Venice

I went up to Venice on Thursday afternoon so that I could attend a gathering in honor of David Rosand on Friday. It was definitely a mixed voyage, in many respects.  My newly-purchased Ryanair luggage,  for example, got damaged somehow on the train--someone ripped the front pocket completely open!  It wasn't that expensive, but still, I hoped that it would last a bit longer than its first ride.  The weather was gloomy, and I was reminded of the annoyance of heading north from Rome, namely, all the tunnels that plunge you into darkness, rushing noise, and pressurized eardrums.  However, it was fascinating to go into a tunnel in a green if overcast countryside, and then emerge on the other side to snow covering the ground and flurrying in the air!  It was still there when I was on my way home today, just a light covering in the fields somewhere between Bologna and Florence, ending as abruptly as it began.

Venice wasn't terribly crowded, even though Carnival begins tomorrow.  My hostess told me that reservations in the city were very low because Carnival is starting very early this year are people are worried about the weather.  My first quick stop was at the cichetti bar Al Bottegon, recommended by Stefania and Tommaso.  My attempt to name-drop Tommaso's family as they told me to failed utterly, possibly because I wasn't actually talking to the grey-haired proprietress who apparently is good friends with his dad, but the cichetti were delicious!  I had one octopus one, in honor of Sean; one bacala, one ricotta, and one other cheese-related one that I can't recall, but they were delicious.  I gulped down a quick glass of wine and headed back out.

It was fairly cold, but the main pathways were still lit with their Christmas finery, which made the night seem very cheerful--and of course all the shops were still open.  I headed from Dorsoduro across the Accaedemia bridge and through to San Marco--which was completely dark!  Possibly something to do with the massive Carnival preparations going on in the square, who knows.  I headed off on the Merceria with all of the other promenading tourists, went over the Rialto, and then back through the much darker streets of San Polo and Dorsoduro to the guesthouse, having made a big circuit around the heart of the city.  I was pretty happy with the durability of my 'mental map' of the city, despite not having been there since 2012.  Of course I got lost--it's Venice, everyone gets lost eventually--but not too much.

The next morning I woke up to an iron-grey sky.  It had rained overnight.  Leaving the guesthouse, I turned left to go to Calle San Barnaba, a fairly large thoroughfare by Venetian standards (meaning you can't stretch your arms out and touch the shops on either side), but stopped short when I saw a huge mass of water at the corner.  Oh no.  Aqua alta!  113 cm of it, to be precise, and unbeknownst to me, I had gone out just at high tide, and had left my rubber boots, purchased on a similar occasion in 2010, in Rome.  Fine then, no Calle San Barnaba; I'd go the other way, through Campo Santa Margherita.  I crossed a small canal, come down the other side and saw, at the end of the narrow calle, more water, and deeper this time--maybe 6 inches.  Fuckkkk.  I turned back around to take my chances in the shallower water.  A man with a handcart was waiting in Calle San Barnaba, and had seem my to-and-fro little dance; he came sloshing over and was somehow offering to ferry me through the water, but I declined.  Maybe it's a cottage industry, like the guys selling umbrellas who come out of nowhere when it rains?

Anyway, my newly-purchased leather boots, which come up a couple of inches over the ankle, did themselves proud, as I gingerly moved through the water, trying not to kick up any froth (canal water: not awesome). Around me, much wiser Venetians were going about their daily business with the addition of knee-high boots.  I wonder what all the dogs do during acqua alta?  There are certainly enough of them, and there's dog crap smeared all over the place.   Anyway, I was congratulating myself for having survived the worst when I turned the corner near La Toletta and realized there was more. Ughhhh.  I sloshed through again, but when I got the Calle dei Contarini, where you cross a fairly big canal, and turn right at what seems like a dead end to continue on toward the Accademia, the water had to be eight inches deep, way higher than my poor boots could handle.  This time, luckily, there was an alternate route that was mostly not-flooded, and I got to my destination, the Salute, with only minor dampness on my jeans.

I should be terribly dramatic and add to that "but there was a heaviness in my heart..." because honestly, there kind of was.  I sat down in the freezing cold church and looked up and thought, "what the hell am I doing here?"  The day before, Leslie had met me at the Frari right after my arrival to show me the Pala Pesaro in restoration, in a makeshift lab in one of the spaces past the sacristy.  It was a fantastic opportunity because it's off view to the public.  I felt like I should have had a stronger response, both emotional and intellectual, to a painting I've always enjoyed and which is one of Titian's most seminal--and one which deeply occupied David Rosand--but nothing really came.  Then, in the Salute, I was looking at the St. Mark altarpiece, which had only been removed from its frame and set up in a restoration space within the Salute (albeit in this case with a plexiglass viewing spot for visitors).  David and Ellen had paid for most of this restoration themselves with a gift to Save Venice.  Looking up, still in the Salute, I could see the three huge canvases of the 1540s that I mention in my dissertation proposal that I would be 'reconsidering'.  Reconsidering what?  Nothing came to mind except the crick in my neck from staring at the ceiling.

My existential problems aside, a few better things happened.  For example, I found out I still had 10 vaporetto rides on my iMob card from July 2012...those are 7 euro a pop purchased singly, so that was great news.  I rode the very slow vaporetto up the Grand Canal to buy a hat by the train station, my first hat ever--that's how cold it was!  Then I walked to Madonna del Orto, and admired Tintoretto's Presentation of the Virgin, noticing this time how all the attention is on mothers and children--all the men are pushed off and in shadow.  His Miracle of Saint Agnes reminded me a big of the Night Watch--the golden figure in the darkness.  And Cima's Saint John altarpiece was full of pure, clear colors as always.  This was the church where I accidentally left my camera on the stoop outside two years ago, and didn't realize it until I was halfway across the city.  Lighting matters so much in these churches, by the way.  I've never seen Sebastiano's San Crisostomo altarpiece with anything like the clarity of published images, because the church is so dim; same goes for Titian's Annunciation in San Salvador.  There are lights on his Transfiguration, but not the Annunciation; I don't get it.

The event at the Academy in David's honor was low-key.  A number of people, including the former director of the museum, the head of Save Venice, the restorers he worked with, and one of his former students read brief reflections on the incredible impact he had on them and on Venice.  Ellen concluded with a brief reflection on their life together, in which Venice had always played a starring role--they came there for the first time on their honeymoon, and almost never missed a year for decades. Afterwards, Save Venice hosted a little cocktail reception in their offices, which are currently just on the other side of the Accademia bridge, but which will be moving to Palazzo Polignac this spring, in part to house the newly-donated David Rosand Library and Study Center.  He bequeathed all 4,000 of his books to Save Venice.

I met a nice Columbia grad student at the cocktail reception named Sofie, who is living in Florence and working on a dissertation on painted organ shutters with her Italian boyfriend.  We chatted for most of the reception, and wound up having dinner together afterward, after I had had a brief chance to talk to Ellen (who had perhaps had a few glasses and was more communicative than usual!) and to meet their son Jonathan.  We ate at a place called Oniga in Dorsoduro, not far from my hotel, and I ate a heaping pile of fritto misto from the lagoon, including tiny shrimps whose eyes I tried not to look at as I crunched into them...

Saturday morning turned out to be incredibly beautiful, if still chilly.  With plenty of time to spare, I rode the vaporetto up the Grand Canal again (it takes forever). The trip home was pretty great: the train was there early, so I didn't have to wait all that time in the cold, and it was only half full, so I could move to a seat facing in the right direction.  We enjoyed beautiful sunshine down through Florence, and then a deep gloom settled over the landscape with accompanying fog.  That in itself was pretty cool.  By the time we reached Rome, it was reduced to just regular stormy skies and occasional rain.  Every time I travel I'm reminded that traveling is really annoying and time consuming, but I try to remind myself that if they invented teleportation I'd miss out on beautiful sights like the countryside south of Florence, gleaming in the afternoon sun.

A Surprisingly Welcome Companion

In preparation for my brief trip back to Venice, I looked through Deborah Howard's history of Venetian architecture.  Goethe's letters from his Italian journey were frequently cited, and with enough interested content that I thought I should check them out.  (I had previously tried, briefly, to engage myself with "Sorrows of Young Werther" but eventually threw it down in disgust.  Apparently Goethe shared my disdain for the youthful novel that had made him famous, which makes me feel much more kindly toward him).  He's no Mark Twain, but there is a surprising undercurrent of humor in some of his observations, particularly regarding his German social circle in Rome.  He was also travelling incognito, so that polite people were constrained to pretend they didn't really know his identity, even though he was a celebrity among his countrymen.  That's pretty unthinkable today.

When it comes to something like 18th-century German, the quality of the translation also really matters, which is a point made in the introduction to this edition, translated by W.H. Auden.  In fact, rather than transcribe all the below quotations that I wanted to save, I tried to Google them, and almost every one came from a more antiquated translation which struck me with none of the force of Auden's.  I still wound up using them for the longer quotations, as a kind of shorthand--they're highlighted in white, an effect of copy-pasting that I've never figured out how to get rid of.

On a French gentleman who feels out of place in Venice, not having troubled to learn any Italian: "it was amazing to me that a man who, in this way, was well educated, brave and decent could travel without noticing anything in the world outside himself."

Inspired by Raphael's Saint Cecilia: "But in order to understand Raphael aright, and to form a just appreciation of him, and not to praise him as a god, or as Melchisedec, "without descent" or pedigree, it is necessary to study his masters and his predecessors. These, too, had a standing on the firm soil of truth. Diligently, not to say anxiously, they had laid the foundation, and vied with each other in raising, step by step, the pyramid aloft, until at last, profiting by all their labours, and enlightened by a heavenly genius, Raphael set the last stone on the summit, above which, or even at which, no one else can ever stand." Initially reading this I was impressed by his willingness to consider historical context and precedence rather than pure genius, but after thinking about this, his view isn't really much different than Vasari's biological/teleological notion of artistic development.  For example, where can one go when Raphael has already hit the summit?  Art must plunge again I suppose.  
Despite his Vasarian leaning above, Goethe wasn't very well-educated in art history; for example, he was apparently unaware of the long Italian tradition of the "sacred conversation" altarpiece, including holy figures separated in both time space space.  As he wrote after seeing Titian's Vatican altarpiece:  "We said to ourselves, "Some ancient holy legend must have furnished the subject of this picture in order that these various and ill-assorted personages should have been brought together so artistically and so significantly." We ask not, however, why and wherefore: we take it all for granted, and only wonder at the inestimable piece of art."  
On experiencing Rome: "The most important monuments I take very slowly; I do nothing except look, go away, and come back and look again.  Only in Rome can one educate oneself for Rome."
And again later: "Rome is a world, and it would take years to become a true citizen of it.  How lucky those travelers are who take one look and leave."
On the lack of serendipity in Rome's location: "...I am convinced that no inhabited site among the peoples of old was as badly placed as Rome.  In the end, when they had swallowed up everything, in order to live and enjoy life, the Romans had to move out again and build their country villas on the sites of the cities they had destroyed."
After attending a blessing of the candles ceremony in the Sistine and leaving early in annoyance: "I thought to myself: these are the very candles which for three centuries have blackened the frescoes, and this is the very incense which, with sacred insolence, not only wraps the sun of art in clouds, but also makes it grow dimmer every year and in the end will totally eclipse it."

Back in Rome

I was fairly grumpy when I got back to Rome on Sunday.  Separating from Sean was harder the second time around (even though now we have only a little less than two months to wait until we're together again) and the experience of being "a stranger in a strange land" had lost its novelty.  Not being able to eaves-drop on strangers, always feeling on the wrong foot in a casual conversation with a shopkeeper, always feeling a bit nervous over whether the cab driver is going to try to screw me over...being plunged right back into it produced a general feeling of "meh" that wasn't alleviated by coming back to the Academy at noon on a Sunday, when the building is at is most deathly-silent.  Only a few hours later, after I had grudgingly marched out to the grocery store to get provisions (having to carry my groceries uphill again! people on the street not smiling or making eye contact!) and was making pasta in the kitchen, did my mood finally break, thanks to a warm greeting and hug from Adam.  That little bit of human contact was enough to make me think "oh, fine, this place doesn't suck that much."  The feeling amplified that evening, when there was a screening of La Grande Belleza downstairs in the lecture room.  Halfway through we stopped and had a potluck dinner together upstairs in the salone; someone had made a vast pot of bolognese, and there were olives, cheese, fruit, and, of course, plenty of wine.  I still laid down that night missing my soft bed, and my quiet house with Sean in it, and my kitchen where all the good mugs are mine and don't go missing, but...this can be good too.

I do have some resolutions that I've brought back with me.  Avoiding the pasta at lunch, having less wine in the evenings (especially when I have to pay for it) and generally trying to save money where possible.  That sort of thing.  I've also decided, a little late, to start Buzzfeed's January monthlong fitness challenge, which is alternating interval running and cardio/bodyweight exercises, five times a week. I decided to just consider Sunday as Day 1, which was, conveniently, a rest day.  I even saved the calendar as a .jpg so every day I can open it in Paint and do this:

Fall Semester, Over

A number of unexpected things which have become part of my life over the last three and a half months.  For example, I drink caffe macchiato, I eat olives, and I can (almost) run a 5k without stopping.  I've spent more time with kids than I ever have before; this week alone, I performed in a children's Christmas play and attended an Italian elementary school recital.  I've played so many parlor games, from the standards like Cards Against Humanity, Werewolves, Pictionary to ones of our own invention, like Lesbian Processing (since re-named Twelve Angry Fellows).  I've been more social than I ever thought myself capable of being, and enjoyed it more than I expected.  Really it feels like the end of fall semester at college; I'm ready to pack up and go home for a visit, but with the awareness that it's just to visit, and not to stay.  The Academy, strangely enough, feels like home.

The Holidays Begin

I haven't posted in weeks, I realize!  The holiday season officially kicked off with Thanksgiving, which the Academy delivered in typically impressive fashion.  Unbeknownst to me, it was a dressy event; I came downstairs for the aperitivi and saw people in dresses and suits, and scampered back upstairs to change into a dress, a choice which turned out to be more comfortable than the jeans I'd originally put on!  They'd just been in the dryer, and I had walked downstairs thinking, ok, I'm definitely not going to be eating that much today.

It was a delicious meal in a packed dining room, but it didn't really feel like Thanksgiving.  After all, how could it be Thanksgiving without my aunt's comfortable kitchen, my traditional turkey leg, my sister's antics?  Even being without Sean for Thanksgiving (though it sucked) wasn't as strange as being without my family, in a way.  Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday in no small part because I spend it with my rarely-gathered clan, and we always have such a good time.  Later in the afternoon, I Skyped into Donna's house, and they were all laughing and making fun of each other and mildly poking fun at my oblivious Aunt Janice, who was herself Skyping in via another iPad from Arizona.  Me in Rome, her in Scottsdale, both of us "meeting" in my aunt's living room in Westwood, MA!  Technology is incredible.

We spent the afternoon and evening playing games in the Salone, which was a fun way to wrap up the holiday--particularly with Werewolves, which has become an Academy favorite!  The next morning we had a Baroque walk-and-talk, visiting Borromini and Bernini churches; afterward Lakshmi and I had lunch at a great bistro in Monti, Barzilai, and then went on our own Caravaggio tour, led by yours truly!  On Saturday a group of us went down to Naples for a tour of Pompeii with Sarah, who is researching the brothel there.  Elaine and I ended up having a later train back than others, so we had pizza, fried things, and wine in a little dive by the train station.

On Sunday, she and Craig held an open studio to wish us all goodbye.  I really wish they were full-year fellows, not residents; they're really wonderful people, and I've enjoyed Elaine's company particularly.  Lakshmi and I had each requested a photo of one of the gorgeous drawings they had up in their studio: she asked for one of Elaine's "papal vultures" and I asked for a picture of Cragi's sketch of an alleyway.  We had then printed off (as photos, not matte, alas) in Trastevere, and Craig and Elaine signed them at their open studio.  Elaine had also made a drawing for me and Lakshmi to commemorate our failed Tivoli/Frascati adventure, which I also want to frame.  We ended the night with another few rounds of Werewolves, and then a bunch of us turned out in the morning to see Craig and Elaine off, first with a last coffee at the bar, and then on the steps of the Academy.

Recent Doings

The week-long constant and occasionally torrential rain broke earlier this week, just in time for our excursion to Monte Testaccio.  This artificial hill was created in ancient Roman times by the discarded fragments of circa 53 million amphorae, which had been used to ship oil (apparently they couldn't be re-used since the terracotta was lightly porous and the oil would turn rancid).  Rather than a random trash heap, excavations have shown that the fragments were laid in careful strata with frequent buttressing, to prevent the entire mound from collapsing.  There wasn't a terrible amount of stuff to look at (you've seen one pot shard, you've seen them all) but there was an interesting view of southern Rome, a more industrial district, and really incredible interactions of light and post-rain clouds, particularly over the Colli Albani.

On Wednesday we had another excursion, one that had to be booked months in advance: the Aula Gotica of SS. Quattro Coronati, a still-operating convent that was once an Augustinian monastery.  In the 1990s, routine conservation of a Gothic-style room revealed that under the white-washing lay an incredible fresco program covering the entire wall space and the vaults.  Painted in the 13th century, it had probably already been covered over by the middle of the 14th, meaning the frescoes had less of a change to be damaged and degraded (vs something like the Sistine, subject to constant use for centuries). The colors are extraordinarily vivid, including a green shade that I'm not used to seeing in medieval painting, though it is frequently found in fresco.

One half of the room has a "secular" theme, with a cycle of the months as well as the four seasons.  Pagan figures, gods and goddesses appear, but often with Christianizing elements.  For example, January is represented by the Roman god Janus, but aytpically he has three faces, not two, making it a trinitarian figure.  On the other side of the transverse arch, the program is explicitly religious.  Female Beatitudes, dressed as soldiers, carry aloft tiny figures of saints on their backs (it's weird), and trample on figures representing the opposites of their good values (Mahomet and the Jews appear, for example, but also Alexander the Great as the opposite of "fear of God").  In the center of this cycle, on one of the short walls, Solomon appears alone.  This detail has led to an interpretation of the room (which was constructed for a cardinal) as a place not only for banquets but also of the dispensation of justice.

Finally, this morning our walk-and-talk took us to Villa Farnesina, built by papal banker Agostino Chigi and frescoed by Raphael, Peruzzi, and Sebastiano del Piombo.  The whole complex has been beautifully restored.  It's a little over-the-top for me, but I love Sebastiano's heavy-limbed Polyphemus, looking mournfully at the escaping Galatea, who is looking over her shoulder from Raphael's adjacent scene like "whew, see ya later, creeper!"  Giovanni da Udine's fruit and vegetable-laden swags, which divide the compartments in the Loggia di Psiche, are also really incredible to look at.  Peter reminded us that since this was painted around 1511, we're seeing some of the literal "first fruits" of New World exploration--corn, squash, etc.  I had never made that connection before!

Aside from these excursions, which really do help frame my understanding of the city (although if I have to hear the phrase 'Rome is a palimpsest' one more time...)  I'm still feeling really at sea about what I'm doing here.  I have a massive list of secondary literature that I'm slowly tackling, but I feel rudderless somehow, like I should have burning questions that I'm constantly applying to the material in front of me.  There's no one else at the Academy who's at the beginning of their dissertation, which kind of sucks.  I'm vacillating on reaching out to Lindsay, who as Mellon Professor-in-Charge is technically supposed to advise us...but she's never had grad students, and also, I admit, I'm a bit nervous about admitting how lost I feel.  That goes for talking about it with other fellows, too.  When you're constantly surrounded by very accomplished, very driven people who are buzzing on about their latest dissertation chapter or their book or their article, it feels weird to raise my hand and say "um, I'm still confused about whether I have original ideas to offer this discipline..."

It also sucks that there are no other early modernists here.  I met a Fulbright scholar who is tangentially linked to the Academy today at the Farnesina.. She works on Raphael, and I may have slightly thrown her off by my over-enthusiasm.  Someone who literally speaks my language!  She said it herself, on hearing I'm working on Titian: "Someone else who works on canon!"  But she also clearly has that sense of direction and drive that I feel like I'm lacking--she buries herself in the Vatican archives every day, working on reconstructing the contents of Julius' library (which was housed in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura, and informed the fresco program).  Le sigh.  I've been putting off reaching out to Coop about this, but I think I have no choice...

Archaeologists Are Cool

Last night we listened to a lecture by Brian Rose, an archaeologist from Penn who spent 25 years excavating Troy.  He's been a fellow and a Resident here, and is now a trustee (meaning, I assume, that he has lots of money).  When the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started, he was also the head of the Archaeological Institute of America, and helped set up a training program to educate US military about identifying and preserving cultural heritage in conflict zones--particularly in terms of helping stop looters.  The photo that showed him in Afghanistan in 2003 wearing a flak jacket was really hard to reconcile that with the short, soft-voiced, smiling man who has absolutely zero of the 'Me Big Important Scholar' ego about him. Seriously, this guy is awesome, and the other archaeologists here confirmed that he has a reputation for being a genuinely wonderful person who is always interested in helping others, particularly students.

He's also a fantastic speaker.  This is the second time I've heard him talk; he gave a very informal presentation to some of us in John's studio a couple of weeks ago, both about his work with the military and his work in Troy.  This talk specifically addressed the practices adopted both in his 25 years working on Troy (the excavations were completed last year) and in his current site, Gordion, also in Turkey.  For example, he talked about the challenges presented by working in international teams, which is now the norm.  His Troy partner was a German Bronze Age specialist.  As they excavated Troy's nine city layers, Brian was most interested in the Roman stuff, but Manfred was interested in tearing through that to get to the older material--meaning they'd have to battle it out over whether a particular Roman house or floor mosaic should be preserved, or removed to allow further investigation.  Archaeology, he reminded us, is by its nature a destructive form of inquiry, even though they've pioneered using non-invasive techniques like magnetic imaging to let them identify the presence of a Roman city under the fields surrounding the citadel, without having to tear them up.

The two most pressing challenges for archaeologists today seem to be the constant threat of looting, on the one hand, and diplomatic issues on the other.  Working in Gordion (which, I learned, was the home of King Midas, who was a real person!  They've excavated the huge burial mound belonging to Midas' father, and discovered, in testing the garments found there, that they were covered in a mineral called goethite that gives off a golden gleam...since they've found exactly zero gold at Gordion itself, this might offer an explanation for the famed 'golden touch'--what if the city elites were simply walking around shining like they wore clothes of gold?), Brian told us they realized they could be endangering sites merely by paying attention to them, because that told looters in the area that there could be something valuable there.  He said once they mapped out some of the most significant tombs in an area and gave the list to the local Turkish police force to guard during the off-season--only to return to find that the police themselves had looted the sites!  Looters often use backhoes indiscriminately, and at night, to tear apart burial mounds, stopping only when they hear the metal hitting stone.  He showed us a photo of a sarcophagus with surviving painted sculpture--something I have NEVER seen before--but with one half of it broken off: the backhoe had sliced it in two in the rush to open the tomb.  I just emailed Brian to see if the photo has been published or if he can send me a copy, because that would be awesome to use in teaching.

Perhaps Turkey is increasingly aware of its status of as one of the few places remaining in the ancient Near East where it's still safe to dig.  That would explain their increasing use of bully tactics to force repatriation of artifacts--they know they've got everyone by the short hairs.  According to UNESCO's rule on the subject, if something has been in a collection since before 1970, it's not up for repatriation claims, unless there is clear proof of looting.  Turkey, however, doesn't care about that, and has been going after objects that have been in museum collections for 50 or 100 years--and then threatening to cut all access to Turkish sites for that country's or that university's archeologists if the object isn't handed over! They did this successfully to Germany a couple of years ago, and then they tried to do it to the UPenn museum over some gold jewelry which had been bought in the 1960s.

 On grounds of style, the gold had always been linked both to Troy and to the Greek isle of Lemnos, but recently analysis of some bits of dirt found inside one of the pieces suggested it really was from Troy.  The Turkish government then threatened to ban all UPenn archaeologists from ever working in Turkey again if they didn't get the gold back--gold which was not even conclusively proven to be from Turkey, and to which they had no legal claim by UNESCO standards.  The university trustees refused, and Brian was summoned to Ankara to meet with the culture ministry, who had refused repeated offers of long-term loans on the museum's part.  Faced with the possibility of losing his life's work in Turkey, the day before the meeting he called the Greek culture ministry and basically begged the officials there, who had no interest in the gold, to put in their own claim of interest in the jewelry!  The gambit paid off, because when the Turkish officials heard that they might have to fight the Greeks for rights to the gold, they immediately accepted the long-term loan offer (which means the museum didn't have to surrender its ownership rights and thus create a precedent)!  Brian said that since then Turkey has become even more warm to UPenn, offering them higher-prestige loans than ever before.  High-stakes international diplomacy is not something that scholars typically imagine having to engage in, so the aplomb with which he manages to navigate these kinds of situations seems really incredible.

A Lovely, If Not Quite "Fall" Weekend

After the cold snap at the end of October, the temperature has gotten mild again, hovering in the low-to-mid 60s.  Although I have a sweater on now, for example, I also have the window open!  It's hard to think of it as being November when you're still sweating carrying home groceries.  The lack of foliage changing color--and the continued presence of flowers--is another mental stumbling block.  On our bike ride yesterday I finally saw a few sparsely distributed examples of leaves turning a brilliant red--but they looked like vines, not proper trees at all.

Our 20-mile trek took us down the Via Appia Antica, riding first on cobblestones, which jar every bone in your body, and then on treacherous basalt paving stones, which can only be ridden on safely if you do so at relatively high speed (otherwise you risk getting your tire stuck being two of them and falling over).  Later on we got off the main road and were on trails, which had their own mud-and-loose-rocks dangers.  I had several very close calls, and have a baseball-sized bruise on my left from where I think I slammed the pedal into my calf when I was trying not to fall over, but I survived!  It was a lot of fun and a beautiful day but by the last 30 minutes of the 4.5 hour ride, as we were heading back into the city and on the cobblestones again, everything hurt.  When I got back home, I plunked down in my desk chair and went "OWWW!"  This morning parts of me hurt that I wasn't even expecting--my wrists, from working the brakes, and my shoulders.  The fact that I went jogging anyway is a point of no small pride.

I spent a lot of the ride with Stefania and Tommaso, who taught me a few finer points of Italian cursing.  For example, although 'cazzo' means dick, you have to say 'cazzone', big dick, if you want to call someone an asshole.  Also, 'n'do cazzo vai' is Romanesco for 'where the fuck are you going?' which was used freely against cars who tried to cut off our right of way.  Seriously, I would never have ventured on a lot of the route we followed had we not been with the guide, since it involved a lot of crossing and riding on busy arterial roads with drivers who did not give a fuck.  One of my close calls came while we were riding against traffic, in fact; trying to hug the massive wall to my left, a dangling vine actually managed to snag around my handlebar and jerk my bike to a stop!  I almost fell off into the road, not to mention almost causing a pile-up behind me.

But again, the important thing is that I lived to tell the tale.  Our worst injury happened at the outset, to poor Sarah, who stopped to take a photo of some extremely realistic-looking Roman legionnaires; in her hurry to catch up to us, her bike slipped in a muddy patch and she fell off and cut up her palms.   Eeep.

Lazy Sunday (Finally)

I woke up this morning and watched four episodes of Buffy, lying in bed under the massive down comforter that I was finally forced to pull out of the closet this weekend.  It is cold here, and the heat won't go on for another two weeks.  After the Halloween party, and after the after-party (which I miraculously stayed awake for, thanks to lots of Coke Zero), I didn't go to bed until 5am.  4:45am saw me angrily shopping for a space heater on Amazon.it, while swathed in numerous layers and a blanket.  I threw in an electric blanket for good measure!

It was an exhausting week, even though it was an interesting one.  After Naples, I joined Dr. Hall on Thursday for a conference in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Sistine cleaning campaign.  I think that represented the most time she and I have ever spent together!  Only the morning sessions actually focused on the 1980s cleaning itself.  Listening to the head restorer, Gianluigi Colalucci, almost come to tears as he recounted some of the key moments in the 14-year campaign (which he described as having altered the course of his life) was really incredible, but the afternoon--four hours of the current scientific team discussing calcium deposits and air pressure and showing more charts and graphs than I've seen since high school science classes--was distinctly less awesome.  If I never hear the words "calcio" and "sbiancamento" again, it will be too soon.  There was a whole second day of the conference, too, focused just on technical presentations on the new lighting and filtration systems, but I quickly decided to say "fuck no" to that.

The only reason I stuck around...why most of the hundreds of people in the audience stuck around, in fact, was because the attendees were invited to a visit of the Sistine Chapel after the day was over.  It was kind of surreal, since the conference happened on Via della Conciliazione, just a short distance from the Sistine, but they loaded us onto buses and drove us all the way around the perimeter of Vatican City, dropped us at the museum entrance, and required us to walk allllll the way back to the chapel.  Since I was with Dr. Hall, who was grudgingly escorting Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, a very elderly, very famous Michelangelo scholar who was about 5-feet tall and walked with a cane, it was slow going.  Then Dr. Hall spotted another Michelangelo scholar, Bill Wallace, whose fabulous lecture I enjoyed at RSA in March, and straight-up abandoned me with this woman!  Not cool, Marcia, not cool.

On the plus side, our visit did include the chance to visit the Sala Regia (begun by Paul III as a demonstration of his temporal power) and the Paoline Chapel (the pope's private chapel, which contains Michelangelo's last two painted works, done on Paul's orders).  I even got a peek down Bernini's Scala Regia, though it was blocked by a scowling Swiss Guard.  The crush waiting to get into the Paoline chapel (which is a small space) was intense, though.  I actually felt for a hot second like I might pass out or something--I couldn't breathe, it was really hot, and people were pressing so tightly against me.  Luckily it passed, and since most Italians are short I quickly found some breathing space!

The downside was that once I got into the chapel itself and could really breathe freely, I was a little too worn out to really focus deeply on the frescoes themselves.  Their color was extraordinarily bright (they were cleaned in the early 2000s, I think), and they were much less ugly than they appear in reproduction--even though the ugliness is actually a structural part of their compositions!  Michelangelo seems to really have lost faith in humanity, and shown them in both paintings (the conversion of Paul and Peter's crucifixion) as gross, graceless creatures, perhaps unworthy of the salvation that the apostles will eventually offer them.  Still, there is a power to Michelangelo's work that can never be denied, particularly the Peter fresco, because Peter, as he's being lifted onto the cross, wrenches his head around to stare angrily at...well, the Pope, it seems, because he meets your eyes only when you go and stand near the altar.  This space saw the actual ballotting for a new pope, and in fact the victor, in the Renaissance, would first be physically enthroned on the altar of the chapel before going into St. Peter's.  It's as if Peter is warning his new successor, and it's quite striking.  It's also cool that I just saw the surviving cartoon for three of the soldiers from this fresco in Naples!

After the Paoline came the Sistine, where we saw the new LED system, which seems super-bright but in fact really renders the paintings so much more legible and beautiful than ever before.  I was very impressed, but I was also very tired, and hungry, and the prospect of hors'd'ouevres in the Vatican garden was less appealing than a delicious Academy dinner.  Bill Wallace and I ended up trotting back the length of the museum together, he to meet his girlfriend and I to race to catch a cab to make it in time for dinner.  I arrived with five minutes to spare!  And then overdid it on the wine at dinner and paid the price.  Ah well.

Skipping the Friday sessions meant that I had time to actually help set up for Friday's Halloween party, not to mention put the finishing touches on my Coke Zero costume (ie, paint my nails black, which I haven't done since I was in college).  The party was a lot of fun, even though it was freezing in the front courtyard.  Carla's van Gogh painting came out incredibly well--she reminded me that this was the benefit of scene-painting training at Theater Fairfield.  The theme was inanimate objects and there were lots of great costumes, both among Academy folk (Falke's shrimp, Dave's boat-in-fountain, Ruth's incredible pasta headdress, the Panino Five) and outsiders--the prize went to the fellows from the Spanish academy, who came as a group of classical busts, but I also liked the group who came as a Rembrandt group portrait, complete with carefully-crafted paper ruffs and picture frame and the Bocca della Verita' girl from the British School. The Germans came with no costumes.  Go figure!

Neapolitan Interlude

Naples embodies many things I dislike about cities.  It's noisy, for a start. Neapolitans, true to type, are extremely energetic and loud. Drivers honk there the way they only do in movies in the US these days.  It's incredibly crowded, though not with tourists.  It's filthy, too.  The buildings are peeling and dilapidated, and there's not only trash, but graffiti absolutely everywhere--including historical monuments, entrances to churches, etc.  It's dangerous, both in terms of traffic (drivers have zero respect for the zebra crossing) and crime.  There's very little green space, and the streets are so narrow, with such (relatively) high buildings, that they can be dimly lit even in full daytime.  The city itself is difficult even to conceptualize, with no central open space, and very few direct sight-lines.

Despite (or because of?) all of these factors, I really liked Naples.  I kept thinking how much more alive it felt, much more so than other city I've visited in Italy, and maybe even beyond.  Rome might be grand, yes, but it's also conservative and staid, as befits a capital.  Venice and Florence are tourist theme-parks.  Naples, in contrast, felt real--for example, there was no discernible different between the "centro storico" and the rest of the city: it had less car traffic, sure (not that everyone was bothering to actually obey those laws of course) but the noise, the filth, the chaos, it was all still there.

I only spent three days there on this trip, but it felt like more.  On the first day, my goal was the Archaeological Museum, which I visited once before when the Rome seminar I was taking took a day trip to Herculaneum.  It was in slightly better repair inside than I remembered it.  The collection is just fantastic.  From the Farnese collection wing, the Farnese Hercules is always a stunner, not to mention a good reminder of one inspiration for Michelangelo's later, comically over-muscled bodies.  I was also really taken by a Venus of the Capitoline Venus type.  For some reason I found this version particularly lovely, from the dimples at the base of her spine to her soft-looking hands (though these were later restorations).  I stood there for a moment, letting the caffeine high from the coffee I'd had outside the museum fuel my imagination, and pictured her turning her head to look at me, unbending her back from that half-bend these Venuses find themselves in, and stretching.

The finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum were also awesome, as before, though I was told only afterward that some of the best stuff is in galleries that are closed because of staffing shortages, but which the guards will open for you if you ask.  If only that worked at the Capodimonte museum, which I've never visited before--seemingly an entire half of the building was closed, including everything after Baroque art and the Royal Apartments.  The Botticelli gallery was closed off too, and down a roped-off, unlit hallway, I could make out one of Caravaggio's Beheading of Holofernes.  The Danae wasn't even there--I had forgotten it's still in DC until next week!

Despite all of the disappointments, the museum was incredible.  It felt like a voyage of discovery--enter another gallery, see another familiar face from the books!  The Parmigianinos, in particular, were excellent, as was Sebastiano's moody portrait of Clement VII.  I was surprised to be moved by Annibal Carracci's Pieta, in a way I rarely ever am by religious art.  Finally, the positioning, and lighting, of Caravaggio's Flagellation was just perfect.  You can see it down one axial wing of the museum, perfectly framed by the intervening doorways.   I love Sebastiano's Flagellation in S. Pietro in Montorio for the elegantissimo leg of Christ, but this one...the whole composition was like a dance, the three tormenters moving around their victim, light starkly spotlighting different parts of their bodies.  Enthralling--and then surprising to visit the original location, S. Domenico, the next day where a reproduction hangs in the chapel, and to realize that it looks better in the museum!

That afternoon Carla came down for a late lunch.  We had pizza at Brandi's, the pizzeria that invented the pizza margherita for Queen Margherita in the 19th century.  They were very friendly, the pizza was great (though honestly, not the best I've ever had), and the prices were surprisingly low for a place running a looping video showing pictures of all the celebrities and politicians who have come to eat there (Pavarotti seems to have been a big fan) including the current "heir" of the Savoy dynasty, who were the kings of Italy from unification until the 1946 referendum.  Naples, in fact, was almost alone in Italy in voting for monarchy in that referendum instead of democracy.  The book I was reading noted that as a holdover of the historically strong affection the city has had for its kings--even though since the Middle Ages, these have all been imposed from without.

The third day I saw as many of the major churches as I could, many with wonderful surviving Trecento frescoes that attest to the influence of Giotto, who spent time in Naples but left no surviving works behind.  I took the funicular up to Sant'Elmo, which offered a lovely view over the city.  I visited the monastic complex of Santa Chiara, with its wonderful 19th-century maiolica cloister. The most striking site, though, was the Cappella Sansevero, with its famous central statue of the Draped Christ.  Adorning the walls are complex allegorical sculptures conceived by the chapel's builder to honor his family members, with the most famous being the veiled Modesty for his mother, and Disillusionment for his father--a man freeing himself from a marvelous sculpted net that symbolizes vice.  In the lower level were the two "anatomical machines", which Sansevero created by injecting some alchemical fluid into the dead bodies of two of his servants, preserving their blood vessels and veins in metallic form--and nothing else.  They're two skeletons covered in a cloud of what seems like wire but is really preserved tissue!  It's freaky, and apparently no one has ever really discovered the trick of how he did it.  Of course, legend also suggests the two servants were not necessarily dead at the moment of the experiment...dun dun DUNNNNN!

Benvenuto al Sud

Last Friday, we left the Academy at 6:45am, in a train of taxis to Termini.  It was a four-hour ride south to Bari, where we were met at the station by Daniele, the driver of a mini touring bus (there were only two dozen of us, so not enough for the huge coach bus).  Our first stop was Polignano a Mare, on the sea as its name implies.  I’ve never seen the Adriatic from any vantage point besides Venice!  It was beautiful.  We had lunch at a seafood restaurant recommended by local friends of the Academy staff (I opted vegetarian and was pleased with my choice).  We stopped in town at a contemporary art foundation, checked out the quaint seaside-town aspect of the place, and argued about the odd proportions of the main church, which was broad and squat, with a weird combination of Romanesque and later characteristics.

Then we drove to Lecce, where our hotel was really quite luxurious.  Robes and slippers in the rooms!  Denise and I made sure to make use of them.  Because lunch had been big, expensive, and had included wine (bad idea if you want to stay awake in the afternoon) many of us decided to skip the arranged dinner and find something small to eat on our own.  This experience would later be dubbed Cheesegate, because when we tried to confirm that the cheese plates we were ordering were enough for four people, our waiter decided to bring us four times as much cheese.  Literally, we got a massive platter heaped with 40 euros’ worth of locally-made artisanal cheese, which was about 30 euros’ worth more than we wanted—plus two plates of mozzarella and some really delicious ricotta.  It was all very tasty cheese, but to paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson, there was too much motherfuckin’ cheese on my motherfuckin’ plate!  We were divided in opinion over whether the waiter was honestly confused (at the time of ordering, there were a lot more in our group than eventually stayed around to eat) or whether there was malice aforethought.  I thought he seemed very nice.  Anyway, we did our best, but maybe only killed 60% of the cheese.  Our real concern was the bill, since it burned us to think we might have skipped the 25 euro prix-fixe dinner only to spend more accidentally elsewhere!  There, at least, we were lucky—only 18 euro a person.  We took the rest of the cheese to go, and agreed to attend the other planned dinners, tails between our legs.

After touring some of the sights in Lecce the next morning, and admiring the strength of the southern sun striking all the white pietra leccese, we were off toward Matera, the city of caves.  On our way, Heather mentioned that there was an ancient Greek temple in the area, so we detoured to take a look.  It was a lovely, quiet spot, and the remains of the temple were impressive.  Then we drove to a lookout that faced Matera proper, as the sun was setting.   The country was rugged, mountainous, and rocky--the soft stone that would furnish the caves inhabited by the local residents for centuries.   

If Matera looked wonderful from the outside, that was nothing relative to the fairy-land aspect it held once you were inside, looking from hill to hill covered with warrens of stone-cut structures, seemingly sprouting organically from the hillside.  Our hotel was in fact a cave hotel, with each room in its own cave, ranging all the way up a very steep hill to Liz, Krys, and Anna's room, which had a terrace, down to the valley floor, where Denise and I shared a passable-but-nothing-special chamber.  It was basically cool to say "hey, I slept in a cave!" but if I came back I would certainly go stay in a modern hotel overlooking the cave.  World's tiniest shower, that room had...it was a big change from the luxury of the previous evening.

The next morning we had one of those cool moments that happen only by good fortune.  While a few of us were checking out the town center, we realized that the huge underground cistern was about to open.  This was 9:30, and we needed to meet our group at 9:45.  The cistern is visit-able by a 25-minute guided tour...in theory.  Denise asked the surly man who came to unlock the gate if we could just pay the three-euro fee and pop in for a few minutes--and he said yes!  We descended into this ghostly, cavernous space, with walls that looked worn smooth by simple erosion but were in fact carved by manual labor.  We had the place to ourselves for ten minutes.  As we hurried back to the exit, the first tour group was entering, and the cacophony produced by all those voices was surprising.  We really got a treat in being able to visit it in silence.  The acoustics were tremendous--Denise sang for us briefly, and it was magical.

That morning we explored the cave churches (chiese rupestre) and cave dwellings of Matera, learning about its incredible history.  After World War II, the living conditions of Matera was branded "the national shame of Italy", and the government eventually built a brand-new town, Martella, and forced its 18k residents to leave, condemning the entire city.  Fast-forward a few decades, and Matera has become a tourist mecca.  It was even announced as EU Capital of Culture for 2019 the day before we arrived!

That afternoon we went to a town called Canosa di Puglia, where we met Renato, "the man with the keys."  Literally--this little satyr of a man had a massive ring of keys at his built, which opened seemingly every archaeological site in this town.  It was one of the differences we saw in the south, terms of organizing access to cultural sites; since there's no money to keep these places open all the time, visiting tends to be by guides only, on appointment.  The plus side is that the guides are local, well-informed, and extremely proud of their heritage.  The two highlights were a 2nd-century BCE tomb chamber, underneath a modern apartment complex, with surviving frescoes above the temple-front entrance, and the medieval Baptistery, which was built over Roman-era ruins.  The Canosian tribe sided with the Romans against Hannibal, and fought with them at Cannae; they managed to capture some Carthiginians despite the defeat, and ritually executed them back home as a sign of friendship to Rome.  Diplomacy!  The skeletons--far too tall to be ancient Italic people--are visible in the excavated holes inside the baptistery.

After a fairly exhausting day, our destination was the seaside city of Trani, where our hotel was vast in scale, if somewhat tired in furnishings.  Our bathroom was the size of my AAR bedroom, so large it was kind of unsettling, because it was all empty space!  No bathtub, and a regulation-size shower, and then emptiness.  Still, the hot shower before dinner was much appreciated.  Our final group meal was at a place called Locanda dei Quattro Ducati, and it was divine.  It also was largely fish, but this time I went for it, and was not disappointed!  One of the appetizers was riso da venere (black local rice) with a cream that turned out to be smoked salmon aioli.  Now, typically if you told me "rice with fish sauce" I would run away, but it was subtle and perfectly flavored.  We entertained ourselves at the table with a game that everyone has been playing: casting people with their opposite-gender Hollywood doppleganger.  I was given Mark Ruffalo, which pleased me thoroughly!

On our last morning, Monday, we toured Trani's medieval sites, and in particular some of its synagogues, which survived because they were converted into Christian churches.  At the Duomo, I managed to muster enough of my Italian (and the polite subjunctive phrase "se fosse possibile..." learned from Carla) to request that the rector allow Nathan and I onto the altar to photograph a medieval mosaic of Alexander the Great.  Win!  We climbed the belltower afterward, and enjoyed the spectacular view over the ocean.  I spent a pleasant half-hour reading Il Gattopardo on the stone benches on the wall that lines the public park, which stretches for a mile or so down the coastal side of the city.

Our very last site visit was Castel del Monte, an odd, unfinished octagonal fortress crowning one of the tallest hills in the region, which may have belonged to Frederick II, a famous medieval ruler.  The interior was nothing special, but outside,  the view over the surrounding countryside was magnificent.  I sat in the grass for a while, soaking up the fairly weak sun that day, and there was a brief period, maybe just 5 minutes, when there was...silence.  No sounds of voices, no crunching gravel, no breeze, just near-total quiet and the incredible view.  It was a Wordsworth-ian moment, broken shortly thereafter by the two teenagers who were desporting themselves on the hillside not far away.

It was a great experience.  The strength of the light in the south, the great beauty of the countryside--so different from what I've seen in Lazio, in Tuscany, and in the Veneto...I look forward to going back.  Carla and I might go to Matera, in fact, in honor of her birthday when both us get back in January.  No caves, though.  Absolutely no caves. 

We're Not in Kansas Anymore...

This morning I went to the Vatican library with Marilyn to acquire my reader card.  "Byzantine" is the way everyone had described the process, and they weren't far off.  I realized, first of all, that I've never really been "inside" Vatican City.  I've been inside the museum, which is technically inside the city, but I've never just walked  around the streets of the city proper.  To do that, you pass through the gates and their Swiss guards, and hand over your passport or carta d'identita' at the checkpoint.  You've literally entered another sovereign nation at this point.  They will hold onto your document until you exit.

The modern-day library is a three-story wing that bisects the huge Belvedere courtyard, designed by Bramante to connect the papal palace with the Belvedere palace.  Looking up at our surroundings was the first time I really had the sensation of "holy crap, I'm doing this..."  We go and present our badges (mine is still a visitor's badge) to be scanned by the guard.  Then we knock at the Secretariat, so that I can be interviewed and my documents reviewed, before I'm permitted to fill out an application and get a card.  I brought some truly awful photo-booth photos with me, which the guy openly laughed at (I look like a confused raccoon); they took their own digital photo, which he pronounced as much better.  Since I'm a doctoral student, they gave me twenty entrances to start with, which I can renew if needed.

Next stop: drop off all your belongings.  Swipe the tessera (card) in the locker room, and a locker pops open for you automatically.  Then back out to the lobby: swipe to go up the stairs.   Reach the main reading room, where you scan your card again, and sign your name next to your locker number.  Once you've found your desk, you go back and write your desk number next to your name.  And that's just to get in.  You repeat the whole process in reverse when you want to leave--and if you haven't been scanned-out upstairs, the automatic gate downstairs won't let you leave.  This is some Fort-Knox-level shit right here.  This explains why people who are using the Vatican apparently often work right through lunch--it's a pain even to go out and use the little cafe in the courtyard.

I also enjoy this gem, from the Rules for Readers:

Readers must wear attire appropriate to the dignity of an ancient institution of culture and study

Lost Week

This morning, like the last several mornings, I've woken up and thought blearily, "I should really drink less."  Flash forward twelve hours, people are handing me prosecco or a waiter is ready to pour some red wine, and, well, that resolution goes right out the window.  Everyone here is feeling it, except I suppose people who were already heavy drinkers, or the two second-year fellows, who assured us that "you totally get used to it!" Even aside from regular dinners, there are so many events.  Example: Tuesday night Amy decided to throw herself a 59th birthday party, with 30 bottles of prosecco and a dozen bottles of wine.  There were no leftovers.  Last night there was an art opening here--more wine and prosecco! I think I've lost my taste for prosecco entirely after being here a month.  But I still love wine.

So not that much has really been accomplished this week.  On Sunday we had a guided tour of my favorite spot in Rome, the non-Catholic cemetery, since one of AAR's advisors also sits on their advisory commitee.  Afterward I walked to the Baths of Caracalla, which I've never visited.  Walking there took a lot more out of me than I was expecting, since I was still getting over whatever ailment I had from last week.  Only the hulking skeleton of the structure stands today, with a few fragments of mosaic pavements on display here and there, but its scale is so incredible!  Coming to Rome is a good way to feel small.

Yesterday Claire and I went to Palazzo Farnese for our tour appointment.  This is the palace of Pope Paul III, under construction when Titian was in Rome.  It was cool to go inside, but it's the French embassy, so no pictures, no moving away from the tour, and, worst of all, the Carracci gallery?  Closed for restoration until June 2015!  Bah and humbug.

Afterward, we went to a fabric store, where we fondled Versace and Dolce & Gabbana silk fabric. There were a couple of really beautiful ones, including a print of Greek ruins from Sicily overlaid with brightly flowering tree branches.  We were there because  I had mentioned buying some fabric to decorate my office.  Now, Claire clearly comes from money, and she has a lovely, '50s-inflected wardrobe, much of which has been custom-made. Thus, she thought nothing strange about these fabrics costing 75 euro per yard (a dress would probably require 3 yards, and the dress-making easily another 200 euro!)  I raised my eyebrows at that, and she shrugged and said that she never puts a budget on her wardrobe.  Mmmm.  We are from verrrrry different worlds.  Thrift store, anyone?

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.

Anniversary

Today is the 8th anniversary of my mom's death.  Could I have imagined, then, where I would be and what I would be doing now?  I miss her.

Some Temples and a Wedding

On Friday, we visited the two closed temples on the Forum Boarium, which I first saw when I was in Rome for a month in 2009.  (Denise, as an arch historian, was scandalized that my Roman art class didn't include them).  They've never been open to the public in recent memory; even the Academy people have never been able to get in before.  Somehow this year the stars aligned (we suspect they may be getting closer to opening them to the public and this is why we were permitted) and people were on hand to open the gates both at the round temple of Hercules and the temple of Portunus.  Both are totally empty, of course, but retain some fragments of fresco that attest to the reason for their survival--conversion into Christian churches.  Mussolini, of course, tried to erase all that intervening history to go back to the pure Roman days, but some bits and pieces survived, here and there.  It's great to see these things not only with architectural historians, but conservators, too; for example, I learned that the horrible condition of the travertine on the Theater of Marcellus is not just due to time, but to a chemical agent used for cleaning in the 70s that turned out to be corrosive!

After lunch in the Jewish Ghetto with Paul, Steve, and his wife Sue (he has a Fulbright to study honor killings in Southern Italy up through the Fascist period, which is very interesting), I wandered around the Campus Martius for a while.  I found a couple of cloth shops, and am contemplating buying a few meters of fabric to drape in swags around my office, just to break up the unrelenting white walls.  I stopped into the big Feltrinelli book store, and was amazed, as I always am, at how much more interested Italians seem to be in philosophy, classical literature, etc, that these genres get prominent forward space in the store, not a forgotten shelf in the back like in Barnes and Noble!

Carla and I met up for the Warhol show, which was all objects taken from the collection one guy, Peter Brant, who was a friend of Warhol's.  Lots of interesting stuff, including an extensive collection of his Polaroid portraits of friends and famous people, from Farrah Fawcett to Arnold.   I really enjoyed Vote McGovern, as well as the series he charmingly titled "piss paintings", which constitute his only true abstract work.  Warhol, and later his assistants and hangers-on, urinated on canvases covered in a copper paint, causing blooms of oxidation to appear on the surface.  They were surprisingly lovely; unlike Carla I wasn't really put off by the method of their creation.  It was also interesting to spend some time actually looking at the pop art icons: images of Campbell's soup, the dollar sign, the Coke bottle, or the screenprinted celebrities.  It really does work (even if he claimed there was no point to his work), in terms of making you focus on an object that otherwise is simply part of the mass-produced background of life.  Or, as the audioguide put it, he elevated these objects to the status of icon.  I still think Pop Art is a movement that especially requires contextualization, though; the heady economic boom of the 1960s, with consumerism on a seemingly upstoppable roll, but before we had adopted the kind of conscious awareness of its artificiality that many people have now.

The other highlight of the week was attending Carla's boss' wedding last night.  The ceremony took place in one of the churches on Trajan's forum, which was very small and very Baroque.  Tourists had no issue coming in and out during the ceremony--several even took communion when it was offered.  I'll admit, I found that sort of unsettling.  The priest was very weird, and made comments about gays, and how only marriage can make you a "real" man or woman, how family means something different than what it does in the US (the bride was American, and her family didn't speak Italian, though he kept addressing comments to them).  Even the Gospel reading was about prostitutes!  Odd, indeed.  Afterward, we threw actual rice at them on the steps, and then were forced to walk all the way across Piazza Venezia, on the cobblestones and then up the stairs to the Campidoglio (even though there is supposedly an elevator somewhere) in heels (and the strap to my right heel, as I had discovered, was on its last leg.  Those shoes have done good service, though; I bought them for Anna's wedding and have worn then to almost every other wedding since!)

The reception was on Terrazza Caffarelli, overlooking the city toward St. Peter's.  It was incredibly lovely.  The reception had an incredible amount of food (I thought) but Carla assured me this was definitely restrained for an Italian wedding reception.  The wedding favors were the black glass goblets with which we toasted, and I took Carla's so that there would be a matched set here for us to drink prosecco out of.  We were both exhausted after the toast, so we left; faced with that sloping incline down to the street, I said "fuck it" and pranced down in bare feet!  Together with the glasses, I probably looked like a drunkard.  My feet were black when I got home, but it was worth it not to be terrified that I was going to fall down a hill!

Un Bel Giro

I spent Sunday morning and early afternoon wandering the historic center.  My first port of call was Sant'Ivo, since I had run into Amy waiting for a cab on the steps and she mentioned she was going; it's only open on Sundays, so when I saw its conspicuous flame-like spire hovering above the rooftops ahead, I had to stop in.  What a beautiful, dynamic space, inside and out.

Close by is Palazzo Altemps, which has a collection of ancient sculpture that belonged to a single family.  On each label there's a sketch of the sculpture, with dark color on those parts which were restored or added in the 17th century.  It's really fascinating to see the way fragmentary statues were "completed", often at the total fantasy of the collector.  One awesome piece I noticed this time: a rare, "true" copy of Phidias' Athena from the Parthenon, signed on the peplos by the sculptor himself (also super rare).

They also had a wonderful temporary exhibition on the collection of a man named Evan Gorga, who basically bankrupted himself buying thousands upon thousands of antique objects, many of which were popping up in the late 19th century as Rome tried to modernize, digging new roads, building bridges, etc. (and the accompanying video to the exhibition featured incredible photographs of what Rome looked like in the 1880s...very different from today!)  His collecting mania went well beyond the usual relief sculpture, coins, and painted vases, though--there were Roman dolls, miniature votives of body parts, tons of gorgeous glass, small low-quality bronze figurines of gods and goddesses...just reams of stuff, all organized simply by type of object.  He had many pieces of detached, frescoed wall surface from various emperors' homes, including some 4th style fragments that combined three-dimensional stucco work with the paint surface.  There were also some fakes, which were noted on the wall labels, that apparently fooled him at the time.

What's really random?  Before becoming an antiquarian, Gorga originated the role of Rodolfo in La Boheme in 1896!

Sunday Night

Reason #645657 why this place is amazing: you play Cards Against Humanity on a Sunday evening, in a group that comprises three graphic designers, two classicists, one journalist, one architectural historian, one artist, and one writer, and the shit they come up is more vulgar than anything you've ever heard before.  Also, the game takes places in a gigantic salone in front of the fireplace, and the marble tabletop is littered with open bottles of wine and prosecco.  Yes.

Piazza Augusto Imperatore

We've had two "walks and talks" this week.  The first, on Thursday afternoon, was a tour of some contemporary art galleries in the city.  Some of the art I found interesting; other pieces much less so.  I've realized that I tend to like work that displays evidence of the process behind it, the marks of how it was made--carving, brushstrokes, etc. The final gallery we visited, which had just opened two days earlier, offered us prosecco on their rooftop terrace, which abuts the Orto Botanico, one of my favorite places in all of Rome.  There was also an awesome statue of Batman adorning one edge of the terrace, all in white, rising out of a slender column formed by the cloak wrapped around himself.  His head was bowed.  It was a wonderful contrast to the gardens behind him, and also such a wonderful high-low contrast to discover in a contemporary gallery.  I think I frightened Peter, the arts director at AAR, with my enthusiasm.

Yesterday's walk started at 9am, and focused entirely on the structures in Piazza Augusto Imperatore, which is a completely failed piazza since there is no central open space; rather, there's the gated-off hulk of the remains of Augustus' mausoleum blocking the center.  We started with the Fascist-era "rationalist" architecture that encloses two sides of the piazza, where we got a chance to see some paintings virtually no one ever sees, which was awesome! First there were a set of middling-quality frescoes by an artist named Giulio Rosso, in a little entrance-way on the side of one of the buildings.  Only a gate divides this alcove from the street, but Lindsay, our humanities director, noted that virtually no one ever even realizes they're there.  The frescoes recorded some moments in the life of this area, which was once the Roman port of Ripetta.

Inside the building was another group of four frescoes, which Adam perfectly described as "Fascist WPA" works.  These commemorated the history of the mausoleum, from its origins in antiquitiy, through successive incarnations as sculpture garden, bullfighting arena, and at the turn of the 20th century, Rome's opera house.  Mussolini, of course, stripped away all those accretions to reveal the remains of the burial site of the emperor with which he hoped to connect his own reign, but Lindsay pointed out that it's unusual there was still an effort to record those past moments, which would otherwise have been completely obliterated.

Our last stop was the Ara Pacis, housed in Richard Meier's controversial shell.  We were actually in Rome the day the building opened, in 2006; I remember that we took one look at the length of the line and said "screw that!" But I've loved the interior, and the way it bathes the altar with light, ever since I first went in.  What was interesting to me, experiencing it this time with this very heterogenous group, was the way in which my understanding of the detractors to the building changed. The building makes no attempt, consciously, to make any sort of connection with the buildings around it on the piazza; it is stridently modern, white, and Corbusier-like.  From the inside, it's definitely a wonderful stage for the main attraction, but outside, it turns its back on its surroundings and funtions like a wall that squeezes the piazza away from the river.  As one of the graphic designers said, the worst insult you can give to an architect is "I like your building...from the inside" and here it seems to really apply.

So this showed me that participating in these kinds of group conversations can be really fruitful, even if it's focused on something I'm already quite familiar with.  We also learned, from Anna, who is a sculpture conservator at the Met, that ancient sculptors frequently made mistakes; they would then gouge out the error and fit an "in-kind" patch in its place, fixing it with plaster or an iron pin.  If we look closely at ancient sculpture, she said, you'll start to see this little fixes everywhere.  Not even the great classical sculptors were immune to a slip of the chisel!

Augustus, 2000 Years Later

Last night a small group of us took a cab down to the Forum after dinner to check out a laser-light spettacolo that restores the Forum of Augustus to what it looked like during the emperor's lifetime (this is the 2000th anniversary of his death).  Unfortunately, when we got there all the tickets for the 10pm and 11pm shows were sold out, but we decided to stick around, off to one side, and just watch, without the headsets that added the music and narration.  That turned out to be the perfect choice, because our "multivocal" narration of what we were seeing (I know a fair bit about ancient architecture, and Denise teaches architectural history)  was probably more interesting, and definitely funnier, than whatever enshrined narrative was being intoned in the ears of the paying visitors.  And we saved 15 euro apiece!

The light show itself was truly spectacular.  Honestly, I'd never known exactly where Augustus' forum was; it's next to Trajan's in the "Imperial Forum" to one side of Via dei Fori Imperiali, the Mussolini-constructed avenue that bisects the archaeological site, and not on the other side, the "Roman Forum".  Centered around the temple of Mars Ultor, it featured an atrium with porticos and two large apses, each of which contained a ring of sculptures (the niches for these, and some of the columns, survive).  The show reminded you of the vast amount of color that existed then, not only in the statues, but in the marbled floor and the painted walls.  As I had hoped, they also showed the gradual decay and ruin of the buildings during the Middle Ages, with sheep grazing in what was then "Campo Vaccino", and earth burying the apses halfway up.  As it is, to stand at the level of the modern road, you look down at least 20 feet into the earth to see the ancient Roman ground level.

We finished the night wandering toward the Pantheon for gelato, which I didn't partake in (I have no problem turning down gelato, but somehow I can't resist a potato chip...) and then walked back across the Tiber and up the hill.  Our last stop was a peek into the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio so two of our group could get their first glimpse of the Tempietto. I was back in my room and ready for bed by 12:30 (or 00:30, as it reads on clocks here).  A long day, and a good one!

Tonight will be another long one; we have the opening reception at 6:30, and a late dinner at 8:15.  It's been described as "medium formal"; fellows will be wearing corsages to identify us to various guests (including the American ambassador to Italy!)  More importantly, Carla is coming!  She's already been here to sip prosecco on the roof, but I'm looking forward to introducing her to more of my companions.  She also gets to sample the awesome dinner, though hers will be different--vegetarian and gluten-free. *shakes head*

There Once Was a Girl from Nantucket...

How did I never know this limerick existed?  Liz told me about it today.  I suppose it's not classy enough to appear in scholarly literature...

While Titian was mixing Rose Madder
His model lay posed on a ladder
Her position to Titian
suggested coition
So he climbed up the ladder and had her

Doppio Macchiato

My coffee virginity, such as it was, is gone.  Aside from a gag-inducing sip of people's drinks here and there, I've never had a coffee, something that inspires no more than average surprise in the US but which here in Rome arouses a disbelief that mounts toward indignance. I don't drink coffee?  What do I do in the morning?  What about after lunch?  How is such a thing possible?  These aren't even Italians reacting this way--just other fellows!

I had already had the thought that perhaps I should begin to accustom myself to coffee during my time here.  Literally, when in Rome, right?  I had mentioned this to Carla, who said she would have me try some of her cappuccino the next time we're together in the morning (for, as any Italian will tell you with another look of disbelief, no one  in their right mind drinks cappuccino after 11am).  Then it came up toward the end of lunch today.  Denise was busily recommending a cafe near the Pantheon, Sant'Eustachio, to which Tommaso added a recommendation for the gran caffe, their specialty.  I agreed to try it at some point, as we shifted to the bar so Denise could get an espresso.  The bartender, Gabri--who I have described to general acknowledgement as a slightly older and bald Daniel Craig, particularly in the piercing blue eyes--rebuffed the Sant'Eustachio recommendation but was horrified to hear I was not a coffee drinker.  He looked at me with this semi-intimidating wide-open stare and asked "Doppio macchiato?  You want one?"  What could I do but say yes?

Denise assured me she'd drink it if I didn't like it.  The little teacup appeared, Gabri frothed some milk into it.  Denise puts in some sugar and demonstrates the proper slow stir technique.  Then, the first sip: gross!  Bitter, awful aftertaste, blech.  But I am standing in a crowd of coffee drinkers, Gabri is bustling about behind the bar, I'm not going to just quit.  Another sip: I try to actually consider the flavor.  It's not so bad in my mouth this time, but the aftertaste is still a bit much.  I manage to drain the cup (much slower than Denise, who is herself apparently a slow drinker; many people just shoot the cup) until there's only froth remaining.  Denise tells me that the aftertaste is why so many people in cafes have a glass of water at their elbow; it's not just me.

Result: not very pleasant, but doable.  Probably it will grow on me.  White wine certainly did, followed by red (which I was also sort of forced into by my roommates the last time I stayed in Rome).  One of my only regrets about Florence was that I didn't enjoy wine then, after all; at least now I will enter coffee the right way...which means the Italian way, of course!

Michelangelo show

Krys and I went to see the Michelangelo exhibition at the Capitoline museum on Saturday.  It was a good show, but oddly arranged, with most of the material on the top floor with one big gallery downstairs where you enter.  There were a number of really great items, including the sonnet in which Michelangelo complains about painting the Sistine, the preparatory drawing for the Libyan sibyl, and the massive model for the facade of San Lorenzo.  The show-stopper, for me, was the drawing after Michelangelo's lost Leda, attributed to Rosso Fiorentino.  I've seen it reproduced, but had no idea of its scale: 16 full-size sheets of paper, making it something like six or seven feet across and four or five feet high!  The composition also struck me as remarkably tender and even sensual in its drawn form, as opposed to the painted copies that exist, which tend to appear colder and more sculptural.  It was a surprise to find myself appreciating the sex appeal of a painting depicting bestiality!

More

...I started to write a blog entry yesterday, around the same time (noon) about how something about the shift in time, plus the energy-consuming nature of this place, has rendered me both constantly hungry and in need of daily naps.  I didn't get further than a couple of lines because...I went to take a nap before lunch! Haha.

It hasn't even been a week yet, so it still really hasn't sunk in that this is my home now.  I haven't even crossed the Tiber yet; today after lunch I'm planning to go to the Capitoline Museum to see the Michelangelo exhibit that ends on Sunday, possibly in the company of some other people (I need to learn to stop mentioning my plans aloud...), and that will be my first venture into the centro.  Afterward I need to hit the Vodafone store to finally acquire a new SIM, and then I guess I'll come back here, though I have to head back downtown for dinner.   Carla has her conservatory entrance exam today, so tonight we're going out to Alfredo e Ada's, the little hole-in-the-wall place she introduced me to last year, where the wine is all house wine, and the menu is whatever Alfredo tells you (but which always includes my favorite, matriciana!)

Living on this side of the river  kind of has that same sense of distance that Brooklyn has from Manhattan.  Getting from one to the other requires effort.  There, it's  subway rides; here, it's walking or riding the bus.  Walking back here is no joke; we may not be on one of the seven named hills of Rome, but holy shit is it steep! [Edit: that's not exactly true; our hill is named--Janiculum--it's just not one of the famous seven on the other side of the river, where the Romans actually lived] Going to the grocery store yesterday felt like traversing San Francisco: up and down, up and down.  I walked to Carla's on Thursday afternoon, which first takes you along the beautiful ridge of the Gianicolo, so you get an incredible view out over Rome, and then goes down a super-windy switchback road...then a super-steep straight road...then stairs!  I took a cab back...

I haven't taken a single picture here yet after the first batch I put up on Facebook.  Today is the first day I'm even bringing my camera.  The sense that this is a place of permanence frees me a little from the desire to obsessively capture every instance of beauty.  Even when I do take pictures, I'm going to resist the urge to post lots of them on FB. Maybe I'll get an Instagram.  (Someone here suggested creating a blog, and I was like, um, well...?)  I don't want to appear to be shoving it in people's faces, "look how great my life is, peasant!"  I remember feeling like that about Jasmine's posts, mostly out of my own feelings of dissertation-related-despair.  It wasn't her fault, but I also don't want to be that person to someone else.

At Last

I'm sitting in my room, in a little white-covered chair, with my feet up on the red damask coverlet on the bed.  Through the open window you can hear the sound of the courtyard fountain.  It's surprisingly loud, since the courtyard amplifies noise; even a couple of people chatting sounds like a small group.  Two massive pine trees dominate the courtyard space, and block my view of my office window, directly on the other side.  It's beautiful, peaceful, and like everyone else here have already asked myself a dozen times, "is this my real life now?"

I wouldn't say that my jaw actually dropped when the van from the airport pulled up in front of the main Academy building, but there was distinct awe.  It was so much bigger, so much more imposing and elegant than the photos were able to communicate, and that sense of wonder hasn't diminished from getting to know the layout more thoroughly.  More than ever I recognize why Jasmine say Academy fellows were thought to be "insular and pretentious": they treat us like rock stars, we eat like kings, and everyone is so different, in their work, their background, that I can't imagine ever running out of things to discuss at the dinner table.  For example: Paula is an experimental composer who will be doing field recordings of ambient sound in Rome's aqueducts; Liz and Khrys are novelists; Anna works as a restorer for the Met with Egyptian artifacts; Sarah is a historian working on the brothels of Pompeii--and we're all eating dinner together.  It's really awesome.

In the vestibule to the McKim building, there are two ancient Roman fountains affixed to either wall, pouring water constantly.  Above one, a plaque records the names of the original donors to the Academy, which include JP Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Henry Clay Frick of the wonderful NYC museum.  Robber barons, in other words, and this stately pile is well worthy of their money. The site is the highest one inside the ancient walls of Rome (Morgan, who bought the land, supposedly wanted to be higher than the French academy across the city in the Villa Medici).  The view from the roof is incomparable--all of Rome is spread out beneath you.

I feel like I could write so much about everything I've experienced here...and it's only been three days!  The first night, I got up from the dinner table to use the restroom, and walking back toward the table, looking down that long, candle-covered table and everyone clustered around it talking so animatedly I thought "Two years of nights like this?" in this sort of awe-filled but also uncomprehending way.  It just doesn't seem possible, that this is a thing I am now doing, and will do for a considerable period of time.  But it is--and the only thing that's going to make it even better is when I get to share it with Sean!

Moving Day!

Holy crap, it's finally here.  In 9 hours I'll be on a plane to Dublin!

In other news, I checked the intranet to find menus for this weeks' meals posted.  Tomorrow's dinner:

Pomodori al forno 
Pollo al mattone con salsa verde e limone
Granita di fragole con panna fresca

YUM.

Damn it, Janet

Janet is the name of the Academy's new intranet system (based on Janus, the two-headed Roman god who is an unofficial AAR mascot), to which I had eagerly been awaiting access.  Now I know that my room is number 206, and my office is 242.  Same floor, woohoo!  (There are only two residential floors, but still).

We also got an email today about our pickup in Rome; sadly, my dreams of a private car with blacked-out windows has gone by the wayside--two other fellows are on my flight, so we'll all be piling into the same van.  Still, someone is going to be waiting past customs with an AAR sign. That is going to be fucking awesome, especially given my 100 lbs of baggage!

While I was in the library the other day, photocopying my master's degree (which I need to present in order to gain access to the Vatican, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and a couple of other places), I flipped through Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome, his account of spending a year in Rome along with his wife and 16-month-old twins.  Carla's mom lent it to me years ago, when the phrase  "American  Academy" meant diddly-squat to me, and I even mentioned it in my interview, which seemed to please my interlocutors.  I really only had vague memories of the book by that point, though, and what stood out most in my memory were the bad things that happened.  For example, he saw a fatal traffic accident, an American tourist driving a car hit an Italian family in the crosswalk.  That's one of my nightmares when we drive in foreign countries--and honestly, here too.

Flipping through it again left a very different impression.  It sounded miserable!!  A lot of that had to do with the aforementioned twin babies which they arrive with.  No parents of twins would be getting a lot of rest, but living in another country with babies?  Christ.  Also, I know the Academy's on a hilltop, but reading his description of hefting a double-stroller down those stairs almost made me sweat.  They spoke barely any Italian, and knew next to nothing about Rome or Italy in general. His wife spent most of her time cooped up in their apartment, which led to a collapse from nervous exhaustion.  They didn't interact that much with the other fellows, from the sound of it, and when they did make appearances at the communal table (which was pre-Alice Waters intervention, so the food sucked) he reported feeling completely lost by the scholarly discussions that were going on about classical history or music or what have you (he's a novelist).

Part of me reads this as "cry moar, don't move to Italy with babies." It's especially hard to feel bad for him after reading that this asshole didn't even have to apply for his Rome Prize.  Nor did he interview!  He just mentions getting a letter saying his work had been nominated anonymously, and then getting another letter informing him of his win!  What the shit is this?  The nominations come from former fellows, I know that much, since I got an email a month ago inviting me to nominate up to three people.  But it seems kind of unfair that some people (is it only scholars, I wonder?) have to go through the application process while others have it dropped in their laps.

That said, his perspective did shed some light on what Jasmine had told me, that AAR fellows are often seen, by people at other research institutions like the Hertz, as "insular pretentious people."  The pretension thing I can certainly see, because AAR is definitely full of itself, institutionally speaking, and they encourage fellows to see themselves as super-duper-special.  The lavish prize ceremony in NYC, for example?  No other fellowship bothers with an award ceremony.  As for insular, I think the language barrier is a factor; I'm sure plenty of the fellows, particularly the non-scholars, don't speak Italian, and for some this might be their first experience living abroad!  That would be pretty nerve-wracking, and if you can just stay in the pretty villa where they feed you, why wouldn't you?

That said, I have every intention of making connections with people at the other institutions, particularly the Hertz, since some people Jasmine knew are still there.  Most of the institutions reciprocally invite people to their events and parties.  I don't know if AAR does, but at least one reception in September included an invitation to "Rome friends."  I made Carla put it on her calendar!

Ready, Set...

I don't want to have to say goodbye to Sean, but at the same time...I'm ready to go!  I'm tired of being in this constant state of "preparing."  Almost all of my stuff is packed in the two larger suitcases, which weigh a combined 86lbs.  Most of my clothes are in vacuum space-saver bags, which means all my shit is going to be incredibly wrinkled when I get to Rome.  Hm, maybe I should have bought that iron that another fellow was offering?  Oh well.

Most of my goodbyes have already been said.  I had lunch with Jen and my cousin Lisa in Waterbury on Wednesday, and then Jen and Vinny came to Linda's for dinner that night.  Jen gave me a ton of cash, which was really sweet and unnecessary, but Vinny's gift was just awesome: he took two used Samsung phones, turned off the cell-tower-seeking part, and stripped them of everything but Skype. That means Sean and I can talk for free, anywhere there's a wifi connection, instead of having to use our laptops!  He warned me that the batteries are really lacking in life, but so what.  It was such a thoughtful gift.  Linda also gave me a wonderful going-away present: she pulled photos from my FB account to create an awesome collage on Snapfish, and had it framed in a lightweight frame so I could have something to put on my wall when I get there!  Also incredibly thoughtful!

My to-do list has literally been whittled down to "switch Costco card into Sean's name" and "check for Ilchman diss at post office on Sat" (and cross my fingers that it doesn't come!) Yesterday I deep-cleaned the house, top to bottom, and took particular glee in employing Magic Erasers, which I am like the last person on the planet to learn about.  Those fuckers are amazing!  Walls, bathtub, microwave, they clean it all!  I even used one on a pair of flip flops before packing them this morning.

Today's agenda includes my last yoga class and a pedicure.  Sean and friends are playing at a golf tournament in honor of Jon Ward's dad.  Theoretically I should go to the "banquet" at 3, but I'm also meeting the other girls for dinner in Milford at 6, and then we'll probably meet up with the guys afterward, so....I need to conserve my energy!