Florentine Adventures

The small town of San Gimignano sits on a hill, about an hour outside Florence. Surrounding the town are modern buildings, vineyards and rolling hills, but inside the walls, the medieval architecture is frozen in time with sixteen of its original towers still standing. I went in the middle of the week, so the streets were quiet and fairly empty. The stillness was soothing after the noisy and crowds of Florence. It wasn’t until we reached a garden at the top of the city’s hill, however, that San Gimignano rooted itself in my heart.

I’d heard about a tower in the garden that you could climb for free (a much better alternative to the almost $20 to climb the 200 ft tower in the center of town), but didn’t see any signs. Finally, I found a stone staircase that led up the small tower. The walls of the city had prevented me from seeing the surrounding countryside, so I was not prepared for the view. It was absolutely breathtaking. I took a 360 degree panorama, but pictures can not even begin to do it justice.

Mary and I went back to Chiesa Cristiana Biblica on Sunday. Our English-speaking friend Andrea preached this time. Once again, everything was in Italian, but we were able to more or less follow along for at least the music. I learned that our Italian friend who helped us find the verses last week is named Pino, short for Gesepepe (or something like that—basically, the Italian equivalent of Joseph).

I had my first class yesterday: Basic Sewing Techniques. Even though I do have a decent amount of experience on a sewing machine, I’ve never actually been taught anything. So, I’ll be learning various stitches and when to use them, fabric types, etc. I’m especially excited about this class because it is something I really love to do, and it’s a nice break from electronic equipment. It’s almost entirely hands-on, which is by far my favorite kind of class.

Today I had Introduction to Italian Philosophy. This is going to be my only “real” class this semester (meaning, all of my other classes will be easy to forget that I’m doing them for college credit). I don’t know that “excited” is the right word, but I do think it will be very useful and enlightening to learn more about Italy’s philosophers and history.

Beginning Italian is going to be very helpful for my time here. Italian is very similar to Spanish, since they are both Romance languages—which is helpful and confusing at the same time. Many times, rather than translating from English to Italian and vice versa, I found myself just translating between Spanish and Italian. Pronunciation is still throwing me off, but I’m getting better at that.

Art history is going to be more lecture than I’d been hoping for, but about 40 % is going to be museum visits, so I’m excited about that. We’ll hit the biggies in Florence—the Uffizi, Academia (Michelangelo’s David), and the Duomo museum, along with a day trip to Prato and a couple smaller museums. There’s nothing quite like taking art history where it happened and actually getting to see the work, not just slides.

Italian-phrase-of-the-blog:

Come si dice . . .? (Co-may see dee-chay) : How do you say . . .?