I can now talk quite fast and get my point across much easier, but my grammar is constantly lacking no matter how much I try it out.

Enough said of my troubles and travesties. This week in my class on Dante was amazing, and I am beginning to truly appreciate the structure and depth of meaning in the Commedia even though I don't understand half of the words. On Monday I picked up four Italian CDs from the Biblioteca Salaborsa and went to TANDEM at a cafe on via Ugo Bassi where I talked Italian to an Italian dance teacher while she spoke in English to me. Wednesday I biked on very far on San Donato to attend a meeting of a group that builds a small sailboat every school year for a festival in the spring, and I will probably start getting involved with this group. After seeing all the sailboats on the water off the coast of Ravenna, I now have a strong desire to board a small vessel and push off from the shore.

Wednesday evening I made another dinner for my room mates and my friends. Marco made tiramisu! The school year is starting, and people are becoming more bogged down with courses, so this time only ten people managed to come to my dinner. However, at this dinner my amazing Italian friend Giovanni (whose facebook photo is AMAZING: he is flexing in the rain without a shirt and with dog tags on his neck, I think he wants to be a supermodel like many other Italian men) brought two very unamazing friends. The moment they came into my apartment, instead of shaking my hand and introducing themselves or saying 'Thank you for letting me, a person you do not know, enter your apartment and eat the food you have cooked,' they immediately began talking to my friend Erica who I met on the plane flying over here (see earlier blog post) and who was surrounded the whole night by these two Italian guys. Now don't get me wrong: these guys are stereotypically Italian. Whatever you might hear about the relationships between young Italian men and women, in the case of these guys they are absolutely true. But the personalities of these two guys is not unusual in Italy. Many men take this incredibly aggressive approach when talking to ladies, and all my room mates saw it as completely normal. It was only me who saw their actions as out of place and improper. Just another part of the culture I need to get used to.

In the middle of the dinner, they were laughing and talking so loud that I just stood up, looked at them, and said Shhhhhhhhh. The whole room got quite and they looked at me and I said 'Shut up,' which is in English but which I think they understood. One of them actually had handcuffs on his belt, don't ask me why, and I think they were headed to the discoteca after dinner on this wild Wednesday night. Anyway, I got to talk to my friend Merle and Marco got mad props for the Tiramisu.

One of the great parts of being in Italy is that I do not have class on Friday, which enables me to take off early for great and amazing places all around this country. This Friday I planned to take off for the Dolomites, and after meeting with a professor about water research, eating an AMAZING lunch at Sara Mazza's apartment (and recieving wine and olive oil as a belated birthday present), I boarded a train seconds before it departed and began a hot and overcrowded voyage to Bressanone/Brixen.

Bressanone is the Italian name for the town and Brixen is the German name. The town has two names because it is nestled in the Alto Aldige - Trentino region in Northeast Italy where the language and culture is making a transition from Italian to German. Hovering around this town are the enormous and rocky Dolomite mountains covered with trees at the base but with peaks sticking up like chess pieces. A beautiful and cold river runs through the middle of the small town, and there is order and organization everywhere. Work buildings and houses in this town have a lot more squares in the architecture than the rounded porticoes and streets of Bologna, there are five times as many bikes as cars, the inhabitants of the town recycle (and compost) everything, and beautiful full red and colorful flowers sprout from every balcony.

I arrived at the train station and went outside into the arms of my friend Tamara, who I met on couch surfing. Immediately another person at the train station smiled at Tamara and introduced herself to me. Many of the inhabitants of this town have lived here their entire lives and have not even gone as far away as I have from Bologna in Italy! While from this initial impression I thought that there might have been many conventions and traditions that I would run up against, I was soon to find out that the situation would not be that dire.

We got in the car and Tamara started off by telling me she was a bad driver while she attempted several times to start the car before the engine arose from its slumber. As we rounded curves and she swerved precariously on the street, she told me how two weeks before she had wrecked a jaguar (which she pronounced 'yag wur'), and I looked at the beatiful enormous mountains looming over us and tried not to think about what was going on on the ground. We got to her flat and I met her brothers, mother, and grandmother. Her whole family lives together in one house, and all of them seem to have gotten very used to living in Brixen.

The grandmother had big glasses and a grandmother-ish voice, but she spoke only German so often it was very difficult to talk to her. However, I did learn while I helped her to take the trash out the German words for green (groon) and bread (broot). Awesome. Tamara's mother worked very hard to keep the house very clean, and she seemed to clean up after her children after meals, tea, coffee, everything, and not to complain at all about cleaning the bathroom all the time or the dishes or whatever. She was very nice and I enjoyed talking to her about Dante and about her town. Tamara's little brother, and her older brother as well, are very into video games, which I thought was a shame since they have great big mountains all around them and so many opportunities to hike and bike and run. But everyone is different, and I am beginning to be okay with that. Tamara had to work Friday night, so I stayed home for a while talking to her little brother in Italian (most of her family knew German and Italian) and trying to give him the best advice about life that I could: do what makes you both happy and feel self-fulfilled. After wards I wrote some purposefully bad directions to the restaurant where Tamara works on a receipt, threw on the brown jacket I bought so long ago in Washington state, and set off walking in the cold night towards her restaurant.

In this town, unlike Bologna, there is no graffiti, and many of the bikes are not even locked. There is no trash on the street, and in the town center I did not see a single car. I walked down to the river, crossed it, and walked upstream along the gravel path on the far bank. The water in the river was very cold and made it even colder along the bank. All I could hear was the river and some people at a cafe near the river bank further upstream. I walked for a long time and finally turned on what I thought was the right road and began to walk through the town. While the walls of the apartments in the town were the same stucco as those in Bologna, they rarely had bare patches or a degraded, decaying look, which is not better or worse but different. After walking with many pauses I made it to the restaurant two hours late, so I did not get to met her friend who showed up at 9. However, I did begin to talk with a young man who works at a bank in the town. He grew up in Bressanone, went to school in the nearby larger town of Bolzano, and moved back to Bressanone to work. As I sipped a glass of local wine that Tamara had gotten for me behind the bar gratis, I talked to him about Berlusconi, life in a small town, the Italian language, the usual topics that arise when a person comes out of nowhere. After meeting several of Tamara's co-workers, I walked back in the cold with her key to open the door, and I could see lights on the hills where towns are put on the edges of cliffs. There does not seem to be a more beautiful or easy going place in the world.

Instead of a couch, there was an amazing bunk bed prepared by Tamara's mother, and having forgotten my toothbrush I rinsed out my mouth, slathered some toothpaste over my tooths, and dropped off to bed. At 4AM Tamara woke me up to let her in, and I yawned and stretched and yawned and stretched and then somehow managed to turn on the light. Then I yawned and stretched the whole way down the stairs, where Tamara was waiting with her friend and asked me 'Do you want a tea?' I yawned, stretched, and said sure why not. We hung out in the basement drinking tea and talking for about an hour while my eyes slowly closed at a tectonic plate pace, and when Tamara excitedly said we would get up early to go hiking I did not believe her one bit.

In the morning I awoke and went down stairs to see Tamara's mother already in the kithen. She made me a big cup, really a bowl, of coffee into which I poured milk and dunked this amazing sweet bread just sitting in the cupboard. I tried to pronounce many of the words in German in the local newspaper to the delight of Tamara's mother and grandmother, then went up stairs to read more Dante before Tamara woke up.

My friends smiling in front of the most organized community
garden I have ever seen. There were hedges, and they were trimmed
and there were pigeons drinking from the fountain.

Since the weather was not so good we decided to postpone the hiking for the afternoon (in Italian, fare trekking), and instead went with Tamara's older brother and a friend to the Museo Diocesano after another white-knuckled car ride with Tamara (just kidding). While there I saw some very interesting sculptures of the Madonna and Child where Jesus in the sculpture was Jesus on the cross instead of baby Jesus. Also they had a lot of clothes worn by previous bishops and crosses overlain in gold and embedded with jewels. One of the robes was sparkly and looked like Michael Jackson would have sported it, may he rest in peace.

A giant sphere in the middle of a piazza by Paolo Flora.

A woman in a sparse forest of feathers (la pluma) in
which the ground is just a bunch of different words and
it is as if the woman is supposed to use the feathers to
make wings to fly away from the words.

A painting of paradise: a lake near Bressanone with
an island in the middle and mountains all around.

Afterwards we went up another floor to an exhibit by Paolo Flora, a designer who used simple pencil on paper sketches to invoke meaning and create scenes which leave a lot to the imagination. We ate lunch at Tamara's restaurant (I had amazing salami pizza), decided the weather was looking up, and made a long fast scary drive up a steep curvy windy road to hike along a trail to a cottage in the middle of nowhere which was a restaurant where I had hot cholocolate and then on the walk back I got a view of the Dolomites through the clouds, the first look of the day. The next morning I had another amazing breakfast and said goodbye to Tamara and her mother at the train station, got on the train, and met a student from Parma who had a sweet Bianchi bike and had been touring for the weekend around a lake west of Bressanone. We talked most of the train ride back and there was hardly anyone on the train which was nice. I will look him up when I go to Parma.

This country is so amazing. I will leave you with this photo of the view from the balcony of the house yesterday morning in the cold of autumn.

Talking on a window sill, Firenze

My quest to find courses which will allow me to finish my degree at UNC stole most of my time this week, and while I made very good friends with a nice Pakistani employee at the local internet point (where I pay about 1 euro an hour to use the internet when the connection at my house randomly fails), I would honestly rather still have most of the week to travel and be on vacation. However, I think that might be said for many people in many professions, and I believe that after I discover professors who are approachable and friendly to exchange students I will be alright. Problem is, like many other aspects of Italian life, the website for the University of Bologna is an unescapable labyrinth that I wish I had known before hand how to use.

I have scored with one course thus far. It is called Letteratura e Critica Dantesca, and I will be reading and discussing much of Dante Aligheri's Commedia. Dante's famous journey is split into three parts: Inferno, where Dante travels through circles to the center of hell, Purgatorio, where he ascends different cornices to the top of a mountain, and Paradiso, where he moves through different skies until he reaches god. Back in high school, I read much of the Inferno in translation, and now I am going to read the real thing! Much of the symbolism in the is difficult for even Italians to grasp, but I am sitting in the front row of the course and learning fast, so hopefully I will catch up quickly. Dante's narrative poem was incredibly radical because, contrary to the convention of the time which upheld that all academic writing about important topics such as God, heaven, the bible, etc. be in Latin, Dante wrote a masterpiece in the vulgar language: the Italian of today. The Commedia is named such because it starts poorly (HELL!) and ends well (heaven). Comedies of the time where normally written in the vulgar language and because of this everyone, down to the pheasants and manual laborers, could understand them. By writing in this way Dante made his poem accessible to everyone at all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

I am very interested in this Dante course, and have been trying to read the required text for the course, which is in Italian, for the last two weeks. Thus far I have made it about 25 pages! I use a three-part strategy (basketball language to make literature exciting!) to tackle each paragraph: I read it once through kind of fast without trying to interpret, then I read slowly out loud and try to determine the meaning of all the words in context without using a dictionary, and then I read it through again in my head. I've learned quite a bit about a previous work of Dante's call Vita Nova and I can feel myself getting faster, but VERY slowly. I am glad I am going through the process of learning a new language now, because if I go into the Peace Corps after I graduate I will have an idea of how to deal with the frustrations this task entails and to remember to take deep breaths to reactivate my sense of patience.

The only science course I have found, Biodiversita e Evoluzione, is taught by a very monotone professor with awful powerpoints, and I have tried to talk to him after class and during his office hours but he is incredibly unapproachable. This could be his real personality OR, as I have come to realize after talking with other students, it might just be a result of how the university system is set up in this country. When I go to class, there is only lecture. The professor talks, I listen, and then it is over. The system is very authoritarian and has been that way for hundreds (almost a thousand) years. Problem is, I feel like I am just in this class to get a grade. Neither I or the professor want to be there, but it is something that we are both required to do. For me, that is not education. Education is me looking forward to class every day, to talking with my professor and working with my classmates and not being able to get my mind off a problem because it is so interesting. In my Dante course, I come out of the room talking with my professor or with the Italians I have met about the class and about the reading! This is not something that will show up on my permanent record, but man I love it! At the end of high school, I decided I wanted to be a writer so I took (as many of my friends know) tons of humanities courses. Now I am slipping!

However, all is not lost on the side of Science. I believe that next semester I will be taking a course on Vulcanology where we will go on field trips to the provinces of Italy which still contain active volcanos. Interestingly enough, Italy regularly has earth quakes, and because of an event in the youths of two of my housemates they can sense them when I can't, so that when a 5.2 on the richter scale quake occured last week they immediately turned on the TV and got online to read about it. Recently on television I saw the museum at Pompeii, where an eruption occuring in the distant past actually froze people in their movement so that now there are what look like statues made out of stone sitting behind glass enclosures, statues which moments before their creation had been eating, laughing, maybe even thinking about how to solve a really tough problem.

OKAY, so that was my first week of class! I know, all my reader(s?) out there are like 'Wow, Ben, that was cool but now we are ready to stop reading because you write too much.' Well, never fear! I am about to recount how amazing my weekend was, which will hopefully reward your perseverence!!!?!

Friday, after departing from my beloved Internet Point (where I now also get un sconto, or discount), I gave my Polish friend Jacob a ring because he lived very close by. He related to me that he was out buying wine with a friend and would meet me at the internet point in five minutes. As a rule, I do not party during weekdays, with few exceptions. I saw this week as no different from any other week at UNC. While it is slightly ridiculous how many opportunities there are for European and other exchange students to go crazy at bars and discoteques, I do my best to refrain because, while every night at a bar or disco seems the same, every time I travel and every time I have a long dinner with a friend it seems as if saving that money to spend now on another dessert which might prolong a conversation was totally worth it. So, Jacob met me outside the Internet Point and I babbled incessantly to him and the French girl with him on the way to his house because I had been locked off from contact with anything but a computer for a long time. We walked past the numerous Italian youths gathered in the dwindling light of Piazza Verdi, past the stucco walls covered with graffiti at street level, and ascended the two floors to Jacob's apartment. When we arrived we gathered next to the window that opens out on the alley, and I could hear the music drifting in from a gay/lesbian/bisexual performance that was occurring on the piazza. Another French girl was there and along with her friend she taught me how to say bad things about other people's mothers in French. We had a great conversation about a new game show where people get payed more and more money for answering more and more personal questions, and I picked a few leaves from the basil plant on the window where she sat and smelled. As we sat and talked and drank white wine, she smoked and exhaled into the street, and the smoke looked amazing in the light. Jacob and the other girl put Ragae music on the computer, and we spent a good two hours hanging out and occassionally dancing or tackling and piling on each other. When they left the apartment for a Regae show on the Piazza XX Settembre I unlocked my bike and headed for home to get some sleep before going to Florence the next day, but I now wish I had gone to the concert and held on to that feeling I had in the apartment for a longer time. I ate dinner (11PM) and dropped off to sleep after struggling to read a little more Dante.


I arose from my slumber at 7:50 AM on Saturday and had an amazing breakfast of cereal with milk and half a banana, a tiny coffee that I made on the stove which I have to light with a lighter (difficult to do when your eyes are half closed) and a cookie, then the second half of the banana afterward. I threw tomatoes, bread, crackers, and jam into my backpach and hopped on my bike to make it to the train station before our 9:00 train. At the train station I met up with three amazing people: Corrina, a 23 year old philosophy major from Germany, Maya, an art major, and Tanya, a girl from Slovenia who sings and is going to try out for the choir at Bologna! Of the three, Tanya was definitely the most touristy, and she had begun to take pictures even before we had left the terminal to head for our trains. We booked a very cheap train to Florence (Firenze) for about 5 euro and it was fine that it took an extra hour because we spent the time talking and they were incredibly eager to use my super amazing fantastic guidebook (Eyewitness travel guides), which has an entire map of Florence and cross sections of the most important buildings. We also had time to take pictures next to an ugly fountain in Prato, which you might be able to find on Facebook.

The three girls had reserved tickets to the Uffizi, which was fine with me because I wanted some time to myself to explore the city. I started off like I always do: walking and taking a glance every once in a while at the map but mostly trying to make my own course. Very close to the train station after walking by vendors trying to sell me many things I don't need, I came upon the Piazza Santa Maria Novella and ate crackers with jam in the grass in the shade of an obelisk looking at the facade of the church and the people walking past. Afterwards I walked towards the entrance and cosidered paying for the museum but decided that I'd rather have money to pay for the train ride back and instead took off down a side street past several shops with beautiful goods in the window.

The first monument I found was San Lorenzo, a church whose facade, like the basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, remains unfinished. The idea of an ugly or undecorated face of a church is appealing to me though because it seems to make more sense when the most beautiful works are on the inside, when what matters most can not be seen. I did not stay to see the inside of the church, but I did walk into the cloister garden, which was planted with beautifully symmetric bushes and a pomegranate tree in the middle.

A picture of San Lorenzo from the shade of the
cloister arden. This is where nuns and priests used to
and probably still do come to chillax. On the other side is a
door to the library, where a famous Mannerist staircase
designed by Michelangelo leads to the stacks.

When I say I walk somewhere, it usually means that I am spending more time stopping to look at things than walking. In the case of Florence, I would stop to gawk at about every other shop and after I left the piazza I saw several exhibits which caught my eye. Sure they aren't what peopel seem to associate with Florence, but I think I should spend more time looking and thinking than rushing to see another building. On this occasion I stopped at a horror shop which had a display on the most famous serial murderers from the United States in Italian, as well as busts of their heads and pictures of them looking very scary and fierce! There was blood and some of them ate people after they killed them! Gross!

After that I kept walking and realized I was in the Piazza San Marco. They seem to have all kinds of plazas and churches and streets named after the same saints in each city, and I really need to read to find out about these people: Santo Stefano, San Margherita, San Vitale. Also, there are a lot of plaza named after dates: Piazza VIII Agosto, Piazza XX Settembre, Piazza VII Novembre, and it would be nice to know what had happened on these dates. Anyway, San Marco was in the University district, and I stopped by a random art exhibit I saw and found a very cool photograph portrait of a man smiling whose face was made of flowers. It looked like something out of the Beatles 'Yellow Submarine' move, and it was beautiful. I also stopped in at the Galleria dell'Accademia, where the original statue of David by Michelangelo can be found, but there was no student discount to see the 5.2 m /17 foot nude. While other people seem to emphasize other parts of David's anatomy, I really like to look at his hands. It seems they are larger than they should be and all the veins and lines are precisely in the right places. I'm not sure how sculpting works, but that statue is just so darn beautiful! I believe that next time I return to Florence I will go to see the real thing.

The North doors of the Baptistry, with tons of tourists
looking on. I think I will go back to Florence when it is cold
and nasty so that I can enjoy the doors without people
struggling to take photos the whole time they should be looking.

After I stepped out of the Academy, I looked to the left and saw the Duomo in the distance. The building is like a giant piece of art, with white, green, and pink Tuscan marble covering much of the exterior and soaring arches holding the church up from the inside. Across from the entrance to the Duomo is the Battistero, or Baptistry. The doors of the Baptistry were constructed by Lorenzo Ghiberti over 21 years of work, but after he got done with that he was comissioned to make the East doors! Uffa! Each panel on the doors depicts an important scene from the bible: Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden, Moses bringing down the ten commandments, and Abraham and Isaac among others. Each of these panels is stunning in its beauty, and I had to elbow some tourists so that I could get to the front and see them up close. Michelangelo called these doors the "Gate of Paradise."

Inside of the Duomo. The painting of Dante is on the left towards
the front, and the dome at the far end of this picture is filled with the
Last Judgement frescoes by Vasari. The dome has two shells: an inner
one for support and an outer shell for show.

Beside the Duomo is the Campanile, a great big tower from the top of which can be seen all of Florence. Each square inch of the tower and of the Duomo is outlaid in marble, like the buildings are enormous sculptures. I stepped into the church and my first thought was 'the ceilings are very high.' I felt bad even walking on the floor because it was all tiled beautifully, but the walls were sparsely decorated with art. All the windows were colored glass, and at the front of the church I got to see a very cool painting of Dante next to Florence, with Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven to his right in the picture and the city to his left. Dante always has on this red robe with a red cap in paintings. One of the reasons the Commedia is so beautful is the many references to politics and religion both contemporary and in the history before Dante.

Painting of Dante in the Duomo. All the people headed
down for Hell don't look so happy, and some of Florence's major
monuments (like the Duomo) can be seen in the city.

Stepping out into the sunlight from the Duomo, I went and stared at some reliefs on the side of the Campanile, then started walking again. The next place I came to was the Orsanmichele, a covered market which had been converted into a church, so that I could see where the arcades had been filled in and frescoes had been put up. I sat for a while in the church and stared at the amazing alter, which like everything else in the church had been constructed by the guilds (arti) of Bologna. I had never thought about a group of people creating a piece of art before.

My favorite sculpture outside the Orsanmichele. I like
how the dudes are just hanging out and talking instead
of staring into the distance majestically. Under them the
guild that made the sculptures is depicted with all their tools.

After leaving the Orsanmichele I was surprised to see that Dante's house (Casa di Dante) was nearby, so I walked over to see it and dropped 4 euro on a ticket (risking not being able to return or having to use an expensive ATM). Lining many of the walls of the museum were the coats of arms for the noble families in Florence during Dante's time and the places where they are mentioned in the Commedia. Each family had a specific story associated with trading, murder, whatever, and Dante incorporates references to them in ways that have layers and layers of meaning. Many of them appear in the Inferno, which would not make me happy if I had the talles tower in Florence. The museum was rich with relics from Dante's life: herbs and rocks referred to in the poem, a recreation of a famous battle between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines (still have to find out who they are), copies of paintings of Dante, original manuscripts from his writing, a model of his undecorated bed room, paintings of the different places Dante goes in the Commedia, a cool painting of Dante on the beach, etc. There was lots of text in Italian on the panels so I couldn't read them all, but I think I will return after I have learned how to read Italian better and after I have already read much of Dante's poem.

An inscription at the beginning of the museum that I found
hilarious. Basically its says that Dante and his good friend
Verese engaged in a poetry exchange where each wrote three
sonnets questioning the other's masculinity, intelligence, etc. and then
after weren't very good friends anymore. Wonder why!

A sculpture of Dante (bottom left) and two hands reaching up
and maybe trying to take him to hell.


A poster with every line of every canto. This was interesting
to me because there are so many ways to look at the poem from the
overall structure to the meaning of each individual line and reference.

Corrina had called me before the museum, but I wanted to see it while I was still in Florence. I met back up with my friends in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella and I ate bread with jam while they told me about the Uffizi (they got to see the Birth of Venus!). I wanted to head for the Futurism museum I had just passed by, but instead we just glanced inside and I took a picture of them under the sign for the Via delle Belle Donne. We then started walking toward Ponte Vecchio, but I lost them when I wanted to look at the 3-D chalk pictures that were being constructed on the sidewalk and they wanted to walk. I walked to Ponte Grazie, a bridge upriver of Ponte Vecchio, and stared at the shops hanging off the bridge for a while. Looking on the hill beside the river, I decided I wanted to see if I could get a good view so I walked up a big hill that was bordered by beautiful apartments with clothes waving and children laughing inside and shutters opening or closing. At the top of the hill I followed some sketchy signs to the Giardini Boboli. The gardens were closed, and when the man at the desk told me in Italian that it was 10 euro for entrance (ingresso), I told him it must be a very nice garden and he laughed.

I headed back down the hill on a different street, glanced longingly at the swordfish on a restaurant menu, and met my friends on the Ponte Vecchio. The whole bridge is covered with jewelry shops with displays where EVERYTHING glitters, and by the end I almost wanted a ring or necklace. When I become a millionaire I will come back and buy a ring to wear or maybe a golden fork to eat my swordfish with.

We decided to head back to the station to catch the train, and on the way I sang to Tanya. She complimented me and told me I should try out for the school choir, which I think I will do tomorrow. After some confusion we got a bus to another train station and on the way Tanya taught me a song in Slovenian. We ran to catch the train only to find out it was running late, and I sang some Death Cab for Cutie songs for my friends while we waited. On the long ride back we looked at pictures and pored over my guidebook some more. I pulled out my enormous gigantic map to show them where I had been in Italy and where I am going to go.

Tanya on the train with a camera. She takes a ton of
pictures so hopefully I don't have to.

Today I ran a long way and went to hang out with my friends in the Giardini Margherita, and I just got back from seeing the amazing fireworks display in the Piazza Maggiore in honor of San Petronio. This week looks promising.

The Rocky Beaches of Liguria

As you may have discerned thus far in my blog posts, I can be quite loquacious at times (a VERY cool word I learned for the GRE and finally get to use!). Since I do not have a lot of time to write tonight and I begin classes tomorrow, I will try to relate as best I can a trip I took this weekend that I think epitomizes all that I hoped for and dreamed of experiencing when I came to Italy. Highlights from the rest of the week include more confusion about coursework, buying new running shoes, and making gnocchi in the tiny kitchen of my tiny apartment. Moving on...

I stayed up until after 2 on Friday night hanging out with an Erasmus student and two of her friends from Germany. I went home early when they headed to a nightclub ('kinky'), took a cold shower, and went to sleep. Yesterday morning I woke up at 6:15 AM and struggled into the kitchen, somehow threw together our tiny coffee maker, and made another early morning bike ride through 'il centro' to the train station. When I arrived at the station, I bought my incredibly cheap ticket to Sarzana (only 13 euro to go across the country! Incredibile!) and rode the train for three hours, stopping for a breather in Fidenza, before arriving in Sarzana. I was planning to read more of a book on Dante on the train, which is all in Italian and which I am supposed to have done by tomorrow, but it was difficult because the second half of the trip the train began travelling through the beautiful northern Appenine mountains (Alpa Apuane or something) and the train would go over these enormous bridges with amazing views of hillsides dotted with tiny stucco houses. With red roofs. Like a tourist I was glued to the window the whole time, and I am amazed that people were able to build such an amazing thing as this railroad.

The railroad tried to follow a river as best as it could, and this river was sooo big and beautiful. Bridges for the train would go over the river for long periods of time. Since we are just entering the rainy season in Italy, the river was incredibly low, but I could tell that it had enormous floods because there were huge cobbles and boulders in the middle of the river which could only be picked up by tons of water. Playing in that river would be real fun, but I'm sure it is polluted by all the Italian style factories dotting its banks.

After arriving in Sarzana I thought about waiting for my friend Clemente, who I met on couchsurfing.com, to come get me, but instead I decided to explore his hometown for a while before calling him. I did what I usually do and just started walking, and unlike my trip to Modena this time my strategy actually worked pretty well. There was an amazing statue that kind of looked like an oscar award in the piazza maggiore. I took a left and walked down a street where all kinds of vendors, from antiques to candy to cheese to clothes, had set up booths outside their stores to enjoy the day.

The start of the annual parade for Napolean. All of the
men marched past chanting old war songs.

Finally I arrived in another piazza where the biannual Manifestazione di Napoleone was taking place, although I did not know it at the time. I just thought it was cool because men of all ages were arranged in groups dressed in different uniforms, chanting songs that I guess the army of Napoleon had chanted when they were headed to battle. There was also a cannon, which was cool. When the parade began I watched it go by and then followed it, being sure to dodge the horse poop. A guy playing Napolean led the parade, which was quite short and ended in the castle on the other side of town. This castle was composed of round towers that were wide at the top with crumbling stone walls stretching between them. I sat on the wall of one of these towers and ate some grapes and a tomato while I looked at the view. Hillsides dotted with tiny houses and a few villas. Another castle rested on the hill closest to town.



A group of soldiers I met in the couryard of the
castle. The guys with the beard was very cool.

I ate slow, and after I finished I walked back down into the courtyard of the castle where one of the older 'soldiers' was teaching another one how to properly hold and heft the gun. After they finished I asked him to teach me, so I learned how to hold a really old rifle, how it worked, and how to load it. Back in the day, soldiers had to put in a little gunpowder to fire the gun, pull the trigger back, pour powder down the barrel, put in the ball, stuff it down with a rod, FIRE, and then do it all over again. Bad-A soldiers could do this four times a minute. Afterwards I got some snapshots of the soldiers and headed back to the train station to meet Clemente. On the way I ran into Jessica, an actress from Berlin who had already been touring Liguria for a month and who was also couch surfing, and we ate a baguette with Nutella I had brought from Bologna under a fountain while we watched kids play at being soldiers.

We linked up with Clemente at the station and headed to his house which was very close by. The bedrooms and kitchen of the house were beautiful, but Clemente's mom didn't really approve of having foreigners in the house (imagine that) and they had an argument of which I understood most of it. Finally I left some stuff from my backpack in his bedroom and the three of us took off for a rocky pocket beach.

To get to this beach we first walked to the bus station. Walking with Clemente was crazy because he seemed to be oblivious to everything whenever he was crossing the street and motioning with his hands all the time. Clemente is 26 and he is just finishing some sort of essay to get his degree from a university in Torino. He has amazing dredlocks that he wears in a million different ways, and he talks fluent Italian, English, and Spanish. He has lived in Sarzana most his life, but next Thursday he is heading to Lithuania to do something similar to the Peace Corps for Italy. He wore very cool colorful patchwork pants.

A view from the bus on the way to Montemarcello.
The road clung to the side of the mountain and
the valley spread out below.

We boarded a tiny bus and headed toward the beach. All of the roads were tiny, and at one point the bus had to back up an entire street to let another bus pass by. We began to head up a hill, and before every turn the bus driver hit the horn and the bus made an incredibly funny sound. As we climbed up the view kept getting better and better, and I could see all the way over this gorgeous valley to the mountains on the other side. At first I thought there was still snow on the side of the mountain, but Jessica told me that this was where the famous marble that all the statues and real nice tables are made of is mined. I really would like to go back and see this place where tons of caves are carved into the side of the mountain.

When we got to the top of the mountain I kept falling behind because I just kept looking as we walked through the tiny, incredibly Italian town of Montemarcello. No cars were in the town, and there were stone walkways with sheets and clothes flapping in the breeze overhead and plants on windowsills where women were talking to friends on the street from the window and a little deserted piazza named after a famous king and tons of statues large and small placed randomly around the town and pieces missing from the sides of buildings and crumbling rock everywhere and an amazing view of the sea and the islands in the sea and the cliffs leading down to the water.

A picture from the steep trail of islands in
the Ligurian Sea.

A small, stepped, steep trail led down to the water where Jessica and I arrived first at a tiny pocket beach while Clemente talked with his friend back on the trail. On the beach were about thiry people, all Italians, sunbathing or swimming or talking and gesticulating madly or sleeping or walking the short way from one side of the beach to the other. The sand on the beach was closer to tiny gravel, and it felt amazing on my feet. I undressed right on the beach and stepped into the running shorts I brought, then walked down the beach into the water, fell backwards into the water, and floated for what felt like forever. I swam around a buoy out from the shore very slowly, wishing that I had brought goggles so that I could see through the crystal clear water. Back at shore I crawled onto shore where I sat and let the waves crash on my feet and picked up the incredibly smooth stones to reassure myself that I was here.

Clemonte and Jessica chillaxing. Notice Clemente's
sexy bathing suit...

I stretched out on my sleeping mat for a while and then went with the other two to jump off a rock on one side of the beach. We climbed over some little rocks, up onto the big ones, and waited while Clemente prepared for a long time to dive, stretching his hands into the air, and finally just jumped in. I followed, and afterwards Clemente, who rock climbed until he turned 20, climbed up the rock. I tried and slipped back into the water, tried and slipped, but couldn't stop laughing. I went back up the other side, waited while Clementer prepared to dive, moved him out of the way and did a swan dive into the water which was scary because there were a few big rocks down there. This is about as close to paradise as it gets.

Jessica, Clemente, and I hung out on the beach while several bus-boats came and went to take people back to town. I ate more bread with Nutella and Jessica told me about the play that she is currently working in Berlin, which is for teenagers to teach them about Fascism. As the sun began to set (in Italian, tramontane), we struggled back up the trail and I stopped many times to wait for Clemente and to look at the painted sky. On the other edge of the small town we sat on stone chairs in the grass outside a bar, with birds chirping in a cage on the other side of the patio, and waited for Clemonte's friend to pick us up. He did, and then he drove (crazily, insanely, like all Italians), we picked up food, then went to Clemente's house to get ready for the night.

Sunset on the beach after most of the people had
left on the boat. The boats had stairs attached to
the front for people to board.

Clemente and I made Jessica and Lorenzo wait at the car while we pondered the meaning of the Poker Face song. If anyone out there knows what is meant by 'Carry my poker face,' please let me know. My theory is that Lady Gaga carries a poker face when she does not want guys to know whether she likes them or not so that they like her more. Beats me.

When we headed out it was dark, and riding in the back seat of a car with the windows a little bit down on these narrow roads was an amazing feeling. After some confusion and driving around in the countryside, and after Clemente tried to hand me the white wine and spilled it in the backseat, and after picking up a friend on the side of a country road, we arrived at a birthday party taking place under a tent beside a vineyard.

I ate tons of food I had never tried. Many people told me the names for the dishes but all of them have left me. Now I only know that they were incredibly delicious, and that there were five desserts all of which I tried twice. I met many Italians at the start of the party, and I was still the American in the group from North Carolina (which, by the way, is in the middle of the east coast of the United States), but last night I felt okay about it. I had a long talk about psychology with an older Italian man while he smoked and I looked at the stars. I had a few glasses of wine and listened to my new friends play music on instruments. One guy was really jamming on the alto sax, and we exchanged numbers because he comes to Bologna almost every weekend to listen to jazz and next time I will go with him to a concert. By the end of the night I was exhausted from talking so much Italian, but the night kept going and going and going. The girl whose birthday it was had red hair and was very patient with me trying to wish her happy birthday and find out about her in my atrocious Italian. A teenager who had been jamming on guitar got a little too drunk and while he was rolling around on a stone bench one of my new friends took off his shoe and threw it perfectly onto a far away table of the tent. There were lights on the hillsides in the distance from the tiny towns that dot each one, and we were surrounded by vineyards.

After the party, we headed back to Simone's place to hang out. I ended up sleeping in his house and using the new-to-me shower in his bathroom. The shower is right next to the sink, and there is no curtain. After taking a shower the showerer has to wipe a towel at the end of a stick across the floor to get it to dry. The bathroom is tiny.

View from the window of the kitchen at the
apartment where I spent the night.

His apartment had a beautiful balcony facing out on the street where I hung my swimsuit for the night, and we all slouched down on chairs, sofas, and the floor, drank wine, and I did my best to answer questions about Obama, George Bush, obesity in America, etc. The living room had so much character: it was filled with books where all the pages were cut, there were jars and random pieces of art on the bookshelves, the short table in the middle of the room spoke of many other nights doing this same thing. I did not go to sleep until 4, but I did get to sleep in a bed surrounded by the medieval weaponry that is part of Simone's hobby.

This morning I woke up at 9, went up to the kitchen to do the dishes, read the book about Dante until I got a headache, then went back downstairs to write amid the medieval weaponry. I read Dante next to a window which opened out on the town, and there was a great view of a medival castle on the hill on the distance but a crane was partially obstructing the view. The kitchen was so beautiful with its amazing array of tools for cooking and the lived-in look that told me that Simone and his girlfriend and friends often eat together and that they are not concerned about the things in the kitchen but the people at the table.

When Simone and his girlfriend woke up (their bed is under a dream-like mosquito net), I walked to a nearby bar with him to buy milk and our breakfast was a bowl of milk with a small cup of coffee poured in it. Into this mixture they tossed cookies, which float on top of the mild and which are removed for eating with a spoon. Delicious, absolutely delicious.

The girlfriend had to leave to go back to her university, which was six hours away by train, and they could not give me a ride to the train station because they have one of those three wheeled thingamajigs that just chugs along, so I took the walk in the bright sunlight to the nearby major road and caught a bus with some help from a nice woman back to Sarzana. I rushed to the trainstation and bought a ticket home for 11 euro, then went to say good-bye to Clemente. He advised me to start climbing on the indoor wall in Bologna, which I will heavily consider, then advised me to go to a certain cafe right across from the church, Gemmi, before leaving and try a certain dish. I walked there, past the vendors outside their shops, bought one of whatver it was and sat down on a table outside the cafe, ate the delicious dessert very slowly, and stared happily into space. I bought a loaf of very good, heavy bread on the way back to the train and made the four hour ride back to Bologna in a crowded train.

This country is so amazing. I start school tomorrow but I'm actually pretty excited because I'm really interested in my courses. I'm taking a Biodiversity and Evolution class, a course where I will read Dante's Divina Commedia in Italian, and a course on the history of art criticism. I'm so excited. Every day here has been like vacation, and I have the feeling that it will stay that way. I have Fridays off, so I will definitely be taking off on Thursdays to do some biking. I have never, every felt anything so amazing as the sand on that beach. Walking over it was like having my feet massaged by the earth. When I dove in the water, I broke out of the surface like a whale, and let the waves move me around while I took deep breathes and looked into the sky. This is living.