Post-Birthday

Well, one of my birthday presents was a cough and a sore throat, so today is a non-real-clothes-wearing day.  I'm wearing yoga pants and a tank top, but I suppose I'll add a scarf for our last Italian class (Italians have a deathly fear of catching cold via the neck area).

This has been another action-packed week.  Monday I went with about eight other fellows to Villa Medici, seat of one of the two French academies in the city.  This is a 16th-century villa with absolutely incredible visual command over the city; just sitting in the lecture room, I was looking out a window straight toward St. Peter's.  We may be higher in topographic terms, but their placement is enviable.

The morning session was effectively three hours of the heads of all of the foreign academies in Rome exchanging hot air on how to unite their institutions more closely (maybe we should have a cultural week? but who will pay?  what about a website?  but who will design it?  etc, etc).  It was boring in terms of content but great in terms of practicing comprehension, since the language of the day was Italian and not French.  In fact, the French had gone to the great effort of providing simultaneous translation headsets, but, as I discovered when I tried to use it for the couple of folks who spoke only French, the English translation sucked.  This explains why the number of AAR fellows still present had been whittled down to me and Denise by the time the session was over!

Unfortunately, it was really their loss, since it was lunch and the afternoon sessions that really gave us the chance to get to know people from the other academies.  Well, really I met people from the French academy and the Dutch academy, as well as very briefly some guys from the German academy.  It was interesting to learn how different the structure is at each institution.  For example, the fellows at Villa Medici don't eat meals together, except for the monthly dinner with their director; Villa Medici also hosts mostly artists and writers, along with the lone art historian, Francesca, while other scholars go to the Ecole Francaise down in the center of the city.  You only need to be francophone to win a fellowship, too, as I learned when Josephine ran up to us, excited to meet other Americans!  It turned out that she teaches at Yale and also knows one of our artists, Amy, who was her old teacher. (On Tuesday night, Josephine came to dinner at AAR, along with an all-too-friendly former fellow from the French academy, an Israeli photographer named Assaf.  He was really not at all subtle about hitting on me, to the great amusement of Amy in particular; it was less amusing when she told me the next day that she's pretty sure he has a wife and kid in France.  Gross).

During the afternoon breakout, the art historians met with Claudio Strinati, who also happens to be one of the AAR advisors.  I knew he was old, and I was expecting someone grave and unsmiling, but he turned out to be charming and self-deprecating, and we had a good time with him.  Then Francesca and Eleonora, two of the French fellows, walked us out to Ferdinand de Medici's studio out on the grounds, which was frescoed with an incredible panoply of birds and other creatures.

Yesterday morning was our trip to the Foro Italico, once called Foro Mussolini, the Fascist sports complex in northern Rome.  Fascists, like Nazis, were obsessed with physical vitality among their youth, and this was designed to be a training center no less in ideology than in sports. We saw some huge mural paintings of truly bad quality in the upper meeting room, and visited Mussolini's private gym.  Outside we checked out the Stadio ai Marmi, still in use as a running track (with a couple of Italians randomly flinging a baseball back and forth in the center).  In the adjacent piazza there are mosaics with Fascist slogans (molti nemici, molto onore) and, repeated over and over, "DUCE A NOI": Il Duce, to us!  A nearby slab contained the text of a proclamation of the beginning of the Italian empire, after the African conquests in 1937.  At the end of the piazza, an obelisk with MUSSOLINI DUX and the fasces.  What made all this so incredible is not only that it's all still here, but that it's all right in front of the soccer stadium built for the 1960 Olympic.  Thousands of people walk by that obelisk and over these mosaics every weekend to cheer on Lazio and AC Roma.  It's an incredible testament to the ways in which Italy has simply chosen to ignore its Fascist past, rather than deal with it.