Casual Run-ins with Culture

We’ve all suffered through classes that made us think, “How does this information pertain to my life?” That is not the case with the classes at CET. Here’s why:

On a Monday Professor Travis taught us about the Italian system of government and predicted that Italy would have a new government in a very short amount of time. On the following Friday, Sam, Kristina and I travelled to Rome to see the Borghese Gallery—home to the famous Bernini sculpture of Apollo and Daphne—and ran into massive crowds celebrating Berlusconi’s departure as Prime Minister.

Professor Travis also taught us about “amoral familism,” a sociological theory that “backwardness” in a society can be caused by individuals failing to act for the common good, an action rooted in distrust and suspicion of other individuals. Edward C. Banfield, creator of the term “amoral familism,” first came up with this thesis when observing a small, Italian town. Sam, Kristina and I, on the other hand, experienced this Italian suspicion of others at a Siena v. Atalanta (Bergamo) soccer game. Whenever a penalty was called, old men would rise angrily out of their seats and forcefully thrust their hands at the refs, yelling profanities to contest the calls.

Not to be obvious, but Professor Albanese teaches us about Dante. And you basically cannot go anywhere in Italy without running into monuments to Dante, hotels named after Dante, or restaurants claiming to have uncovered the earliest fresco portrait of Dante. He’s just everywhere.

Another direct connection: Professor Petrioli teaches us about Pietro Lorenzetti, then we go to San Francesco church in Siena to see a fresco Lorenzetti created. He teaches us about Jacopo della Quercia, and we finally understand the fountain that we pass by every time we walk into the Piazza del Campo. He then teaches us about Sodoma, a Mannerist painter; Kristina and I make a casual trip to the Uffizi Gallery just to visit; we run into Sodoma’s painting of St. Sebastian; and I decide to write my Sienese Art and Architecture paper about that painting, just because I got to see it. And so on and so forth.

Essentially, studying abroad is awesome because we learn about another culture—Italian culture—but instead of just learning about it in a classroom setting, we get to live it as well. Not to mention that the five of us girls in the CET Siena program get to learn and experience what we learn together, which is the greatest part of all.

The Francigena Road

The Francienga Road (Via Francigena in Italian) is a road of pilgrimage that extends from Spain to Jerusalem. In the middle ages, the Via Francigena was integral in bringing new cultural influences and wealth to Siena, which led to Siena’s growth into a well-established city and cultural center. And of course, because it is so important, the Via Francigena is all our Sienese Art and Architecture teacher can ever talk about. Us CET Siena students, then, have come to loathe and adore the Via Francigena in equal parts, integrating the Via Francigena into conversation as often (or as little) as possible.

In fact, when my roommate Andra was about to meet an Italian boy in the city center, my other roommate Sam and I decided to give her a teasing “talk.” “One,” we said, “you are only allowed to kiss.” “Two,” we said, “you can occasionally hold his hand.” “And three,” we said, “you are, under NO circumstances, allowed to talk about the Francigena Road.” Of course we later amended the last rule to say that Andra is either not allowed to talk about the Francigena Road or is allowed to talk about the Francigena Road, meaning she is either silent about the topic or cannot stop talking about the subject even for a second.

The Francigena Road also came up when Kristina, Marcella and I—the only three people in our Italian language class—were asked to write an in-class, collaborative essay about a “discopub.” Of course, we named the discopub “Via Francigena.” And just as pilgrims stopped into churches along the Via Francigena during the Middle Ages for food and shelter, so was our discopub designed to provide a haven for those wanting to eat and party. We also wrote that Piergacamo, our art history teacher, would be the celebrity at the discopub’s fabulous opening, all the while learning important Italian words like “le pellegrine,” pilgrims, and “un buttafuori,” a bouncer.

Not to make our obsession with the Francigena too absurd, one of the highlights of a bike tour we took through the Tuscan countryside also had to do with the Francigena. First off, the bike tour was cool all on it’s own. We got to bike beneath one of the gates to the city, marked by a traditional Sienese “balzana” crest; we got to bike on roads lined by beautiful, golden rolling hills; and we got to look back from the top of a hill to see the walled-city of Siena, snuggled into the hills at a distance. However, as we approached the top of one of the hills on our bikes, we experienced a particularly spectacular moment: we’d found the Francigena Road. On the left of the dirt road was a modern day sign with a small logo of a pilgrim and, in bold white letters, the words VIA FRANCIGENA. “Take a photo of me hanging off the sign!” my roommate Samanthat exulted, climbing up the sign like a monkey and initiating a whole round of photos we took with this celebrated sign.

We didn’t get to bike all the way from Siena to Jerusalem on the Francigena, unfortunately; but it’s always extraordinary to me that, as silly as we make the Francigena, in Siena, there’s always a good chance that you’ll stumble across history and an older time.

Beautifully unbeautiful: Chiesa San Niccolò, Catania

I stepped inside and felt, at once, a little disappointed. The church was undergoing serious construction, so I could not really walk around. I was reading a sign about San Nicolò’s significance when I was startled by a loud snort. The source of the noise appeared to be an older gentleman dressed in a checkered fleece, despite the heat, who was sitting asleep on a wooden bench nearby. Every so often, he would let a strident snore escape as he sat slumbering on his throne. Eventually, he woke up and noticed us. He said a few introductory words about the church in Italian, walked to the door where two other men stood and then sat behind a desk where he clasped his hands into a ball on its surface and began humming peacefully.

I was struck by the serene manner in which this man carried himself. With his calm movements in mind, the church assumed a new atmosphere for me. It became a beautifully walled city of white marble, whose interior was punctured by shafts of bright light. The construction scaffolding, though quite expansive, only carried the weight of one or two workmen, whose silhouettes were foggy in the dusty light and whose panging hammers were like dripping water on stone. The church had transformed from a decrepit monument into a heavenly sanctuary, draped in an atmosphere of sleepy luminosity. And yet, it is this very luminosity that lends such an environment a certain vibrancy, infusing it with an unquenchable vitality. Despite the church’s incompleteness, all of its various elements – the man, the sound of hammering, the shafts of light – form their own harmonious ecosystem and I, a casual tourist, felt close to God in its presence.

Lo sciopero

A couple of weeks ago, my friends and I decided to take a trip to Cinque Terre for the weekend. We were thrilled to go, both because we had heard such wonderful things about this place, and because it had taken so much effort to plan the trip. After we finally found and put a payment down for a hostel and settled accounts, our Resident Director took us to the ticket office in Piazza Gramsci so we could buy our biglietti for the trip. As she was in the midst of conversing with an employee about expenses, we could see her facial expression become worried. I, who had only taken a couple weeks of Italian at that point, had not the slightest idea about what was going on. When she finished her conversation, she explained to us that there would be a railway strike (uno sciopero) for that Sunday and she didn’t know whether trains would even be running to Siena that day. We were distraught. After much discussion about our options, we finally decided that we would go on our excursion anyway and deal with the strike on Sunday. Worst come to worse, we would take a 5 am train on Monday morning and arrive a half an hour late for class.

The trip to Cinque Terre went smoothly. When we arrived, we, like all of the other English-speaking tourists we encountered, were enchanted with the beautiful coastline, picturesque villages, and clear blue water. We swam, hiked most of the paths between the villages, took a sunset boat ride back to the town we were staying in, and enjoyed some well-earned food. The next morning, a friend and I woke up early to check the strike situation at the train station, and our day full of adventure and confusion began.

To give away the ending, we made it home safe to Siena on Sunday with time to spare. I thought I might provide you with a step-by-step summary of our travels so that you will have some idea of what to do if you should encounter one of the many inevitable strikes that the Italian bus and train systems are so fond of. So. If you should find yourself in Riomaggiore on the Sunday of a strike and need to get to Siena the very same day, just follow these simple instructions and you’re sure to conquer lo sciopero. Here we go:

1. Wake up extremely early in order to scope out your situation. What if the only train running through your station leaves at 6 in the morning? Then you’ll be waiting at the train station all day having no idea that the only train has already left you behind.

2. Since your hostel’s office won’t be open for a couple of hours, leave your room keys in the suspicious wooden box propped up against the outside of the building. There was a cat in a shoebox nearby yesterday. The cat is gone. Where did it go?

3. Arrive at the train station to find other weary Americans studying abroad who have been there since 6, but all of the trains since that time have been cancelled. Learn that if “SOP” appears next to a specific train’s information on the departures board, you’re out of luck. Apparently that means that your train has been cancelled.

4. Wait at the tracks in vain for any train at all to pass by. It is randomly really cold (why, it was so nice yesterday?). Change into pants in public at the tracks (don’t worry, literally no one is there but you because it’s so early). You don’t want to miss the one train that passes through because you’re in the bathroom. Remember that Spongebob episode, “Rock Bottom?” No. You’re determined to have better luck than Spongebob. You’ll change at the platform.

5. As the day progresses, ask other random early-risers stranded in Riomaggiore what their plans are and if there is possibly a way to get back to La Spezia train station if no trains come through. After being hustled by an old lady trying to advertise her hostel to you, figure out that there are taxis, but the taxies charge 50 euros and are all booked for the day. How can it cost 50 euros when your train ride from La Spezia to Riomaggiore on the way to Cinque Terre was only 7 minutes long? Your other options are embarking on a 4-5 hour walk uphill with all of your luggage or hitchhiking.

6. Decide that you’re going to haul up to the top of the town by climbing a formidable hill and discover when you arrive at the tourist center at the top that there is, in fact, negative hope of catching a taxi and pretty much no other options.

7. You see a lady getting into a car. Ask her if there is room for five. Nope, she can only take two to La Spezia, but she was awfully nice to offer the ride at all. It looks like it’s going to rain. Sit aimlessly at the top of the hill until you see a taxi driving away. A taxi? Have the friend in your party who speaks the most fluent Italian chase the taxi up the street and pretty much grovel at the driver for a ride. He is a driver for La Spezia so is technically not working for Riomaggiore, but he is a sympathetic soul and agrees to take you along on his way back. When your friend asks how much it will cost, he hesitates and she takes his moment’s silence to suggest 30 euros. He accepts! Looks like your luck is changing.

8. The second you get into the taxi it begins to rain. During your drive to La Spezia, you begin to understand that if you had decided to walk you would have surely died within moments of your departure. The mountain you are driving up is treacherously steep and curving, and there is legitimately no space on the side of the highway for walking. Plus, even if you had made it you would have definitely died of hypothermia from the rain and wind when you arrived at the station.

9. When you arrive at La Spezia station, send your Italian-speaking friend to the information desk to ask about trains to Siena. When she comes back, you learn that there are no trains to Siena but one to Pisa that leaves in about two minutes. Run to the platform, not bothering to buy the new appropriate tickets or stamp them, and hop on the train and hope for the best.

10. When you get on the train, you immediately realize that it looks like the Hogwarts Express. There is even a man pushing a food trolley. You could swear Harry Potter is in your compartment underneath his invisibility cloak, and you caught a train that will bring you closer to home. What could be better? Your bubble is burst when a man comes through to check tickets. Your friends and you explain that you bought round-trip tickets and didn’t really know you needed new ones, and then the nice man lets you buy your tickets on the train.

11. When you arrive in Pisa, you quickly realize that there is little to no hope of getting to Siena by train and that the last four trains to Florence have been cancelled. You bum around, eat one of those Caffé Zero slushes, and buy marshmallows.

12. Rest in the waiting room that is inexplicably lit by fluorescent pink-purple lights (Why? Why does the room have to be that putrid color?) and try to read for a couple hours while the TV in the corner replays the same commercials over and over. After reading two pages in two hours, you are in the midst of debating with your friends about whether you have time to go to the leaning tower when you notice a departure on the screen for Florence with no “SOP” displayed next to it. It looks like your luck has turned for a second time and you spend the next fifty minutes with your fingers crossed.

13. After a fairly painless train ride, you arrive at Santa Maria Novella station in Florence. You go across the street to see if you can catch the next bus on the Siena Rapida, but the bus is already full and has been having mechanical problems that eventually force all of the passengers to get off. Cool. You buy tickets for the bus that leaves the following hour.

14. You and your friends haul all of your luggage all the way to the Duomo to have a look before you head back. At this point, your feet and back hurt so much (and you are so regretting not showering for two days) that you can barely appreciate the beauty of the Duomo. You decide that next time you visit you’ll be in a better mood and you head back to the bus station to wait for the bus.

15. When you’re finally on the bus, you feel relieved (the end is in sight!), but wish people wouldn’t speak so loudly. You drift off to sleep with a vague sense of exasperation, but when you wake up you find yourself in Piazza Gramsci.

There you have it. Perhaps now you’ll know exactly what to do when you inevitably encounter lo sciopero. My parting advice is this: be creative – at the very least, you’ll have an adventure you won’t forget. From here, all I can do is wish you luck.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

When you sit across from a stranger on a train, next to a stranger on a bus, or across from a stranger at a wooden table in Munich during Oktoberfest, there is a good chance that you are going to exchange life-stories with that person. And it is this opportunity to exchange stories with strangers from all over the world that makes study abroad so exciting. These strangers might be American, simply because study abroad students tend to travel to similar destinations; however, when you get to clink steins with a group of German students who eagerly include you in their own party culture, you learn a great deal by simply interacting with someone different than you are. And it is this realization that people from other backgrounds aren’t scary but are, rather, just human that is extraordinarily liberating.

Every human has his or her reservations about meeting new people; we pick and choose whom we talk to so that we don’t find ourselves in unsafe situations, interacting with unsafe people. However, we often make superficial judgments about other human beings that don’t necessarily correspond to who we think is “safe” to talk to and who is not. And in such cases, we sometimes miss out on meeting incredibly fascinating individuals.

For instance, while taking the train from Siena to La Spezia—a city in Northern Italy that serves as a jumping-off point to the popular destination of Cinque Terre—I sat next to a woman in her late-twenties with a ragged haircut, her hair died red and faded over time. She was wearing a tank top that was too tight and too short, loose hippie pants, and earrings that seemed to delineate her as a follower of some Eastern religion. But when I struck up a conversation with her, introducing myself as someone who is interested in art history and architecture, I discovered that she works as a free-lance architect in Warsaw, Poland. She advised me that working as an architect requires resigning yourself to long hours at the office and integrating others’ ideas into your own.

On the same train, I discovered that the couple sitting across from me instructed the Polish architect in a pottery class somewhere near Rome. This couple, dressed in large, unfortunate floral prints and dirty, non-descript t-shirts, by amazing consequence, came to Italy from Fort Collins, Colorado, a city located sixty miles from my hometown. The woman works as a special-ed teacher—the profession my CET roommate Samantha is pursuing—and the other currently works as a bronze caster and sculptor. After discussing places to visit in Rome, the sculptor informed me that he believes the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini is a “god,” a point I have to agree with him on.

Since meeting these three captivating people, I have chatted with an adorable old Italian woman whom I helped off a train, a Chinese family that opened a clothing shop in Siena within the past fifteen years, and a handsome German man whose children live with him in Munich but who is dating a woman from L.A., to name a few. Humans never cease to surprise and fascinate me, and it seems that when we are thrown together in common situations, sometimes our best and most absurd qualities emerge.

The Sienese Pigeon

I love pigeons, and I love them dearly. Show me a classically thundercloud-colored pigeon with a couple turquoise and scarlet feathers in the neck area and I will be one contended gal. What about the occasional milk chocolate or white individual, or the even rarer cookies and cream mixture? I adore them all. I have met few other human beings in this world who share my passion for birds, let alone pigeons, which one witty family member described so lovingly as “the rats of the sky.” Okay, I’ll take it, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but as surely as I know you’re reading this post thinking “wow, this girl is a crazy person – who could have spent two whole weeks in beautiful Siena and be thinking of those dirty little creatures?” I also know from my time here that pigeons have something that even the savviest resident lacks. And it has everything to do with beautiful Siena.

To start, I’ll provide some background about Siena’s pigeon inhabitants. In my unprofessional opinion, I’d say that the city’s pigeon populace rates: “moderate.” The only reason why one might think this rating too low is that pigeons are essentially the only birds regularly visible in the city center. I would even go so far as to say I’ve recognized the same pigeon in different parts of the city – a phenomenon common of small Liberal Arts colleges like the one I will return to in the spring, except with humans (or squirrels). Now, one might think about how it’s a shame that other more aesthetically pleasing birds aren’t present. I argue, on the contrary, that this only emphasizes the complexity of the intelligence and adaptive qualities of the pigeon brain – a triumph over less clever creatures. And yet, the most impressive feat of the Sienese pigeon has to be its ability to access some of the most enviable and inaccessible views and experiences offered by the handsome city in which it lives.

Now, if you’ve never paid close attention to a pigeon flying, you’re missing out. My Ornithology professor once bashfully admitted that he sometimes confuses pigeon flight with that of hawks. Returning to the point, just imagine the Tuscan panorama from above – an unfurled mantle of yellow-greens, ochres, and orangey-brick red metastasizing sleepily in every direction. From this view, you can probably see the black and white striped stone of the Duomo, the reassuring shell shape of the Piazza del Campo, and the labrynthine snaking of intrepid streets that revel in their own Medieval complexity. Maybe you could even pinpoint that veritable Mount Olympus that I climb every morning to get to class. This city lends an exceptional meaning to “bird’s eye view,” as is evident from an impressive array of postcards sold in any local Tabaccheria. Now, while pigeons don’t fly high enough to get quite as picturesque a view as that plastered to the front of the postcard I’m about to send my boyfriend, pretty much any sight of the city from above is breath-taking. And can you imagine the spectacle of these rich colors and sights dissolving into one another with the blur of motion and flight? As a watercolor painter spending a semester in Siena, I envy these pigeons from my earth-bounded circumstance. That’s saying a lot, seeing as there is no dearth of artistic inspiration in this city.

If we humans want to see Siena from above, we need only climb the narrow corkscrew staircases of the Torre del Mangia or the Duomo façade. In fact, just yesterday I found myself atop the Duomo façade after spending an Art History class studying Duccio’s famed Maesà – I couldn’t have asked for a more fantastic afternoon. And yet, the second I descended I wanted to climb right back up with a book and stay there all afternoon and evening. My excursions above the city can only be undertaken a handful of times due to time and monetary constraints, but I wish I could be up there every day. Now, if I were a pigeon, I could pretty much chill on the Duomo façade whenever I pleased. If I so desired, I could even lay my nest on part of the wall. No money, no stair climbing, I would need only Bernoulli’s convenient principle to bask in the sunlit, breezy atmosphere of mid-September Tuscany.

I wish that I could perch like a pigeon. If I had this capacity, I would rest on the sculpture-laden cornices above the Duomo’s main entrance. I would plop down atop the she-wolf’s column on the former Francigena road and observe the gold-painted man below, posed as an old-fashioned photographer who playfully turns the crank on his camera when you drop a Euro into his hat. And, I admit, there are several times that I’ve looked on jealously as pigeons land freely on the marble sculptures of the Campo’s fountain, where they wash their delicate beaks in narrow rivulets of cool water.

After only two magnificent weeks, I already feel at home in this city (though after these two magnificent weeks, climbing Mount Olympus hasn’t gotten any easier – another reason to wish I could fly). I feel safe walking through the streets during both the day and night. I am proud and satisfied every time I emerge unscathed from the Conad supermarket where nobody speaks English (and I speak barely any Italian). After some searching, I have already found several cozy niches, my favorite being the fountain in the Oca contrada. The gold cameraman may actually recognize me. But even if I lived here for years, I wouldn’t be as intimately close to this city as a Sienese pigeon. I will never put my bare feet on the marble sculptures of this town, nor will I inconspicuously dunk my head in my favorite fountain. I won’t pick at the tasty dropped crumbs of foreign strangers and I will never take respite on an orange-red roof heated by the sun. And, as much as I would cherish the opportunity to sit with the sculptures above the Duomo’s main entrance, I must say that I neither want to go to jail nor fall to my death. (I may also note here that pigeons have excellent spatial memories and probably navigate the winding hills and roads with enviable ease.)

Thus, the Sienese pigeon can appreciate Siena in a way that I will never know. I really do have nothing to complain about, though. For these next few months, I couldn’t ask for a better home. Here, as I sit in my room in the Lupa contrada (who knows, maybe pigeons are loyal to the contradas where they make their nests), I am content. I can only hope that this, perhaps unconventional, view of Siena can give you a glimpse of a few of the many wonders of this incredible place and maybe inspire you to think twice about my feathered friends and neighbors. After all of this, if you still consider pigeons “rat’s of the sky,” I won’t be offended for them – I like rats, too.