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.

La bellezza

Walking into the Sienese Duomo is like meeting a celebrity. I have studied art history for the past two years; have repeatedly heard the names Duccio and Pisano; and have seen photos of both Duccio’s Maestà, once displayed in the Duomo, and the Duomo itself on a projector screen. But having a physical interaction with a three-dimensional object, particularly a building, is far more insightful than a photograph can ever be.

Although I have never been part of an organized faith, it is hard to believe when entering the Duomo that such a magnificent building was made by human beings. In our CET class Sienese Art and Architecture, I learned that people during the middle ages thought of medieval cathedrals as products of God for God, and that artists were just intermediaries between God and the physical world. However, knowing that artists over 700 years ago collaborated to build and decorate such an amazingly sumptuous yet refined building—divine inspiration or no—always melts my mind. And the fact that I stared at photos of Pisano’s pulpit for almost a day back in Baltimore, not to mention for homework here in Siena, didn’t help calm my racing heart when I finally got to approach the stone masterpiece.

Besides having the opportunity to see artwork in real life—not on slides—and to learn about new artworks and historical traditions, living in Siena has given me a whole new conception of what life can be like. I could just say that I am experiencing a different culture from that found in the United States. However, I am so delighted by the Italian appreciation for living that I must say, Americans would be healthier were they to work and think at a slower pace. The generalization that Americans work too hard and that Italians work too little should be taken with a grain of salt; but, coming from a university that is inundated with stressed out twenty-somethings, I can tell you that there is a better way to live than sitting at a desk in the library for twelve hours a day. Art is all around us—Italy makes this opinion seem like a fact—but it is not worth anything without someone to momentarily appreciate its beauty.