Fare la spesa (shopping) and Trulli!

I finally made it to the market today for a glorious stash. 

Lessons began today.  There are around 13 students in this “over 50” program and all are from the US with the exception of one French Canadian, Jeanette.  She and I are very much in simpatico and have ended up in the same class after taking the initial exam, etc.  In class we played a few games designed to familiarize us with each other and also to give the teacher a better idea of our individual comprehension level.  

In the afternoon we went on an informative walking tour of the trulli.  These dwellings are centuries old and the stone, limestone, is anywhere and everywhere.  Basically, Puglia is all rock.  Our guide said that if you took a shovel and stuck it in the ground, you would hit rock.  And some of that rock is flat, naturally occurring slabs that can be easily chipped and shaped into stackable pieces.  There is no cement holding these structures together.  But to seal the outside they concocted a paste (also made out of ash and ground limestone) to seal the outside.

Puglia gets its name from Apulia, its original name.  It was first colonized by the Mycenean Greeks during the first millennium BC.  Apparently, “apulia” means “without water.”  Lots of rock and no water.  But that didn’t stop it from being prized territory for after the Greeks came a slew of other colonizers (Romans, Saracens, Turks, Venetians) to take a hold of this perfectly situated land and its various ports. 

But back to the trulli, they were so smartly designed.  The layout of the rock, from the bottom up, is in a circular pattern whose purpose is to capture what little rain falls and funnel it downward into a cistern.  Each trullo has this system. 

We went into a trullo that was furnished as it would have been in the 19^th century, say.  We learned about the diet of the contadini (farmers), which was mostly grains and legumes with some fish occasionally.  Andrea (a man’s name… he is the program director) said that his grandfather told him that when he was young, their family may have eaten meat only 2 or 3 times a year. 

To live in a trullo used to be a sort of shameful thing because people associated it with being poor.  NOW, they are the thing and it is so very cool to own one.  They are cherished and smothered in love and attention.  Look at these precious and enchanting homes!

Sunday morning in Alberobello

This morning and afternoon are free for exploring, but later this evening I meet with other students attending the school for an aperitivo.  Tomorrow, classes begin!  At 9am I have a placement exam and interview which will place me in the appropriate class.  A typical day will be classes from 9-12:45, a couple hours for lunch, then an afternoon excursion.  Pronta!

Let’s take a little stroll together:

The trulli are so interesting and oftentimes they are personalized with a symbol painted on the roof:

It’s quite enchanting:

Every Italian city and town has a memorial for soldiers who died in WWII:

Again, I don’t really have much information to share yet.  Tomorrow afternoon our excursion is an orientation to the city and its history.  I will have more to report. 😊

Today is the final course of the Giro d’Italia!  I have to admit I have been watching it.  Endless, grueling cycling that goes on for hours … lots of nothing happening …. Then a 30 second sprint at the end and someone wins.  For the viewer, its takes the same kind of suspended disbelief, patience and willingness to rest in a state of anxiety and boredom that the sport of soccer (football, here) requires. Nonetheless, I do like watching it.  Vai, vai!!

Aspetta!  I was wrong.  The final course is NEXT Sunday.  Porca Miseria!

In Puglia!

 After a long train journey I have arrived in Alberobello, Puglia!  It is the home of unique homes called trulli.  A singular home is a trullo.  I will have more photos and information to share in the next couple of days.  Right now, I'm just settling in to my mini-palace, my little cocoon of love, this sweet orb of happiness:

Angry Communists and Stunning Mosaics

 Today I wanted to visit two of my favorite churches that feature mosaics:  Santa Maria Maggiore’s for their comprehensiveness and Santa Prassede’s for their naivety and age. We are having a heatwave here and the temperature is more like July.  Perfect conditions for a political rally.  I happened upon this Worker’s Communist Party (PCL) who were furious about something, obviously.  The polizia were out in force but as the rally took to the streets, it became a huge nightmare for drivers who, as you may know, are quite angry behind the wheel on the best of days.  Let’s just say horns were honked with vigor.

 

Italian politics are very interesting and complicated.  Italy has a multi-party system, with 5 major parties (The Five Star Movement, Lega, Democratic Party, Forza Italia, and Brothers of Italy).  Then they have 38 minor parties (of which the PCL is one).  Mario Draghi (aka Super Mario) is the current Prime Minister and he is actually an Independent.  He’s really an economist who was brought back in 2021 because it was felt that Giuseppe Conti was not handling the COVID crisis with the correct amount of sprezzatura.

Santa Maria Maggiore is dedicated to the big M and rightly so.  How splendid.  How breath-taking. Big and billowy, gilded and graceful.  It’s actually a basilica and very classically Roman in style.  There are many chapels in the aisles on either side of the main nave and I was fortunate enough to be there when the 11am mass was beginning.  So I went to mass, surely gaining a few extra credit points.  In the crypt of the nativity, encased in crystal, is wood from the Holy Crib.  VV!

 

Above is the crypt of the Holy Nativity.....

Santa Prassede has a special place in my heart because it was here where I finally understood the intoxicating beauty and spiritual effect of mosaic.  Saint Praxedes was an second century martyr who was executed (along with her sister Pudentiana) by the Romans because they were discovered to be hiding and caring for persecuted Christians, and actually even providing Christian burial for the dead. 

This little church is 9^TH CENTURY, guys.  And it is a gem.

Volare.... of course.

 

Un uomo carino.

Poetical Hair

 

 

“Oh Rome!  my country! city of the soul!

The orphans of the heart must turn to thee.

Lone mother of dead empires! And control

In their shut breasts their petty misery.

What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see

The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way

O’er steps of broken thrones and temples. Ye!

Whose agonies are evils of a day _

A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.”

--Lord Byron, Childe Harold

 

Il Giardino Borghese is a large public park that became the property of Rome and Romans around the first part of the 20^th century when the Borghese family could no longer afford it, apparently.  Peccato!  But the upside is that it allows anyone to wander through what used to be a completely private paradise.  It is a wonderful place per fugare, to escape, the noise and constant movement of Roma.  Come and enjoy endless lanes, picturesque statues and fountains, the sound of parrots (quite a large population of parrots) chirping joyfully.  The Galleria Borghese is here, as you saw on a previous post.  It was the home of Cardinal Scipione Borghese and houses such a splendid collection.  But equal to the collection is the villa itself.  SUCH a beautiful place.

If you keep walking westward, you will find the Villa Medici.  This was repurposed by none other than King Louis XIV and sort of switched gears through the years to become the home of the Prix de France, an award for artists to come and live here for a year while they are working on projects.  Boise’s own Tony Doerr won the Prix many years ago.  He had an idea for a novel, set in WWII, blindness, hope,…. Hmmmmm..  Anyway, while he was living here he suffered from a bit of writer’s block and so began to journal, which became his book Four Seasons in Rome.  I highly recommend it!  So good!  It all ends well because that “idea” he had turned into All the Light We Cannot See.  BOOM!  Pulitzer Prize, bitches!!!

The Villa was chock full of French tourists.  The exhibition was interesting.  It was about scribbling and the role that it played (and plays) in creativity and innovation.  It featured oodles of doodles, by famous artists.  And I love doodles.  These are so intimate.  You can feel so close to the artist because you can see how it played with the pencil or charcoal, and then putzed around with form and caricatures.

The exhibition takes a gnarly turn with the work of some modernists like Cy Twombly.  Now to me, this is …. Crap.  Sorry.  Even Peggy Guggenheim drank the Kool-Aid with this stuff.  Ugh.

And then, just when you think you’re all sassy and know everything, the exhibit calls upon da Vinci who wrote about the importance of componimento inculto (untidy compositions) as a way to explore movement and form.  And then you are prompted to think about how, during the early 20^th century, Europe’s avante garde became enamored of children’s drawings as a font for ‘primitive naivety’ and escape from academic conventions and long-standing ideas about taste and beauty.   They had an early 20^th century film installation as well. 

You know, maybe I’m just a dud but I love convention.  So this girl walked over to the Palazzo Altemps for the antidote:

Oh yeah….. I could live there.

Where I couldn’t live is Keats’ tiny apartment by the Spanish Steps.  Tiny. Hot. Airless.  I know that consumption is a very Romantic way to go, but ugh.  This little gem of a museum is really worth visiting, seriously though.  It is full of ephemera: letters, journals, drawings, edited manuscripts.  One thing I found very poignant was these two locks of Keats’ hair, along with an excerpt from a letter by Leigh Hunt in 1833: “Mr. Keats’ hair was remarkable for its beauty, its flowing grace and fineness. … It was a kind of ideal, poetical hair and the locks we possess are beautiful specimens, …. They are long, thick, exquisitely fine, and running into ringlets.”

The exquisite death bed of tubercular splendor:

*****

Rome, you're glorious.

Today I was inspired to visit the Capitoline museum, and then walk around the forum… not go in it, just walk around it.  I needed to be in awe, truly in awe.  And of course, Rome delivers in that category.  The Capitoline Hill is a true palimpsest and exploring the area is so amazing.  From the Temple of Jupiter as a start….

To Imperial Rome in all its masculine and muscular splendor….

To the Christianization of the Empire, thanks to Constantine who even in bits and pieces is quite impressive….

To the Risorgimento and the bravissimo country of Italy, created in 1861….

 

The ground floor of the Capitoline museum is full of treasures, so many gems like this bust of Socrates:

And this super cool Medusa:

And Commodus dressed as Hercules:

And on the first floor (re: second floor to us) is an exceptional collection of religious paintings.  A remarkable thing, though, was that there were several small groups of individuals with vision impairments who were being taken through the exhibit. And, there was going to be a lecture for them.  I know this because I happened to look into one of the lecture halls and I saw that they were setting up for a presentation for some society for the vision impaired.  But get this, in front of many of the paintings were these brail reproductions of the paintings that the ‘viewer’ could feel.  This is the one in front of Caravaggio’s St. John the Baptist:

This makes me believe in love and humanity, big time.