I guess the most major thing that’s happened in the past two days is that I moved into the house with my host “family.” I put it in quotes, since we’re being hosted just by Anna Marcolin. She’s a middle-aged teacher who speaks absolutely no English. (Whether or not she actually knows any English she never lets on.) Dinner was ridiculously awkward our first night. Her mother was over and eating in front of the television, watching some sort of Italian “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” Anna kept talking and talking in Italian, and I only understood a little bit of it. (Though I understood a lot more than the girl I’m living with, since I had to translate for her a lot of the time. It’s frustrating because she keeps looking up to me for help when I WISH I had somebody to look up to.) We were able to answer just a few of the questions she asked us, like where we live, how many siblings we have, what school we go to, etc. I’m actually surprised by how much I was able to pick up, even though I’d only been taking Italian for three days. Even just this extra day of Italian has boosted my confidence considerably. I’m still laughably horrible, though. I remember about five of the thirty verbs we learned yesterday, but that’s still at least five more than I had three days ago. Oh! Right, dinner. She cooked for us, as I realize is the custom. But I can’t get over the size of the meal. We had three courses. The first was a wheat pasta in olive oil with oysters and parmesan cheese. Then we had really REALLY fresh salmon with cauliflower and salad in a vinegarette. And then there was an apple for dessert. Italian dinners are really disproportionate to their breakfasts (thank goodness), since we just had a piece of bread with jam for breakfast. Still, it was really good jam (cherry) and wheat bread with a nice flaky crust. Then the next night we had wheat pasta shells in a marinara sauce, followed by cornish hen, spinach and salad, with a kiwi for dessert. I realize now that Anna likes only health food, which is actually kind of a let-down. I keep hearing about these amazing hearty meals other people are being served, and we get wheat pasta (which was hard and kind of flavorless) and dried out hen. Whatever, I don't want to be Debby Downer--it was still good, just not the really authentic stuff I was looking forward to.
When we first got to the apartment, Anna helped us up the stairs with our luggage, and we unpacked. She showed us around, and I guess the most interesting aspect of our living arrangements is our "culturally different" shower--it's just a bathtub with a hose thing that you wash yourself with. I'm sure it will get less awkward as time goes on, but my first shower was not the easiest thing I've done here. Anna also has a little black dog named Teo. He's really cute and fairly well behaved. I just hope that Anna is a responsible pet owner--I can't tell you the amount of times I've nearly stepped in dog poop just sitting on the sidewalk. (Plus when it rains, like it has been for the last three days, it gets soggy and dribbles down into the gutter. Really nasty.) Our bedroom is really big, with a nice armoir that has eight drawers for each of us, then a space in the middle to hang clothes. There's another dresser, a table with two chairs and then our beds, which each have side tables. It's nice (I'll get pictures soon), but the beds feel like they're stuffed with animal carcasses. Also, we're next to a really busy street, so we fall asleep to the sound of buses going by. As you can imagine, it's very soothing. There's a drying line wa-a-ay up by the cieling that I can't figure out how to reach. I haven't washed any clothes yet, so I guess I'll figure it out when it's necessary. There is at least a small radiator that gets the towels dry pretty fast.
I'm still at the point where going "home" is something I don't look forward to. I like sitting at school, since I've got Internet access here, and I don't have to worry about communicating. The one really hard part about this trip so far is that there's not really any time to rest. We get up, go to school, have lunch, do our art history thing in the afternoon, then go home, have to struggle through dinner with our family, and finally go to sleep. There's this really constant stress level that I think is only masked by my culture shock. On the bright side, we're going to Siena tomorrow. It should be really great to just wander around at my own pace and see the sights without being lectured about them.
I'll end on a lighter note here with my trip to the Florence Baptistry yesterday. It was really so much better than I could have ever imagined. I unfortunately don't have any pictures of the outside, since it was rainy and gross. I'll take pictures of the Baptistry and the Duomo up close when I have a better day. My pictures of the interior aren't the BEST, since I took them without looking through the viewfinder--I just held it as still as I possibly could in my lap during the lecture, trying not to be too obnoxious.
When you first walk in, you have to look up immediately. The ceiling is one enormous mosaic. All the figures are in color, then the background is gold (representing the heavens.) The ceiling is divided in eight triangles. Three of these show Jesus and The Last Judgment. You can see this really awesome demon on Jesus's left in the second picture on the bottom if you squint really hard. (Again, you can see this much bigger on my flickr page.) Then the other five triangles are divided into four layers that tell the stories of Creation, the life of John the Baptist, the Annunciation and the life of Joseph. Then there is a circle of arch-angels and a design on the upper-most section.
This one shows a little better what the walls look like. There are ionic columns holding up the arches in front of the windows in white and green marble (which is sort of what the front looks like). You can also see the four panels better in this one. I hope that the gold translates in this photo. It had such a brilliant, rich patina--I have no idea how they made this back in the 11th century.
This is the only tomb in the Baptistry. It's John XXIII, the only pope to ever step down from his post. He did so to allow a stronger Italian family take over so that the French popes would lose their power. I took this one because the swags of fabric and the figure itself were made by Donatello, and also because the columns are authentic Roman columns that the Florentines took from the old forum.
Here's the altar. I wasn't clear on whether it's still used today. Anyway, you can see that the geometric designs on the walls are modeled on really early Christian architecture, which is cool. I guess the architects who designed the Baptistry thought they were taking their artistic inspiration from early Roman buildings, but they were wrong. There's another mosaic over the altar with a gold background and various religious figures. The big mosaic of Jesus sits over the altar, so it's really spectacular to look up and see all of this stuff at once. I might try to go back later and see if I can get into the excavated remains of Florence's first cathedral, which is below the Baptistry.
I'll be back on Monday (maybe--hopefully Sunday) with news from Siena!
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