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.