Home Again, Home Again

We've been home for two weeks! Everyone keeps asking us if we're happy to be home and if it was easy to transition back to American living; the answer to both is "YES" for Sean and "mostly yes" for me.  I don't miss Rome specifically as much as I miss the pace and style of life that's common in Italy. Sean likes to point out how much more convenient and comfortable our life here is, which is true, but I also look around and see all the ways in which our society encourages, and sometimes even requires, sloth, excess, and wastefulness. Why is every store air-conditioned to the point of discomfort, for example? (Worst offender: Stop & Shop). Why are they lit to freakish brightness and contain 3,000 types of breakfast cereal, which is shitty for you anyway? That's not to say that I'm fetishizing the Italian way of life, which has its own slew of problems. Nor do I plan to be one of those people who go on about how my true home is in Rome or something. That's annoying, no one cares, and most importantly it's not true; Sean and I are in agreement that we could only live in Italy if we had enough money to supply ourselves with the American-level creature comforts, like a dishwasher, air-conditioning, and a good mattress. Since that's super-unlikely, I'm not dreaming of becoming an ex-pat one day. (I've learned to dislike that word: ex-pat is just a euphemism for "wealthy white immigrant we approve of," as opposed to the poor brown ones). We can enjoy what we had for two years in Rome, and make our jokes to each other. Memories of the umbrella pines will have to do for now. 

One important aspect of our Roman life has been translated more or less successfully: coffee! I had previously sampled both Starbucks espresso, which was very bitter, as well as independent place in Branford, which was both bitter and had an after-taste. Sean repeated the experiment and agreed that both sucked. In all likelihood, they don't clean the machines often, which gives coffee a bitter taste (at the Academy, people complained that Monday coffee was more bitter, since Alessandro was known for not cleaning the machine when he closed on Saturday). And it's expensive/wasteful anyway, considering they give you a regular-size paper cup for a single espresso shot. Although I haven't tasted it, Sean's department apparently has some excellent espresso. It's capsule coffee, but his adviser Raffaella is from Turin and wanted the good stuff. They even have actual ceramic Illy cups! Truly, the grad students are living the life.

Since bar coffee is never going to be an affordable or tasty solution, it's up to us to make it at home. I bought Kimbo espresso-ground coffee and a Bialetti moka pot on Amazon, but unfortunately I didn't realize how large a pot I was buying, so we've each been drinking a double every morning. Without the power of an actual espresso machine, you can't get the crema that gives bar espresso its special slightly thicker texture, but the taste is solid, and it does the job! I had stopped ordering it macchiato months ago, so we don't even need to bother with frothing our own milk, which seemed like a pain in the ass whenever I watched someone do it in the common kitchen. One day, perhaps, when we have decent income, we could think about investing in a real machine. In the short term, we need to find some decent cups. Somehow I thought that with all the Italian-Americans around (Linda has a moka pot, for example, though she only uses it to make the decaf espresso Gary drinks after big dinners) I'd be able to find some espresso cups at Goodwill, but I've checked a couple with no result.

Another carry-over from Rome: boxing! We joined the distinctly non-gritty 9Round boxing/kickboxing gym, which offers a different 30-minute workout every day. We do the rounds twice to get a good workout out of it, and it is tough, so that's nice. Sean looked at me once as I was flagging and said (quietly) "Come on, ladeee!" like Leo would have, and I both laughed and worked harder. We're never going to actually learn anything new in terms of technique, though, and obviously never even glove-spar with someone else, which is a bit disappointing. Even though I sucked at it, it was definitely a challenge. But never fear, 9Round offers its own things for me to suck at--like jump rope. Yes, the pastime of 10 year old girls is beyond me. Oy. 

Arrivederci, Roma

So it's almost here, after two years. Our flight leaves at 9:40am tomorrow.

 I'll miss Rome: not just the coffee, the wine, and the food, but its grandeur, its beauty, and even (a little) its chaos. Where else in the West do you encounter history so casually, and frequently? Walking to dinner the other night with Carla, for example, I looked up at a Renaissance building I hadn't noticed before, on which its frieze proudly announced, in Latin, its owner's name (Turci), his title as an apostolic notary, and the date, 1500. Just for a second, as I read the inscription and admired the building, I felt like I was participating in a conversation across time. I'll miss those moments. Hopefully I won't forget them either...one reason I still keep this blog.

Further Assorted French Musings

One week to go! This time next Sunday we'll be winging our way back to Rome, and to a dinner with Adam at Bi-Won, an excellent Korean place that may well have ruined me for other Korean restaurants (I say this having been only moderately enthused by a plate of spicy pork and kimchi at a well-reviewed place near Republique yesterday).

Last week we took another trip outside Paris to Provins, a small town south-east of Paris that features regularly in all the "day trips from Paris" recommendations, since its preserves its medieval character in the upper town. I think time in Italy, with its plethora of charming hill towns, has made me snobby, because I wasn't really that impressed. The medieval part of town was pretty small, and without many features of interest; the main (and only) square had a smattering of overpriced cafes as well as the requisite ice cream shop and carousel, but not much else. We climbed the "tower of Caesar," which did give a view onto the medieval church and to the town below, but beyond that the landscape was pretty uninteresting (for example, a new subdivision that could easily have been in New Haven). We checked out the church, the nave of which was never completed, and then walked to the other end of town to see the Gate of Joy, the plain but sturdy-looking gate that still preserves some of its ramparts. And that was all! Definitely not worth 50 euro for two train tickets from Paris, in my opinion. What did strike me a day or so ago is that Provins would have made an excellent setting for Madame Bovary: stifling, provincial, and small. Anyone would go crazy, have affairs, and ruin their husband if they were trapped there! Even Sean agreed, sort of (he's never had much sympathy for poor Emma).

After we arrived I briefly re-read How Paris Became Paris, and was reminded that compared to Venice, Florence, or especially Rome, Paris was such a late-bloomer as a city! Almost all of the significant architecture in Paris dates to the 17th-19th centuries. In the middle of the 16th century, an emissary of Phillip II who was on a mission to survey important architecture in the north of Europe reported that there was nothing of architectural interest to see in Paris, and stayed just a single day. At that point, of course, there were no squares, no boulevards, no great public gardens. Even the sameness of the architecture (tall, narrow facades painted white, slate mansard roofs) which seemed kind of bland to me the last time we were here, now reminds me of the incredible control that was given to city planners, to force new construction to adhere to certain standards so that the growing city would have a "look" to it, something that no other city had had before.

Again, always comparing to Rome, we've been so impressed by the public spaces here--not only by their cleanliness and organization, but by the wonderfully diverse ways in which the French use them. At the Parc du Belleville, a five-minute walk from our place, you can see out over the entire city from a looktop at the top; you can also see nearly every inch of grass taken up by people sun-bathing, reading, or just hanging out in groups. Walking back through Place du Republique on a weekend evening, people are skate-boarding on one half of the huge, traffic-free central square, while one of the cafes has put out all sorts of table games and kids games for patrons and families to enjoy. Official communication seems to be pretty clear, too; for example there are large, easily legible maps of your surroundings at every bus stop and metro entrance, and even on the sides of the (many and free) public toilets. Today I got a bit lost while running found myself at a highway on-ramp; I ran south until I found a bus stop and could figure out that I'd taken the wrong street at one of those spiral intersection.

Another example of surprisingly good communication: at Pere-Lachaise cemetery there were signs explaining that the city had discontinued use of a particular weed-killer that was carcinogenic, and asking for patience with the weeds as they tried out different solutions. Unthinkable in Rome (and probably most places in the US, too). Of course, underneath all this admiration of Paris as such a livable and functioning city is my awareness that I don't really know anything about what it means to live here. If you don't speak the language, your awareness of a culture and its problems is limited to what you can read in the English press. After all, we're certainly not getting to know any actual French people. France clearly does have a lot of problems, racial, post-colonial, and religious problems--but it's so easy, as a short-term visitor, to see only the lovely surface and not what may be underneath.

A note on Pere-Lachaise: when we were here a couple of years ago, I noted how I didn't think the cemetery had the charm of the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. This time I realized why: it's not just the atmosphere, the lack of the cypresses and the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius. Partially it's the recent date of the cemetery; it wasn't opened until the 19th century, so the style of the tombs tends to be very similar, and there are far fewer idiosyncratic tombs (aside from Oscar Wilde, etc.) than you find in Rome. But more than this, I think it's the sheer variety of people from all nations and faiths who are buried in the cemetery in Rome that captures both my imagination and my pity. The people buried in Pere-Lachaise are overwhelmingly Parisians buried where they lived and died, but most of those in the Roman cemetery probably didn't expect to die there, in a foreign country. The gravestones, in fact, often speak of sudden illnesses and disasters while traveling. Standing in front of those sorrowful monuments, a traveler yourself and far from home, empathy comes easily. I wonder if, at the end, even those who were permanent transplants wished they could have died on their native soil, with the people they knew.

Chantilly and Musee Conde

Yesterday we took our first real trip out of Paris; Chantilly is only a 30 minute ride on an express train, but it seems world away. The town itself, of which we didn't see much, is small and quaint, but everyone comes there for the Domaine de Chantilly, the vast park surrounding the Chateau and its exquisite Musee Conde. We took a rather roundabout way from the train station and wound up on a path crossing an immense field, by what we later realized was the hippodrome or horse-racing track, moving toward a vast building that we assumed was the chateau itself. Nope! It was merely the incredibly large stables, built by Louis XV, which still house live performing horses as well as the Museum of the Horse. A couple of galleries were dedicated to carousels, with the majority of the colorful examples coming from the US in the early 20th century, including Rhode Island and Philadelphia (a rabbit, a zebra, and a giraffe included!)

The Chateau itself was further on, behind a huge wrought-iron gate with a gilt crest, and across two bridges, the corners of which were ornamented with big 19th-century statues of hunting dogs and stags, a nod to the original function of this place, which was a hunting retreat for the French royal family. An equestion statue of Anne de Montmorency, the Constable of France under Francis I, who had the chateau built in the 1560s, stands before the main gate; from his family the estate passed eventually to the Grand Conde, the first prince-of-the-blood (cousin to young Louis XIV). His family is the reason the museum inside is called the Musee Conde, but, rather confusingly, the collection is neither his nor Montmorency's, but a totally unrelated nobleman, at least insofar as French nobility is ever un-related: the Duc d'Aumale, whose father, Louis-Phillipe, was the last king of France, reigning 1830-1848. Aumale had to go into exile once his father was forced to abdicate, but he had been bequeathed the Chateau by his godfather, the last prince of Conde (whose only son and heir had been shot by Napoleon). Once he was allowed to return to France in the 1870s he reconstructed the Chateau, which had been mostly destroyed in the Revolution, into its current state--in which everything, from fireplace grates to doorknobs, bears the monogram of a superimposed H-O, for Henri d'Orleans, his actual name.

He was a fantastic collector of books, drawings, and paintings. There are three paintings by Raphael in his collection, including the small, delicate Three Graces and the so-called Madonna di Loreto, which was thought only to be a copy after a lost painting from the Borghese until a cleaning reveal the Borghese inventory number. Other notable paintings included a very sexy Ingres self-portrait (adjacent to a copy of Titian's Prado Ecce Homo), a small Maso di Banco Lamentation over the Dead Virgin once thought to be Giotto, Piero di Cosimo's posthumous portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, the loveliest woman in Florence, and the gallery of small portraits of various members of the French royal houses (not collected by Aumale). Probably one of the most valuable objects is the one not on view, except through a facsimile: the Very Rich Hours of the Duke du Berry, a 14th-century illuminated manuscript that's included in every art history survey as an example of "International Gothic."

The house itself was also really cool. A couple of rooms that survived the Revolution had been restored by Aumale to the 18th-century Rococo splendor. The dining room featured gas sconces that apparently produced flame in the shape of the fleur-de-lis, and in the adjacent service kitchen there was a speaking tube in the wall going down to the actual kitchens (which I was tickled by since we just watched the Aristocats!) The grounds were also exceptionally lovely, and large. The gardens closest to the house were designed by Andre le Notre (who designed Versailles), but further away the grounds were permitted to become 'manicured country style' (complete with sheep grazing alongside a river) and woods. The grounds were so large, in fact, that as I was dragging myself on our march back to the main gates (Sean, of course, was trotting happily along after 5 hours) we saw a sign that indicated that there was a kangaroo enclosure on the grounds--but on the far distant side! Not even the lure of a 'roo, alas, could induce me to walk all of that over again (especially not when we still had to walk back another half-hour to the station) so we regretfully bid them goodbye, soothing our sorrow with an ice-cream cone. Real ice cream! Not gelato! I do love France. Best of all, the ticket-seller had given us both the student discount, no questions asked, so we paid 20 euro for all of this beauty and splendor, instead of 34. I also love a bargain.

French Musings 2

I was just writing to Jinn that I don't think we really understood how long a month can feel, if you don't have an external job or a social circle, when we decided we'd spend August in Paris. We do each have work to do--I'm turning in my second chapter to Dr. Cooper tomorrow, so that Sean can start using my laptop to finalize his conference paper--but it's surprising how *long* the days feel when it's just the two of us! Yes, all of Paris is our oyster, but Paris is also a very expensive oyster, so we can't exactly spend our afternoons guzzling wine in sidewalk cafes. We've been trying to walk as much as possible, for example, to save on metro and bus tickets, but Menilmontant is a hike, and it's also been unpleasantly cloudly and chilly.

Last night we went out belatedly to celebrate Sean's birthday; our attempt last week at Le Richer was met with disappointment, as they were closed for the August holidays. We wound up at a restaurant that was highly recommended on Tripadvisor. The service was very friendly and they're not condescending about speaking English, which probably accounts for a lot of the good feelings people leave with, but the food was mediocre at a ridiculous price. However, the night was saved by the couple next to us, Kirby and Jessica, who initiated conversation once we'd both finished our meals. They were Canadian, but had spent two years living in State College, PA, when Kirby was an assistant professor there in geography (as we learned later, geography as in climate-change research, not maps!). They were leaving Paris the next morning and heading, of all places, to Rome! We had a great conversation with them, and best of all, after agreeing on the mediocrity of our current location, they gave us a recommendation for a mom-and-pop place they had found the night before. It was really nice to have someone to talk to other than ourselves, so I told them I was grateful to them for making the first step!

After days of chill and clouds, today was a brilliantly blue, warm day, and we tried to make the most of it! This I walked down to the Bastille market to buy groceries for the week. It was less overwhelming than last weekend, and the deals are great; I got plenty of eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, shallots, cipollini, nectarines, and grapes for less than 15 euro. Sean and I went downtown to visit the Opera Garnier, which was beautiful. I had never put this together, but one of the signs pointed out that it's a rare example of a work of architecture which carries the architect's name (along with, for example, the Eiffel Tower). Then we headed to the Tuileries to take advantage of it being a free-museum Sunday, to visit the Orangerie. It was a pretty long line in the sun, but Monet's Nymphea were worth it (although we noted that Monet's belief that the painting ensembles would produce a meditative effect on those who sat amid them would not have held up in its current environment, full of people talking and taking selfies). The pamphlet noted that when the paintings were unveiled to the public after Monet's death in 1926, people were uninterested, since it didn't seem avant-garde, but after WWII some of the expressionists returned to the paintings and saw connections to their own work in the near-abstraction of his late brushwork.

Paris has to have the loveliest and most user-friendly green spaces of any European city I've seen so far. Not only are they kept in really nice shape, but the way people use them is so incredible varied. In the Parc des Buttes-Chaumonts, there are always people doing yoga and meditating, but also people boxing, and even doing Zumba on a rare strip of level ground. At the Tuileries and other parks, there are benches, but also plenty of green metal chairs, which people can arrange to their hearts' content (provided they can get ahold of one). We snagged a couple after our time in the Orangerie and sat on the terrace overlooking the gardens. I had never thought about the way that only having benches effectively reduces the ways you can use the seating in a park; only a certain number of people can fit on one, and they can't be rearranged. Here instead you see knots of people gathered in all sorts of configurations, including plenty using a bench as a footrest or a picnic table. Poor Rome: in so many ways it comes off worse by comparison! Rome certainly lacks the money to have the kind of services and upkeep that the Parisian parks have; plus Sean pointed out, you could never have those moveable chairs there, because they'd all disappear within a month.

French Musings

We're in Paris! We're on Rue de Menilmontant in the 20th, near Belleville. The "montant" part of the street name is accurate, since it inclines slightly up from the metro stop, beginning a much steeper climb a few blocks before where we are. It was a considerable slog getting here from Orly, which is south of Paris; Menilmontant is in the north. We took a very crowded, but deliciously air-conditioned bus and then two subways--and then had to pull our bags uphill to meet Salvatrice, who turned out to speak more Italian than English, thanks to parents who emigrated from Sardinia! That would be our last moment of linguistic aptitude, I'm afraid. I told Sean today that I quite like Paris; I just wonder how much more I would like it if I could actually speak French!

It's kind of a shock to go from a country where I had decent fluency in the language as well as what I'll call cultural literacy (knowing how day-to-day things work; knowing what the mores tend to be, to help you figure out how to act in a given situation), to being back at the kid level of pointing to things and saying please! Sean's enjoying his bit of linguistic supremacy over me; it also helps that he isn't fazed by trying to say "l'eau" to a bartender several times before they get that he wants water, where I'm always embarassed. On the plus side, I can at least read enough French to get by (spotted on the bus: a sign warning people that the majority of assaults on public transit come from an effort to steal your smartphone)!

Aside from the language barrier, Paris is a welcome change from Rome! New sights, new tastes (we had Afghani food our first night here, although--Sean's birthday tomorrow night aside--we have very little money to eat out, alas). New weather--it's 20 degrees colder than Rome, saints be praised. I woke up freezing our first night, while our friends who got stuck in Rome and at the Academy for several more days, thanks to American Airlines fucking up, were suffering through 90+ degrees. There's been a mix of sun and clouds every day--I never knew how thrilled I could be to see clouds! From the top of Menilmontant, and even more so from the Parc Buttes-Chaumont, you have an incredible view of the cityscape and the fierce-looking clouds rolling in.

Where we're staying is not downtown; it takes 45 minutes or so to walk to the Seine. Paris is incredibly large, and seemingly very prosperous; it seems much more like New York than Rome, but without the soul-lessness that I found in Berlin. Yes, I like that every corner seems to have a boulangerie done up in colorful wooden panels! The neighborhood we're in has a large population of North African immigrants, and it's also something of a shock going from fairly non-diverse Italy to multicultural Paris. I told Sean that it feels like in Rome, you see the same ten or so Italian "types" over and over again, while here there just seems like more variety of people of all ages. Another fabulous French innovation over Italy is that the ATMs actually ask you what kind of bills you'd like, large or small--and the shopkeepers don't even mind changing 50s if you do have them! ATMs in Italy will never give you a 10-euro bill and they will give you every 50 they can, a bill that almost no one, outside of a supermarket or a busy pharmacy, will be willing to take without a grimace. The French, having apparently enough coins in circulation to make change, also don't expect you to balance your bill for them (as Sean's reminded me, as I was adding change to our restaurant check so that they could just give us back a 20). For contrast: Jinn and David's horrible experience with the Roman cab-driver who outright refused to take a 20-euro bill because he couldn't make change, and who, since his credit card machine was broken, as they always seem to be, insisted on Dave going into Bar G to make change while he ranted at Jinn in the car!

So far, people have been very friendly to us despite our total lack of French; I think if anything, they're more confused, since Menilmontant isn't exactly tourist central. Today we went down to one of the city's largest fruit and vegetable markets at the Bastille, and I was pleased to have successfully guestimated the cost at each of the stands I stopped at so I never had to blindly hold out cash--that is, until I was foiled buying some grapes. I handed over too little, then couldn't understand the guy's response until he said in English "50 more cents!" We had falafel wraps from a Libyan food stand for lunch, and they were great (I also paid for a 4-euro sandwich with a 50, with nary a flicker of annoyance from the cashier). I couldn't understand, though, how this sprawling food market had no trash cans anyway, just the occasional plastic bag affixed to a bench. Sean revealed that Jeremy had told him this is now true throughout Paris, since they're worried about terrorism; the bags on the benches were in fact clear.

The possibility of terrorism has been on our minds, of course, and particularly after Nice (and then the attack in Normandy). I rather assumed, given the strong military and police presence that's been going on in Rome for the past year and a half (in a nation which, although nominally targeted by ISIS, hasn't actually been attacked) that France would be doing something similar, but it's not true as far as I can see. The night we arrived, we walked all through the city, down across the Ile de Saint-Louis, people everywhere occupying the "terraces" outside restaurants and bars, and then sat in front of Notre Dame, without ever seeing more than a handful of police. It's not obvious that a show of force will necessarily deter or prevent attacks, of course, but I was a little surprised not to see more of an effort, even if only as a token. The French probably don't want to live in a police state, of course, and I get that, but I couldn't help but think, as we shouldered our way through the intensely crowded market today, that when you hear reports of suicide attacks in Baghdad and other cities in the Middle East, it's often markets that are targeted. No police anywhere in sight there either, though.

Tomorrow is Sean's 31'st birthday! To celebrate, we're going to dinner at a place he found on his last visit here, called Le Richer, near the Opera. He says that although it looks hipster-pretentious, the food is excellent, inventive, and cheap (hat trick!).

Moving Day (Almost)

I never knew how stressful packing could be until I faced having to get two years' worth of belongings for two people into four bags: two large suitcases, one medium, and one rolling suit bag. It's not even really the clothes, it's the books; I managed to get most of them into our luggage, but I had to suck it up and pay 100 euro to ship home a twenty-pound box with a couple of exhibition catalogs (as well as our boxing gloves, which, despite their light weight, would be impossible to find space for in the bags). Complicating matters is the fact that we're not actually headed straight home to New Haven, but are going first to Paris, then back to Rome for two days, then Sean goes down to Naples for his conference. We're leaving three suitcases here until the beginning of September, meaning everything we need immediately, or he'll need for the conference, has to come to Paris. Complicated.

Tomorrow I'm leaving the Academy, after two years. I'm certainly ready to get back to real existence; as charmed as our lives are here, it's still effectively an elegant dormitory. We've been lucky to make some really good friends this year, and even better, we have plans to actually see them back in the States. Rick and Lauren are in Cambridge, and have an entirely separate apartment in the basement of their townhouse that they've encouraged us to come stay at (John and Bryony, for example, are taking them up on this for two weeks in August). Emma, Jeremy, and the girls are in Swarthmore, and our plan is to go down and stay with them in mid-October, when Jinn and David are visiting from Chicago. We're also headed to Chicago in late March-early April for RSA, so we'll see them again in the winter.

It's a bit more sad to say goodbye to the staff, since I don't know when we'll be coming through Rome again (unlike most people here, who already seem to have their next visit booked). Gabri, at least, we'll see in NYC in October for "Gabri-fest," but Tiziana and Alessandro...? And poor Massimo. I don't think I've written about him on here; one of the "rossi", he got into an awful car accident about a month ago, coming home late from the staff party at the Academy. We were out back with them singing group karaoke, and Sean stayed up playing pool with the stragglers till 3am. Massimo was supposed to stay over, but decided at the last minute to drive home to Ronciglione, an hour north, and we don't know what happened (possibly he fell asleep?) but he hit a wall at full-speed. He's been in a vegetative coma ever since, and suffered really traumatic injuries. He was such a nice guy, even if he always spoke in super-fast dialect that I could barely follow.

So as not to end this on a down note, I went back to my first, starry-eyed post when I arrived here in September 2014. The cynical side of me read it with an eye to everything that I would come to find annoying, but I've often returned to the sentiment below in the two years in between, because I vividly remember thinking it:

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!

Tonight will be the last time that I look down that candle-lit table. I've been incredibly lucky to be here, and--as I said two years ago--the time I got to share it with Sean has been the most special of all.

So long, Academy, and thanks for all the fish pasta!

It's Fucking Cold (And the Peasants Rejoice, Sorta)

Truly, we have reached the end of Shit To Complain About at the Academy (topics include: our fellow fellows; kitchen hygiene; relative crappiness of beds, pillows, showers, etc.; fetishization of non-Italian foodstuffs; Italian societal norms; the phrase colpo d'aria) when our main thread of complaint at dinner tonight was "Holy shit it's so fucking cold! Why is it so windy? Ahhhhhh my napkin is blowing away down the table and that guy's empty wine glass just fell over," etc.

It's been above 90 degrees for weeks, hitting an unpleasant high of 97 on Monday, only to cool as we approached the weekend. Yesterday was the first day in a long time when I walked through the city without being unpleasantly sweaty, and I found myself thinking "oh right, I like Rome!" Yesterday the high was maybe 86, but today the high was only 72, about 20 degrees from what our bodies were trained to expect as of just a few days ago. There was brief rejoicing which turned to "oh god, we've been weakened" as it got colder.

Things I enjoyed:

• being able to actually sleep in our room last night, as opposed to our office couch, where I've been sleeping since it got unbearably hot
• being able to exist in our bedroom without needing to keep the door propped open for a chance at a cross-breeze (and zero chance at privacy)
• being able to turn off the overhead fan, the only break that poor bastard has gotten in months
• being able to work in my office with the windows closed this morning, thereby (nearly) silencing the cacophony of those tiny fucking sparrows who nest in the cortile
• being able to walk around without feeling like a sweaty mass of fat
• crunching through dry lives on the Lungotevere and feeling like it was September
• needing to put a blanket on top of the bed in addition to the single sheet

Things I did Not

• needing a sweater to sit in the cortile for lunch
• feeling like an aged Italian grandma for needing a sweater in mid-July
• feeling like I was walking through a hurricane to head downtown (reality check: 18 mph wind)
• pine needle fragments directly to the eyeball on the Lungotevere
• shivering through dinner, despite sweater
• asking quickly if anyone had anything planned for post-dinner (Wednesday night we watched Predator, which I enjoyed; last night others watched Devil's Advocate, which I declined), learning several people planned to get directly into bed, and realizing this was a good option

It's going up to 81 tomorrow. But never fear! We'll be back to our regularly-scheduled 95-and-up temps as of Monday. 

Fight Club

Leo (the guy pointing, in blue shorts) came to dinner at the Academy last night.  We had a good time, and then at the end of the night he said "just so you know, just because you invited me to dinner doesn't mean I'm going to go any easier on you in the gym." Haha.

The Future

My two years at the Academy are almost at an end. I've told Sean many times that no matter where our path leads us in the future, we'll always be incredibly grateful to have had this experience together. Usually they say "we'll always have Paris" but I suppose for us it's "we'll always have Rome."

However, I become increasingly doubtful that my future path is going to be within academia. I'll be graduating, god willing, next spring, but I haven't published anything (nor do I have anything remotely ready for publication), and my ideas--I'm being honest here--aren't likely to set the world of Titian studies on fire.  I know, and have been told, that I'm an excellent teacher; I know I'm an excellent writer; and I really do love art history.  Unfortunately, those things are not enough of a combination to secure a tenure-track job, not in today's work of adjunct-only hires; it's your research and publication record they care about. Ironically, it's Sean, with his Ivy-League degree, his several publications (so far!) and his long track record of conference presentations who has the best shot at a tenure-track job, but Sean has no passion for his field and doesn't think he wants to stay in it, either. If only we could combine Sean's qualifications with my enthusiasm, we'd be one perfect tenure-track-worthy professor.

So that begs the question of what's next? Obviously the first thing is to finish the dissertation. ("The only good dissertation is a done dissertation" is now my credo). When I get back, I'm going to get in contact with the Renaissance scholar who now runs Fairfield's art museum to talk to her about paths in the museum world. It's possible that Academy networking might be of use, one never knows. I also need to discuss this with Dr. Cooper, not least because her husband, Tim, talks to the grad students about his career in academic publishing, which is something else I'm interested in.  My ideal career, believe it or not, would be at a good-sized community college, the kind that actually tenures its faculty (I knew some grad students who were already tenured in Philadelphia, even pre-defense).  The focus is actually on teaching rather than on research. The likelihood of getting that kind of job, though, is pretty low. Still, a girl can dream.

It's definitely hard to even conceive of giving up the dream of being a university professor. One of the seductive things about academia, after all, is that it preaches to itself about being one of, if not the most important things that exist in society. We shepherd the life of the mind, what could be more important than that? To enter that path, and then to leave without hitting the brass ring of a TT job, is seen as a failure--a loss of status. Nothing else you do will be considered to be as important as what those who are researching and publishing are doing.  I have to acknowledge that, and accept it. Ironically, I know that the people who will have the greatest sympathy are those who were in grad school with me; Jasmine may have gotten a TT job, for example, but her experience there is miserable. The group of us spent a lot of RSA talking about how bullshit academia is and how difficult it is to survive (and I don't even have kids, like her, Cate, Susan, and Erin).

Even if I don't go into academia, even if I don't ever get to call myself a professor, how can I regret it? I love what I've learned, the knowledge I can share in others, and occasionally the love of art I can help kindle. How could I regret a path that earned me two years here at the Academy, even if there were many parts of that filled with anxiety, frustration and unease? What I've seen, done, and learned, the friends that I've made, all of that is something I will need to remind myself of in the future. Whatever happens, it was still worth it. We'll always have Rome.

Anzio

This week I learned how difficult it is to try to plan large group movements, especially last-minute. We were trying to find a place for a weekend getaway, given the high temperatures in Rome, but with 10 people (two of them little girls) and a strong desire for air conditioning, non-shady, non-ludicrously expensive options were slim. After a lengthy struggle (which included considering renting a big air-conditioned apartment in Rome, we decided to chuck the getaway plan and instead hit the beach for the day. In the end, thanks to a recommendation Jinn scouted online, we wound up at Marechiaro, near Anzio, the site of the Allied landings in WWII. A pair of loungers under an umbrella cost 15 euro, the beach was uncrowded, and the sea was beautiful. The few times in my life I've gone to the beach have been either Long Island Sound or once on the Lido in Venice, neither of which have particularly strong currents, so the big waves coming in at Anzio were so much fun! Best of all, it was twenty degrees cooler than Rome, given the strong wind.  Twenty degrees.  Hopefully we can go once more before we leave...

Quick One

June 20th already! Our time here proceeds apace.  We've been incredibly lucky with the weather so far, in that we've only had a couple of hot days, and a lot of cool ones.  Our luck might be starting to come to an end, though; it should be above 90 this weekend, though they promise back to upper 80s next week.

Boxing is going great! Sean and I decided to go three times a week for the rest of our time in Rome; it's a considerable time-suck, considering that we leave here at 11:40am, get back at 1:45, and then have to shower (and for me, dry my hair). I'm usually good to go by 3pm, but by that time I'm also tired.  Still, we'll never have this kind of time to dedicate to gym-going, and it's a lot of fun (even as it's the sweatiest I've ever been in my life). Our friend Adam has been going too, and he pointed out that you have to be so focused on trying to survive what you're doing that you simply can't think or worry about anything else.  It's pretty Zen.  It doesn't even bother me being the least-in-shape woman in a group that's comprised almost entirely of incredibly ripped guys, along with several amazingly fit women. Sometimes the conditioning circuit includes the pull-up bar, for example.  Can I do a pull-up? Dear god, no.  So far I've progressed to being able to get my knees up a few times!  Meanwhile, the woman who is my fitness inspiration is over there doing like 10 of them before the buzzer sounds.  When we get back to the States, instead of going back to the gym I went to with Linda (sorry, Hareem!) I think we're going to join 9 Round with Sean's dad when we get back; it's a 30-minute HIIT working based on boxing/kick-boxing. (I just went to their site and watched the video and my first thought was "dear god it's so CLEAN" compared to our grungy basement gym!)

Yesterday morning I woke up to the strange sight of Sean, up and getting dressed before me. He announced that he and Rick had decided on a road trip, since Rick had rented a car for the weekend for something on Saturday. We left the Academy at like 8:45, and by 10am were hiking in a nature preserve about 30 miles north of Rome, where we saw an stream running orange with sulfurous water, and watching its bubbling up from cracks in the riverbed. Hiking with zero coffee in my system was a challenge (by the time we were having lunch around 1 I was reading to fall face-down in my food), but it was great!  Inside the nature preserve, at the top of a hill, there was a ghost town called Monterano that the French destroyed in 1799; there was an aqueduct, several ruined churches (including an incredible beautiful one standing alone in a field, the very definition of "picturesque") and a palace.  We were lucky on timing; since we'd gotten there early, we were leaving the site when the Sunday picnic-ers were starting to arrive, and we got to our chosen lunch spot in Bracciano just after it opened and before it got packed with people. The only bit of misfortune was that the castle in Bracciano was closed for the day, but we still saw a beautiful view out over the lake (and learned that the guy who wrote A Clockwork Orange used to live there).  Someone had also left graffiti of Tool lyrics (from Sober) in several places at the overlook.  Random!

Road trips on a beautiful day, in beautiful countryside, have been one of my favorite things in this country.  Italy, I'll miss you so (but I'll change my tune once it gets hot!)

Budapest, Vienna

We're back from what will probably be our last intra-European trip, aside from our stay in Paris in August.  It was a fun week, but I'm pretty tired (looking at some backpackers in the airport this morning, all I could think was "oh god, how?")

Our first stop was Budapest to meet up with our friends Danny and Kim, who are living there more-or-less-legally this year (their residence permits are technically for Rome) and who had just learned that following their wedding back in California in September, they'll be off to Bangalore, India for a Fulbright fellowship.  We had a great time with them, although their apartment was a bit more, um, intimate than I was expecting!  When they first arrived in the city, they were renting a two-bedroom on the eastern Buda side, but at some point they actually invested in buying an apartment near the train station on the far eastern side of Pest. Real estate is dirt-cheap right now, apparently.  Anyway, when they offered to let us stay with them if we came to town, I confidently told Sean it was a two-bedroom deal, but it was more of an all-in-one situation. Danny and Kim were sweet enough to actually sleep on the air mattress and give us their bed, because of how hard it is for Sean to sleep, but it was still different than what I was anticipating.

Sean really, really, loved Budapest: the amount of green space, the eclectic mix of architectural styles, the way public transit actually functioned, etc. The traditional Hungarian food is delicious, if a bit heavy; the first night Sean's dish of stuffed cabbage was incredibly good, as was the goulash soup. The country is in the EU but not on the euro, so the currency situation was a bit bewildering. After so  many years of traveling only in the euro zone, the concept of paying 4,000 HUF (Hungarian Forint) for something, and having that be incredibly cheap, was really hard to wrap my mind around. The language is also a huge stumbling block; it's a non-Indo-European language, meaning it has no pretty much no relationship to anything we're familiar with, and it's famously difficult to learn. Most people can speak English, and most places tourists would go had English signage, but when we stopped by a outdoor beer-garden type of place in Danny and Kim's neighborhood, the sign and all its options were only in Hungarian and the staff knew no English, so we could only point to what we wanted and smile (which makes you feel like a really dumb child!).  Sean was so in love with the city that he suggested he'd actually be willing to live there, if we were able to get jobs there (itself totally a pipe dream!) but I think the language barrier would actually be a deal-breaker for me.

Vienna, in that sense, was much easier to deal with, because even if I can't speak German, I can at least make a small amount of sense in reading it. Vienna, fellow-capital of the Hapsburg empire, is like Budapest's grander, wealthier cousin.  Everything is elegant, everything is clean, beautiful, and practically dripping money.  I liked it--who wouldn't like it? everything works, unlike Italy! --but it was also a bit too much for my taste. My real purpose there was to see the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which was an incredible knock-out, practically a temple to Renaissance and Baroque art (they have other stuff there too, of course, but at this point I'm pretty much full-up on antiquities).  You could teach an entire course just on the masterpieces they have there. We also tried one of the fancy coffee-houses, Demel, where Sean had a delicious piece of cake, and later, when I met up with one of Dr. Cooper's friends for coffee at Landtmann's, I experienced the delight that is elderflower water. Austrian food, which we tried the night of our anniversary, impressed me much less than Hungarian food, but we also had fantastic Indian and Greek food.

Like anyone who lives in Italy, we spent a lot of our time outside the country bashing all the things about it that don't work and being surprised at how well things work everywhere else...and yet I was happy to come home!

= dead

So Sean decided to join the boxing gym where Stefania, Joseph, and Mac all went last year; he reported it was super-intense but fun, so I went along today.  In words from Archer, "holy shitsnacks!" So much more intense than the standard gym I've been going to with all the middle-aged women, and a lot of fun, even if I can barely lift my arms now.  Boxing gloves are a good souvenir of Italy, though, right? :-)

Sicily

The Academy's spring trip to Sicily conflicted with my trip to Boston and Sean's to Nantes, which we were both initially disappointed about (though the trip turned out to be a disorganized, madcap four-day dash about the island, so we were probably better off).  Then we thought about doing our own trip, but were discouraged by the difficulty of renting an automatic car anywhere but Palermo, which even Romans had warned us against driving in.  Then we scrapped the idea altogether, until our friends Heather and Larry came to visit us a couple of months ago.  They've been living in Siracusa, where Heather started a study-abroad program for her tiny college in Iowa.  We'd also just heard rave reviews of the place (or rather its adorable island subsection, Ortigia) from Woody and Leslie after they went.  Larry, as he typically does, sold us hard on coming down there, particularly on the food and wine, so we bought tickets.  $90, a 55-minute flight from Rome to Catania, and an hour-long bus ride later, we were in Siracusa.

Ortigia itself is pretty adorable.  Almost all of the buildings date after a massive earthquake of 1693, so they're in a Sicilian Baroque style when is much more light-hearted than the solemnity of Roman Baroque.  There are picturesque narrow streets full of light, balconies, and drying laundry, plus some pretty impressive ruins, like the Temple of Apollo as soon as you cross the bridge onto Ortigia (where just before leaving, we watched a slender black cat toy with, dismember, and abandon in boredom a little lizard).  In the main square, the Duomo is formed out of the skeleton of the temple of Athena, by walling in between the columns (visible both outside and in) to form the outer walls, and then excavating arches into the walls of the cella to create a three-nave structure.  I've never seen a structure where the original cella is still standing, more or less!  The main square also has the entrance to the hypogeum, a series of underground tunnels and cisterns that provided air-raid shelter for Siracusans when the island was getting pounded by the Allies in WWII, and the church of St. Lucy, which holds Caravaggio's Burial of St. Lucy.  It's a beautiful, serene place, especially since we came in April when there were plenty of people but not yet the hordes of summer, who, much like in Venice or other places, come on buses from their cruise boats and depart when the sun is setting.

Sean was so happy in Ortigia!  Our hotel room had a soft bed and wonderful pillows and the shower was powerful.  There were delicious pastries to be sampled everywhere; cannoli, but course, but also fanciful marzipan, ficchetti fig cookies, and the "raviola" pastry filled with ricotta cheese, which we shared with Larry sitting in front of the Duomo, drinking the best blood-orange juice I've ever tasted.  Citrus is so plentiful in Sicily that it finds its way into every dish, from the salads to the tiramisu.  And oh, the food!  Larry did not over-sell it.  We had one of the best meals of our lives that first night with him and Heather at Apollonion, which offers a six-course fish menu that just kept coming and coming. I had an incredible pasta dish with crema di pistacchio at La Gazza Ladra, and our last night we went with Larry to Taberna Sveva (I include these names so I know what to recommend if anyone I know goes).  We invariably let Larry pick the wines, and were introduced to a new favorite grape, Frappato, which Larry told us we'd be unlikely to find outside of Sicily.

Siracusa proper boasts an archaeological site with a small Roman amphitheater, a large Greek theater, and the famous 'ear of Dionysios' cavern, the acoustic properties of which we could hear being tested by groups of Italian schoolchildren as soon as we entered the site (which is like a half-mile from the cavern). By the time we arrived, there were competing groups of high-schoolers instead, doing various chants and cheers, and holy crap was it loud! As we were leaving, one boy turned back into the now-empty cavern and simply shouted "UMBERTO EC-OOOOO!"  Lol.  Unfortunately large parts of the archeological park were closed off, and frankly, the theater had nothing on the one at Epidauros.  We felt similarly about the museum, even though it boasts a wide-ranging collection of Sicilian-Greek antiquities.  Yes, we were being those snobs who have been to "real" Greece and are looking down on the provincials, haha.

Also of interest was the catacomb of S. Giovanni, and back in Ortigia, the mikveh that dates to the 2nd-3rd century CE, the oldest surviving one in Europe.  18 meters below ground, two meters below sea-level, it was infilled with sand by the Jews when they fled in 1493 and forgotten (rather than being purposely destroyed, that is).  It was rediscovered only recently, when renovations of the hotel above were carried out.  Having just seen the catacombs, the rectangular troughs cut into the rock were very much similar to graves, which makes some sense given the 'rebirth' metaphor common to both.

Although Siracusa was probably the most JV-version of Sicily (tourist-oriented, perfect Italian instead of dialect, incredibly friendly to foreigners), we were incredibly grateful for things that were different than Rome. Different food (ahhh, the fried fish place Larry pointed us to, where 8-euro got you a little box filled with a mix of small whole fish atop a bed of calamari, or the sandwich place in the market, where his buddy 'il Mago di Panino' made us a "breakfast sandwich": wild onion, basil, and fennel, then smoked mozzarella and beef carpaccio, topped with olive oil, blood orange zest, and lemon juice--spectacular!), different things for sale (I bought a printed scarf from India, and a pair of earrings in a boutique), different sights (the sea, with its incredibly clear water).  It was good.

Srsly

Nearly a month to the date of my last post: coming off old Cold Round 4 for this (academic) year.  I joked to Sean that I'm almost taking Nathan's 2015 role of ailing Victorian maiden, except for the fact that colds < repeated rounds of food poisoning.  Still, I think I can say that I am Officially Over communal living and its attendant germ factories...

Sickness and Travel Planning

I have an unpleasant cold, which means as the birds sing in the 60-degree sunshine in the courtyard, I'm sitting with the space heater cranked up in the office, one blanket on my lap and the other around my shoulders.  One of the downsides to living communally is that when you're sick and would rather not see anyone, ever, you still run the risk of meeting people if you actually want to leave your bedroom for the office, the kitchen, or the bar (where Gabry has, unsuccessfully this time, been petitioning me to try his "grappa cure").  Luckily IDAF and will walk around ensconced in my blanket like a human burrito.  I have not, however, yet reached the stage of being willing to exit the bedroom in my too-large lilac chenille bathrobe, which I think initially belonged to Jen but which I swapped for a kimono-style robe my mom had given me.  That bathrobe is the color of my childhood bedroom but it's warm as hell.

However I have used this time to plan out some of our final major travels!  The first is at the end of March, when I will head to Boston for RSA and Sean heads to Nantes for a conference of his own; I'd known about RSA for a long time (and in fact the second half of my shoptalk was basically that paper) but Sean just found out about the Nantes thing and so had to withdraw from the Sicily AAR trip.  We kind of resigned ourselves to not going to Sicily, especially because of the expense and difficulty of getting an automatic rental there.  We changed our minds, though, particularly after our friends Heather and Larry came to Rome from Siracusa, where they're living this semester.  Now we're going to go down and spend three nights in Siracusa in April--no rental car, no grand scheme to "do" Sicily, just three days to chill out and explore one part of the island with people who know it well.  There are plenty of ruins and an archaeological museum, which Woody and Leslie recently saw and raved about.

The trip I just booked is for May: we're going first to Budapest, where we can stay with Danny and Kim for a few nights, and then we'll take the train/bus a couple of hours to Vienna, spend three nights there (including our seventh wedding anniversary!) then fly back to Rome.  There are lots of Titians and other relevant artists in those museums, so I'm very excited.

Apart from that, the other travel we're hoping to do is within Italy itself.  Carla and a friend went up to Turin, rented a car, and drove through the Barolo and Barbaresco vine territories, which looked incredibly beautiful; she brought back lots of bottles, several of which I've been lucky enough to sample.  We'd like to do that, maybe in June with friends from the Academy.  We've also got to go back to Naples, and at some point try to go see some of the places where Sean's family came from (though as he recently discovered, his paternal grandmother's family, the Brignoli, were from Piedmonte and not Campania like he'd thought).  In other words, to edit what I said in my last post, by the time I leave here I'll have been in every region of Italy except Valle d'Aosta, Liguria, and Calabria (forgot that one!)

Molise

At some point during our three-day road trip through Molise (and a bit of Puglia), I told Sean that I felt like I owed my great-grandparents an apology, since I had always sort of assumed, without ever really thinking about it consciously, that the place they had left to come to the US must have been pretty drab and dull.  Bonefro itself might not be anything out of the ordinary for a tiny hill town, but the larger region of Molise was really quite stunning.  We basically drove for three days, practically eating up the scenery outside the windows with a spoon--and we were lucky to have incredibly beautiful weather to do it in.

Leaving Rome on Thursday, we headed east and stopped at Subiaco, site of St. Benedict's first monastery.  Nathan had raved about how beautiful the site was, perched on a mountain in a heavily wooded region, with water flowing invisibly but audibly below.  Unfortunately, we got there right at 12:30, when the monastery closed for the 3-hour afternoon break.  What's our least favorite Italian word? Chiuso (closed)! Even the path up to the "Sacro Speco", the cave where the saint lived, was roped off.  So we breathed in some fresh air and hopped back in the car.

Three hours of driving took us straight across the calf of the Italian boot, through some incredibly beautiful snow-capped mountain ranges (the park of 'Majella' is especially awesome) to lush green fields and then finally, Pescara and a view of the Adriatic. We drove south to Termoli, where we had a B&B.  In the morning we headed to Bonefro, thirty miles or so inland, and that's when the landscape was at its most exceptional.  People don't really visit Molise; it's the Italian region with the lowest population density, and one of only three regions without a single UNESCO monument.  There's not much in the way of attractions in the cities, but the landscape is just incredible.  We agreed that we were really lucky to be able to come and explore it, which we never would have done if I hadn't wanted to visit Bonefro.

To my delight, there was indeed a Bar Di Marzo in the main square of the town.  The bartender wasn't particularly surprised when I said that was my name; he first asked if we were Canadian (not just in Bonefro but in all of Molise, most emigrants must have gone to Canada, because everyone thought we were Canadians, except for the one guy in Lucera who thought we were English!) and then pointed to a fat older man standing next to us and said "that's his last name too."  I met 1/24 of the people remaining in town with my last name, haha.

After Bonefro, we went to Campobasso, which turned out to be much more crowded and anxiety-producing than we'd thought.  Still, on our way out of town, we stopped at a gas station with an attached bistro that turned out to be yet another extension of hipster culture, even to the furthest reaches of Italy!  Mason jars for glasses and outdoor seating built out of reclaimed pallets, etc.  But the food was delicious, which is what matters.  From there we headed toward Lucera, technically in the neighboring region of Puglia, which for 75 years, 1225-1300, was home to a Saracen Muslim colony displaced from Sicily by Frederick II.  There was a cool-looking castle on the mountain top, but once again chiuso!  I took a brief nap in the car while Sean poked around, we stopped into the two medieval churches (one of which was built on the site of the destroyed mosque), grabbed a coffee in a very friendly bar, and set out again.

It was about 5pm, and we decided to head for Vieste, on the tip of the Gargano peninsula, which forms the spur of Italy's boot.  The GPS said it would take two hours, and there were lots of well-recommended restaurants in Vieste, so we figured why not?  The drive looked like a lovely coastal itinerary and we hoped some light would hold out for us to see the sea.  Well, what GPS doesn't really tell you is that you're heading UP into the motherfucking wilderness, where you will enjoy two hours of completely unlit hairpin mountain roads, while somewhere far, far, FAR below you lies the silent Adriatic.  Holy shitballs, that was nerve-wracking!  On the plus side, we saw three foxes.  Then, we arrive in Vieste, which is a summer resort town, and find it so packed with people at 7pm on a Friday that parking seems impossible.  We find a (free) spot and head off for our recommended restaurants, only to find that they, and every other eatery we pass, are closed, apparently for the season.  It was amazing--so many people walking up and down in the streets, and apparently none of them were planning to dine out!  In the end we ate at La Teresina, the only open place in town, which turned out to be just fine, with a surprisingly friendly owner/waiter, and then got back in the car to head north around the peninsula back to Termoli.   The roads in this direction weren't hairpin for as long as they were on the other side, for which we were grateful, but it was ironic that here we were, in a place of stunning natural beauty, according to the pictures, which we couldn't even see!  Not our most well-thought-out plan, but an adventure.

Yesterday, we drove from Termoli back toward Rome, taking a different southern route and stopping in Montecassino to see the reconstructed Benedictine abbey.  Coming down the mountain, we practically stumbled onto a really great restaurant with the un-Italian name of Ethan's--thanks, we learned, to the father having emigrated to the States and then having returned to Italy.  Later I discovered it's the top-ranked restaurant in the small city, and with good reason, as their food was not only incredible but inventive, which is usually anathema to Italian chefs.  Our appetizer was this savory "millefoglie" involving layers of thinly-sliced beef, crema di bufala, thin apple slices, and a basil reduction.  I had pappardellini with sage and butter, one of my favorite non-tomato dishes, and god was it good. They even brought us homemade cookes with our coffee, which definitely won Sean over.

Our very last stop before the Academy was Parco Leonardo, the shopping mall by the Fiumicino airport, to hit the Auchan, a megastore that makes most American Walmarts look tiny.  I actually found it anxiety-producing, a sign that I have grown to accept the tiny cramped Conads, Coops, and Docs that form my grocery world!  We picked up groceries, but we were actually there so Sean could get new pillows, since he's never slept comfortably on the Academy pillows.  Last night was the first attempt and so far, so good.

So with this trip, we only have a handful of Italian regions left to visit! Calabria and Piedmonte on our list, so by the end of the year I think we'll have visited all of them except for tiny Val d'Aosta in the north, Sicily to the south, and perhaps Liguria.

Vat Lat Adventures

I went back to the Vatican Library last week for the first time since the fall.  It really is a great place to work, but it's hard for me to schedule time to be there more than once a week.  Just getting there, getting in and getting set up is a lengthy process.  I have to admit that it is pretty awesome to be saluted by a Swiss guard as you show them your reader card at the Porta Sant'Anna; then, once you enter the massive interior courtyard formed between the papal palace on your left (you look up and see tourists on their way to visit the Raphael rooms, walking along the outdoor corridor) and the New Wing of the library, built in the 1580s by Sixtus V, on your right.  Before its construction, the courtyard stretched far and away, down to the Belvedere at the other end of the Vatican complex, but now you enter a massive box of brick and stone, the center of which is a parking lot (naturally).

There are two entrances to the New Wing; one goes to the Archivio Segreto and one to the Library.  In the library everything is state of the art.  The guard scans your card on the way in; scanning it in the cloakroom pops open your locker.  There is a gate and card scanner on the staircase, and upon entering and exiting the reading rooms your card gets scanned there too.  The gate downstairs won't let you out unless you've checked out upstairs, one way to ensure readers have returned all their materials (without, you know, pocketing anything, which used to be a serious problem!).  Once you've scanned in, you sign the register with your locker number, then choose a desk in the cavernous main reading room, or the small Manuscript room, and then indicate that number on the ledger as well.  Only after all of that can you pick up whatever printed volumes you've reserved, or put in a request for manuscripts.  Like I said, it's quite a lot of start-up just to get to the point of looking at something!

So far nothing I've been looking at has been revelatory; mostly it's just following up on published or otherwise referenced archival sources.  Last week and today I was looking at a series, Vat.Lat.14827-35, that contain Giovanni della Casa's papers.  One of the volumes contained something interesting at the back, correspondence written in numerical cipher, separate from the otherwise detailed letters going back and forth between della Casa in Venice and his patron, Cardinal Alessandro, down in Rome.  Prefacing the collection of ciphered material was the key to the cipher itself:

ab ec id of ul ng mp rt sz&

9 4 7 3 5 2 8 6 0

nulli’ 1

qua que’ qui

02 28 52

che chi non

.7 .3 .8

Scrivasi congiunto senza servar’ l’ortografia nelle aspirate’ & nelle doppie et la nulla si ponga al fine delle parole 3/o/4 volte per verso abbreviando tra la nulla li nomi consueti, exempli gratia v.s. rxma, s. sta [ri]?

I wonder how quickly you could break this code without the cipher?  I think it helps that each of the single numbers has an optional corresponding letter, multiplying the potential false answers.  The "special" sets also throw a wrench in, and allow you to do 'combos', which I wasn't expecting.  I decided to try a bit on my own!  I started with the first ciphered text and decided to try to work backward from the end. So the last line and a half of folio 615 reads:  179879896648320721832554846.72574240984697964025.743263

 I was able to break it down thusly:

1 79  879   89664

   da mia   parte

8320721

monsig

832554

monluc

846.7     257 424 098469

perche   gliene   sapera

7964 025 .7 43263

dare   qua l che conto

This is really just one a part of a longer sentence: "...for my part Monsign[ore] Monluca because he will know to give some account of it."   I had actually been working on this for a little while when I realized the folio that came next, which was written in a terribly messy haphazard hand (meaning probably della Casa himself and not his secretary), was a transcription of what I was looking at!  Which meant I could check my work and realize that I did it right, and I had--even the bit that doesn't make sense, which is Monluca: not a recognizable name to me from the Roman or Venetian milieu (and if it's so important that they're talking about it in cipher, they're probably going to be relying on only the most trusted, and therefore most well-mentioned, of go-betweens).  The 'combo' part is in the last line.  "02" gives you "qua", 5 is "l", and ".7" is che, which produces one word, qualche (some), with a kind of shortcut instead of spelling each letter out. 

This felt like a lot of fun, but of course it didn't actually produce anything useful to my work, so I had to give up on the ciphered texts.  Oh well!

ETA: Monsignor Monluca turns out to have been the French ambassador to Venice.  Mystery solved!

Italian Christmas

So that was fun, exhausting, aaaaaand exactly nothing like Christmas, really.  Despite the lights in the streets, the tree in the Salone, and Sean's month-long warbling of Christmas carols, it has never felt less like the holiday to me.  Then again, I've never spent Christmas outside the States before.

We celebrated the (rather warm) day here with a massive potluck, the belated centerpiece of which was Ji Hye's fried chicken.  Sean made a huge pot of pasta fagioli, so at least there was something traditional going on, haha.  After the food, there was bocce and soccer in the backyard, Sean winning a few games of the former; later that night there was pool, with Sean "Sleeper Cell" Gleason losing a few games. I even played with Rick against Helena and Steven, two of the kitchen interns, and managed to do pretty well, even if we lost in the end.  I went to bed before the Christmas sing-along started around midnight, but sitting in bed chatting with Lakshmi I could hear the rousing strains of "Dominic the Donkey" and other classics being belted out by a mildly intoxicated crowd on the floor below.

Although there were no wrapped presents this year, we still got each other gifts!  Mine was writing to the restaurant in Belluno where we had dinner in August to see if I could order a bottle of their specially-made amaro that Sean had been so fond of.  They never replied, but I found the pharmacist who makes it for them, who was not only willing to send two bottles COD to Rome, but threw in all sorts of cosmetic samples with it!  Sean, for his part, visited the antique booths in Piazza Borghese and found a matted print of an engraving after Titian (of a painting I'd never seen before, which is in the Louvre).  This was dismembered from a 19th-century book, and when I looked up the identifying marks of the engraver the first result was a matching leaf in the British Museum, which is cool!  He also bought me a bottle of Refosco, which we shared last night around the pool table.  I still dream of the Sancin Refosco on the menu at il Refolo in Venice, but that doesn't seem to be available anywhere south.

Our Christmas Eve was awesome too, I should say; after the Academy lunch a big group of us went to see Star Wars (in my and Sean's case, for the second time!),  got extraordinarily overpriced drinks at the bar on top of Hotel Bernini and wandered around before settling in for dinner and very serious Star Wars discussion at Insalata Ricca.  Some folks stayed downtown to go to midnight Mass, but Mass in the Pantheon was cancelled, strangely enough, with almost no warning and no explanation.  It was a full moon and a beautiful night, made slightly less so when walking over the Tiber--the smell of starling guano is seriously gross!!