This is called an Askos. I saw in the the Museo Civico Archaeologico here in Bologna. It was a terracotta container designed for pouring, and the name comes from some Greek word.
This is a vase which used to hold (or still holds) the ashes of a dead Etruscan person. The pictures on the vase are of the person and possibly their family at a potentially critical moment in life. People were buried with their belongings: not just valuables but also everyday items such as fibule for pinning up robes or le tazze, cups used for drinking. These nice vases were put inside of much larger ceramic vases called ossuario.
A recreation of the statue of Neptune found in Piazza Maggiore in Bologna. The making of this sculpture went something like this: 'So, do you think you could put a few more muscles here? I'm not sure those muscles actally exist! Just keep adding muscles until he looks buffer than any of us, then Neptune will be appeased!'
Inner courtyard of the Museo Civico d'Arte in Modena. There is one really big headstone and a lot of medium size and smaller ones.
A recreation of the statue of Neptune found in Piazza Maggiore in Bologna. The making of this sculpture went something like this: 'So, do you think you could put a few more muscles here? I'm not sure those muscles actally exist! Just keep adding muscles until he looks buffer than any of us, then Neptune will be appeased!'
Inner courtyard of the Museo Civico d'Arte in Modena. There is one really big headstone and a lot of medium size and smaller ones.So first off I would like to let you all know my address and other information about how I can be reached. Feel free to send postcards, chocolate, money, and any non-perishable food in your house which you may have bought in bulk for a nuclear storm which did not occur.
My address:
Benjamin Bogardus c/o Monaldi
Via Vizzani 45/2
Bologna, BO 40138
Via Vizzani 45/2
Bologna, BO 40138
My phone number here (the first number is the country code, and for many cards you may have to press #, which my Australian friend calls the hash sign, after dialing):
(39) 327-9927134
My email address for the University of Bologna:
benjamin.bogardus@studio.unibo.it
Allright I think that pretty much does it. If you have any questions about how to contact me or which presents I would like or how much money is enough to send just let me know. Oh, and also if you want to talk to me and find out how I'm doing. That is OKAY, but the others are better.
SO, I spent the weekend in a little bit of a hiatus. I've been feeling the culture shock and missing home a bit, but I have been told by enough people that this would happen that by now I'm pretty numb to it. I didn't go out for TWO NIGHTS STRAIGHT! This was find with me because I needed sleep and there was a bunch of academic stuff I had to look at online.
I woke up on Saturday with the intention of making headway towards finding a bicycle. However, the more I look the further behind I seem to fall. I am going to use one very crappy bicycle to commute to campus and buy another for touring the country. I am still riding the red bike spoken of in the last post, and we have 6 other bikes which I thought would be potential candidates for an upgrade. After eating breakfast, drinking my cafe, and watching the morning news with incomprehension, I spent an hour or two in the cantina where the bikes are stored looking around and trying to decide what to do.
The cantina is a dungeon-esque storage room in the basement below my apartment building. Lines of wooden doors along dimly lit corridors with concrete floors and lights which turn off every two minutes... you get the idea. But I've gotten used to being alone down there even though every once in a while I get shivers. Five of the bikes down there are straight trashed. Many have breaks which don't work, are incredibly rusted, have problems shifting, and NONE seem to have air in their tires. I wheeled all of them out into the hallway and spent a long time attempting to use our small pump, which I call a pompina (not a real word), to get them up to speed. After failing at this, I did my best to get all the tools in the cantina together and figure out if I needed to buy any at the store. Old bed frames, tools for spicing up mopeds, and clippings of news events from long ago are among the other detritus located in this room. Finally I returned to the light, gave one last try on fixing the low seat on my current bike, and headed back upstairs to eat.
And boy do I eat. I often feel like I eat more than all my other housemates. Many times the meals are very simple and just combinations of the same ingredients: GOOD bread, butter, salami, pasta, fresh tomatoes, and cheese. The kind of cheese I have been eating is called Grana Padana or something. It is a type of parmesan cheese which is supposed to be inferior to the more expensive Parmagiano Reggiano, but it melts in my mouth. Any of the foods in our refrigerator I could eat on their own, but combined they become organic (not an Italian word). Last night I fried some yellow pepper, onion, and garlic in olive oil with salt, pepper, and oregano, then heated a tortilla on a flat pan and shredded the low Grana Padana onto the tortilla. I cutted up these amazing little grape tomatoes while the rest cooked and then threw all this stuff together in the tortilla with some salami. It tasted heavenly, and I wasn't even that hungry because I was still full from lunch!
On Sunday I woke up and went running through the park near my house and through the Giardina Margherita, taking a different way back. The sidewalk was studded with pedestrians and church goers, and dodging them all ended up being very fun. Thankfully the Giardina Margherita has a trail around it so that I didn't have to run on concrete or pavement all the time, and I ran the trail real fast but then slowed down to a crawl at the end so that I could look at the booths for the children's festival that was going on. Lots of the little kids were doing this miniature car race and they all looked goofy. The bells in a church tower rang right over my head on the way back, and I stretched on our balcony and took a cold shower.
I decided to travel to Modena on Sunday. Modena is east of Bologna, and I had no problems this time finding the right train to take. All of the train stations in Italy operate on the same terms, so maybe I'll be less confused in the future. On the bus I studied the futuro tense in my text book and looked out the window at the flat agricultural landscape. In Modena I spent a long time walking around trying to find the duomo. I figured that a good strategy for finding museums would be to look for large building sticking out of the landscape and head toward those, but this strategy does not seem to work as well as a map. After a couple of hours I finally found a nice art museum that had a map and spent a long time looking at grave stones and about ten million paintings of the virgin and the child.
The grave stones (le stelle) came in different sizes and shapes, and each had an ingraving of the person it was made for, their father, what they accomplished in their lives, and all of this in Latin, yet another language I don't understand. I was the only one in this part of the museum, and after walking through a pair of glass doors I bought a ticket, picked up a lot of free paper, and went up to the Civic Art Museum in a glass elevator. The light coming through the glass in the top of the atrium was beautiful.
In the art museum there were a hundred thousand pictures of the virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. There were pictures where the baby Jesus looked almost like a miniature grown up and others where he was looking like a normal baby playing with the folds of Mary's robe. Some paintings had the mother and the baby looking straight at me and in others they were looking at each other or at other members in the paintings. Chilling crosses dwelled in the backgrounds of some paintings, and in others the baby Jesus was being adored by Magi (still don't know what exactly those dudes do) or handing a key to an adult or baptizing someone. Very interesting, but my legs got super tired.
I spent too much time on the first fourth of the exhibit and had to speed through the second half, but there were many pieces that stood out to me. Many little pictures intended for alters had been designed so they could be folded up like a book with doors, and in the third room of the art museum there was an enormous piece which had several panes divided by golden plated embridery. In each was a different person (Jesas at the top peak), and it was strange to think about the panes as little rooms that each person was in. I could not take pictures in the museum, but I would have taken a picture of this one, each holy person residing in their own place in this alter piece.
Another piece that stood out to me was some naked dude sitting down with one leg propped on the other attempting to remove a splinter from his foot. There was also a wooden cello with designs etched into the wood, and at the end giant enormous paintings of events from the bible. Also at the end, where I finally got to sit on a couch, were some stunning still lives, one of which had a delicious looking cut watermelon.
Many of these paintings I felt as if I had seen them in books, and now I actually got to see them in real life. It was amazing. I ate bread, tomatoes, cheese, salami, and grapes in the museum lobby and headed back to the train station.
I spent yesterday (Monday) morning attempting to figure out which courses I will be taking with an advisor Tiziana Labriola. Her office is on the second floor (primo piano) where there is an ancient museum filled with different animals preserved in jars. There are a million different kinds of frogs, birds, and a big petrified lion. At our meeting, Tiziana talked very fast and printed lots of paper off to give to me. I feel now that I might be able to figure this out, to finish my major here in Italy and be able to graduate when I get back. Maybe. Problem is, each department at the University of Bologna is on a different time schedule for when they start and end the semester. Some even have trimesters or quadmesters instead. I am going to need to contact each professor individually to find out when their class is. Exams are a nightmare: they usually take place at the end of the semester three weeks after school ends! Picture taking a 20 minute oral exam that determines whether or not you pass a class you have attended all semester! I would wet myself. Apparently they are made easier for foreign students, but we will see.
I went to take a dvd back to the Biblioteca Salaborsa, found out it has strange hours like every other building and was closed, then headed back to the bus stop. On the way I decided to stop to see the library for the Department of Natural Sciences, and on the way to the second floor a poster caught my eye talking about water on Mars. Instead of giving an email address, it told me to go to the next floor and talk to a professor about participating. In this way I met Professor Barbieri, one of those scientists who is looking for water on Mars. The building in which his office sits is hundreds of years old, but his research is incredibly recent. By comparing different formations on Mars and Earth, Pr. Barbieri has shown that there are many similarities between landforms formed by water here in the deserts of our planet and areas found on Mars. Talking to him I was almost convinced that the massive investment that we've made sending little spacecrafts out to crawl over the planet and take grainy photographs has been worth it because the discovery of even the most simple form of life on this planet could completely overturn our current view of life. If life was ever present on Mars, this means that it may exist on many more planets than we initially thought.
Barbieri and I talked entirely in Italian, and he showed me pictures of his research. It was interesting discussing the most miniscule form of life on a distant planet while on the wall behind us there was a satellite image of Europe, green and chock full of people and plants and animals already. I think I am going to take a Paleontology class with this professor now, but we will see.
I headed home and was late for lunch after buying bread at the local grocery store COOP, and afterwards I read about bikes online and in books and then set out on a quest for Decathlon, a bike store. After taking the Red Ruby (name for crappy bike) to the Salaborsa and returning the DVD, I took a bus out to the edge of town and accidently got off too soon before the mall.
Asking for directions in Bologna is interesting. It goes like this: I begin walking up to a store. EVERYONE sitting out front, mostly old people, stare at me and become hushed as I walk up. I mumble my question in bad Italian, someone shouts Eh, I say it again in different words, and then all of them start giving me advice at once and I get hardly anything out of it. Anyways, finally one man pointed in a direction and I began to walk in that direction. After weaving around several apartment buildings, I found one of the most beautiful views I have yet encountered in this distant country: a garden.
It was raining, and I went through an iron gate and walked around in one of the largest commune gardens I have ever seen. Each plot was different, and many of the pathways were covered by makeshift tile walkways. Many gardens had huge cabbages, squashes, cucumbers, and peppers in neat rows sticking out of the ground or bamboo shelters under which sat plastic chairs. Ivy covered much of these shelters and would shade them if the day was not so gray. Small buildings were located in the middle of this sea of garden, and there were tables around which I could picture older people playing the card game I encountered at the airport upon first arriving to this country. My shoes got muddy walking along the smaller paths, and I really wish that I was part of this great creation project.
I pushed my way over a hill, jumped a fence, and arrived at the mall. After putting my backpack in a locker before entering the store (really? another difference...) I talked with Alessandro, one of the helpers, in Italian and he immediately referred me to another bicycle shop that is close to the train station to buy a bike. By the way, my favorite word in Italian is allora. It is the equivalent of 'alright then' in English, or 'okay, so...' All the bikes there were crap for what I needed them for, but I got some good tips from Alessandro and looked at accessories for a long time. Buying a bike is going to be difficult for me. I need the right size, the right pedals for shoes, shoes with metal parts that don't scrape the ground, a good pump and repair kit, mounting places to hold my stuff, a lock or two or three, and a hundred other things. Last night I sat down at my desk and wrote furiously for half an hour about all the stuff I will need. I am going to truly think about each piece now while I have time before school starts and find the best place to buy it, whether online or at a store. I have money to buy all the stuff, but the less I spend on the bike, or the more wisely I spend it on the bike, the more I have for wine and cheese and bread.
I am going to be travelling from town to town across the Italian countryside and using couchsurfing.com to book a sofa at successive towns. I am incredibly excited about this because sleeping on a couch is cheap and a great way to meet people, and it means I no longer have to carry a blanket or sleeping bag or any of that. Less weight means more enjoyment. Many of the best places to go on long trips are along the west coast of Italy, so I will be needing to take the train a ways to get to these, but my first trip will be to the hills near Bologna to see what is over there.
I could say a million things about the bike I want and all the tools I intend to buy, but maybe I'll save that for another day. I woke up early this morning to go running, but it is raining ourside (Piove molto a Bologna). I have several meetings to make it to today, but they will get done. I CAN NOT WAIT to start biking!
SO, I spent the weekend in a little bit of a hiatus. I've been feeling the culture shock and missing home a bit, but I have been told by enough people that this would happen that by now I'm pretty numb to it. I didn't go out for TWO NIGHTS STRAIGHT! This was find with me because I needed sleep and there was a bunch of academic stuff I had to look at online.
I woke up on Saturday with the intention of making headway towards finding a bicycle. However, the more I look the further behind I seem to fall. I am going to use one very crappy bicycle to commute to campus and buy another for touring the country. I am still riding the red bike spoken of in the last post, and we have 6 other bikes which I thought would be potential candidates for an upgrade. After eating breakfast, drinking my cafe, and watching the morning news with incomprehension, I spent an hour or two in the cantina where the bikes are stored looking around and trying to decide what to do.
The cantina is a dungeon-esque storage room in the basement below my apartment building. Lines of wooden doors along dimly lit corridors with concrete floors and lights which turn off every two minutes... you get the idea. But I've gotten used to being alone down there even though every once in a while I get shivers. Five of the bikes down there are straight trashed. Many have breaks which don't work, are incredibly rusted, have problems shifting, and NONE seem to have air in their tires. I wheeled all of them out into the hallway and spent a long time attempting to use our small pump, which I call a pompina (not a real word), to get them up to speed. After failing at this, I did my best to get all the tools in the cantina together and figure out if I needed to buy any at the store. Old bed frames, tools for spicing up mopeds, and clippings of news events from long ago are among the other detritus located in this room. Finally I returned to the light, gave one last try on fixing the low seat on my current bike, and headed back upstairs to eat.
And boy do I eat. I often feel like I eat more than all my other housemates. Many times the meals are very simple and just combinations of the same ingredients: GOOD bread, butter, salami, pasta, fresh tomatoes, and cheese. The kind of cheese I have been eating is called Grana Padana or something. It is a type of parmesan cheese which is supposed to be inferior to the more expensive Parmagiano Reggiano, but it melts in my mouth. Any of the foods in our refrigerator I could eat on their own, but combined they become organic (not an Italian word). Last night I fried some yellow pepper, onion, and garlic in olive oil with salt, pepper, and oregano, then heated a tortilla on a flat pan and shredded the low Grana Padana onto the tortilla. I cutted up these amazing little grape tomatoes while the rest cooked and then threw all this stuff together in the tortilla with some salami. It tasted heavenly, and I wasn't even that hungry because I was still full from lunch!
On Sunday I woke up and went running through the park near my house and through the Giardina Margherita, taking a different way back. The sidewalk was studded with pedestrians and church goers, and dodging them all ended up being very fun. Thankfully the Giardina Margherita has a trail around it so that I didn't have to run on concrete or pavement all the time, and I ran the trail real fast but then slowed down to a crawl at the end so that I could look at the booths for the children's festival that was going on. Lots of the little kids were doing this miniature car race and they all looked goofy. The bells in a church tower rang right over my head on the way back, and I stretched on our balcony and took a cold shower.
I decided to travel to Modena on Sunday. Modena is east of Bologna, and I had no problems this time finding the right train to take. All of the train stations in Italy operate on the same terms, so maybe I'll be less confused in the future. On the bus I studied the futuro tense in my text book and looked out the window at the flat agricultural landscape. In Modena I spent a long time walking around trying to find the duomo. I figured that a good strategy for finding museums would be to look for large building sticking out of the landscape and head toward those, but this strategy does not seem to work as well as a map. After a couple of hours I finally found a nice art museum that had a map and spent a long time looking at grave stones and about ten million paintings of the virgin and the child.
The grave stones (le stelle) came in different sizes and shapes, and each had an ingraving of the person it was made for, their father, what they accomplished in their lives, and all of this in Latin, yet another language I don't understand. I was the only one in this part of the museum, and after walking through a pair of glass doors I bought a ticket, picked up a lot of free paper, and went up to the Civic Art Museum in a glass elevator. The light coming through the glass in the top of the atrium was beautiful.
In the art museum there were a hundred thousand pictures of the virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. There were pictures where the baby Jesus looked almost like a miniature grown up and others where he was looking like a normal baby playing with the folds of Mary's robe. Some paintings had the mother and the baby looking straight at me and in others they were looking at each other or at other members in the paintings. Chilling crosses dwelled in the backgrounds of some paintings, and in others the baby Jesus was being adored by Magi (still don't know what exactly those dudes do) or handing a key to an adult or baptizing someone. Very interesting, but my legs got super tired.
I spent too much time on the first fourth of the exhibit and had to speed through the second half, but there were many pieces that stood out to me. Many little pictures intended for alters had been designed so they could be folded up like a book with doors, and in the third room of the art museum there was an enormous piece which had several panes divided by golden plated embridery. In each was a different person (Jesas at the top peak), and it was strange to think about the panes as little rooms that each person was in. I could not take pictures in the museum, but I would have taken a picture of this one, each holy person residing in their own place in this alter piece.
Another piece that stood out to me was some naked dude sitting down with one leg propped on the other attempting to remove a splinter from his foot. There was also a wooden cello with designs etched into the wood, and at the end giant enormous paintings of events from the bible. Also at the end, where I finally got to sit on a couch, were some stunning still lives, one of which had a delicious looking cut watermelon.
Many of these paintings I felt as if I had seen them in books, and now I actually got to see them in real life. It was amazing. I ate bread, tomatoes, cheese, salami, and grapes in the museum lobby and headed back to the train station.
I spent yesterday (Monday) morning attempting to figure out which courses I will be taking with an advisor Tiziana Labriola. Her office is on the second floor (primo piano) where there is an ancient museum filled with different animals preserved in jars. There are a million different kinds of frogs, birds, and a big petrified lion. At our meeting, Tiziana talked very fast and printed lots of paper off to give to me. I feel now that I might be able to figure this out, to finish my major here in Italy and be able to graduate when I get back. Maybe. Problem is, each department at the University of Bologna is on a different time schedule for when they start and end the semester. Some even have trimesters or quadmesters instead. I am going to need to contact each professor individually to find out when their class is. Exams are a nightmare: they usually take place at the end of the semester three weeks after school ends! Picture taking a 20 minute oral exam that determines whether or not you pass a class you have attended all semester! I would wet myself. Apparently they are made easier for foreign students, but we will see.
I went to take a dvd back to the Biblioteca Salaborsa, found out it has strange hours like every other building and was closed, then headed back to the bus stop. On the way I decided to stop to see the library for the Department of Natural Sciences, and on the way to the second floor a poster caught my eye talking about water on Mars. Instead of giving an email address, it told me to go to the next floor and talk to a professor about participating. In this way I met Professor Barbieri, one of those scientists who is looking for water on Mars. The building in which his office sits is hundreds of years old, but his research is incredibly recent. By comparing different formations on Mars and Earth, Pr. Barbieri has shown that there are many similarities between landforms formed by water here in the deserts of our planet and areas found on Mars. Talking to him I was almost convinced that the massive investment that we've made sending little spacecrafts out to crawl over the planet and take grainy photographs has been worth it because the discovery of even the most simple form of life on this planet could completely overturn our current view of life. If life was ever present on Mars, this means that it may exist on many more planets than we initially thought.
Barbieri and I talked entirely in Italian, and he showed me pictures of his research. It was interesting discussing the most miniscule form of life on a distant planet while on the wall behind us there was a satellite image of Europe, green and chock full of people and plants and animals already. I think I am going to take a Paleontology class with this professor now, but we will see.
I headed home and was late for lunch after buying bread at the local grocery store COOP, and afterwards I read about bikes online and in books and then set out on a quest for Decathlon, a bike store. After taking the Red Ruby (name for crappy bike) to the Salaborsa and returning the DVD, I took a bus out to the edge of town and accidently got off too soon before the mall.
Asking for directions in Bologna is interesting. It goes like this: I begin walking up to a store. EVERYONE sitting out front, mostly old people, stare at me and become hushed as I walk up. I mumble my question in bad Italian, someone shouts Eh, I say it again in different words, and then all of them start giving me advice at once and I get hardly anything out of it. Anyways, finally one man pointed in a direction and I began to walk in that direction. After weaving around several apartment buildings, I found one of the most beautiful views I have yet encountered in this distant country: a garden.
It was raining, and I went through an iron gate and walked around in one of the largest commune gardens I have ever seen. Each plot was different, and many of the pathways were covered by makeshift tile walkways. Many gardens had huge cabbages, squashes, cucumbers, and peppers in neat rows sticking out of the ground or bamboo shelters under which sat plastic chairs. Ivy covered much of these shelters and would shade them if the day was not so gray. Small buildings were located in the middle of this sea of garden, and there were tables around which I could picture older people playing the card game I encountered at the airport upon first arriving to this country. My shoes got muddy walking along the smaller paths, and I really wish that I was part of this great creation project.
I pushed my way over a hill, jumped a fence, and arrived at the mall. After putting my backpack in a locker before entering the store (really? another difference...) I talked with Alessandro, one of the helpers, in Italian and he immediately referred me to another bicycle shop that is close to the train station to buy a bike. By the way, my favorite word in Italian is allora. It is the equivalent of 'alright then' in English, or 'okay, so...' All the bikes there were crap for what I needed them for, but I got some good tips from Alessandro and looked at accessories for a long time. Buying a bike is going to be difficult for me. I need the right size, the right pedals for shoes, shoes with metal parts that don't scrape the ground, a good pump and repair kit, mounting places to hold my stuff, a lock or two or three, and a hundred other things. Last night I sat down at my desk and wrote furiously for half an hour about all the stuff I will need. I am going to truly think about each piece now while I have time before school starts and find the best place to buy it, whether online or at a store. I have money to buy all the stuff, but the less I spend on the bike, or the more wisely I spend it on the bike, the more I have for wine and cheese and bread.
I am going to be travelling from town to town across the Italian countryside and using couchsurfing.com to book a sofa at successive towns. I am incredibly excited about this because sleeping on a couch is cheap and a great way to meet people, and it means I no longer have to carry a blanket or sleeping bag or any of that. Less weight means more enjoyment. Many of the best places to go on long trips are along the west coast of Italy, so I will be needing to take the train a ways to get to these, but my first trip will be to the hills near Bologna to see what is over there.
I could say a million things about the bike I want and all the tools I intend to buy, but maybe I'll save that for another day. I woke up early this morning to go running, but it is raining ourside (Piove molto a Bologna). I have several meetings to make it to today, but they will get done. I CAN NOT WAIT to start biking!
Ben, your descriptions of the food there is heavenly. I'm going to the Bottom of Lenoir now to make myself a little Italian meal... salad, tomatoes, cheese, italian dressing? yum, keep them coming!
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