Not Built in a Day

To begin, here are two pictures from this past week: on Tuesday the 17th we went to St Andrea della Valle to look at the dome and apse frescoes by Lanfranco and Domenichino. They are pretty impressive; here are two not-very-good photos. Then on Friday morning I left for Naples (Napoli) with my Baroque Art class! Here's what we saw: Day 1 (Friday) We left Rome at 7am and arrived around 10:30 at the Capodimonte Museum up above the city. This is an extremely large museum so we only saw a small part of it; unfortunately, I have no photos since we weren't allowed to take pictures. We saw works by the Carracci brothers, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, and other northern and southern Baroque painters. Then in the afternoon the bus took us into the city where we took a funicular and a series of public escalators up to see the Monastery of San Martino, a Carthusian monastery, situated on a hill above the city. The views from there were amazing, and the monastery's chapel was d...

Hello everyone! Sorry for the delay in posting, but it's been a busy week. Here are the photos as promised from last weekend (Valentine's Day). I started out my walk by visiting some early Renaissance palazzi, including the Palazzo Cancelleria, Palazzo Farnese (now the French Embassy and closed to the public), and Palazzo Spada. On my way I saw the market at Campo dei Fiori, a fruit and vegetable market by day, popular hang-out for college students at the bars at night. There was also a really cute fountain with turtles! Apparently during WWII the locals were afraid the turtles might get stolen, so they were removed during the occupation and then put back afterward. Then I ventured southward toward the former Jewish Ghetto with the Synagogue (it has an aluminum roof), the Theater of Marcellus and other ancient ruins, and Trastevere (the area of town across the river, Tevere being the Italian word for the Tiber River). In Trastevere I saw some churches, including ...

I realized that I never posted any pictures of my apartment, so today's post includes the stuff of everyday life here in Rome. You've already seen how I eat, now you can learn where I live! Here's a photo of my apartment building: we're on the third floor, which is the fourth row of windows up from the bottom. There's a gym in the basement of our building that isn't part of our apartment complex. And here's our kitchen! It's actually a closet: the door (flat against the wall) on the right can be closed to hide the kitchen area completely. Very strange. This magical sight? It's from our bathroom, next to the light switch for the mirror! I'm not sure if this is a socket of some kind for an unusual appliance; it doesn't seem to have any metal parts to supply electricity. At any rate, it's nice to have some magic in the apartment. Another common sight in Rome: cats! And you all know how much I like cats. Here are three I've m...

Hello readers! First of all, thank you to everyone for the numerous kind birthday wishes I received on Wednesday (my 21st birthday). Although I didn't do much to celebrate, we did bake a pear crisp that only burned a little bit, and went out for dinner to a Mexican restaurant, a rarity in Rome. It was great to have some salsa for a change! This week (Feb. 9-12): I didn't have any class on-site trips, so I don't have any photos from that, but I do have good news! I'm definitely going to Tunisia for spring break, and I now have train reservations for all but one of the trips I'm planning to take. Sara and I are going to Pisa, Sicily (Palermo, Agrigento, Catania, Syracuse), Venice, Milan, and Florence for sure, and are planning to go to Orvieto but we couldn't make the reservations so far ahead. Also this week I made my first drypoint engraving. It's not finished yet so I don't have a photo of that, either. What I do have photos of is my walk around...

This weekend (Feb. 6-8) Sara and I made a point of going to visit the downtown area. On Friday, however, I visited the Instituto Nazionale per la Grafica behind the Trevi Fountain with my printmaking class. We saw original prints by Durer, Rembrandt, Piranesi, Goya, and others, as well as the original plates for a Piranesi print and a couple other artists. It was raining, though, so I didn't go see anything else that day. Saturday we went to the Palatine Hill museum and the Forum Romanum (Roman Republican forum). I can't post all my pictures here because I took so many, but it was great to see all the buildings that I've been studying and can identify on sight by now. We spent several hours climbing all over the site looking at everything. One of the most impressive ruins is the Basilica of Maxentius, which is just immensely large. The Museo Palatino (Palatine Hill) isn't quite as interesting because it was just a lot of brick walls from houses--first the patrici...

On Sunday the 31st we spent the early afternoon in Saint Peter's Square after taking it easy in the morning... sometimes you need to take the day off from sight-seeing! The line to get into the basilica was extremely long so we didn't even try to go in, especially since it was a Sunday so there was probably mass going on. We made meatball subs for lunch, which was an experience; we discovered that meatballs aren't just meatball-shaped pieces of ground beef but actually require seasoning. Next time we'll know better! This week hasn't been too intense, although we have had a couple cooking failures. This week I printed a color relief print using plywood (see pictures below for pictures of my black and white linocut print also), saw five works by Caravaggio in-situ in churches around Rome (in Sta. Maria del Popolo, San Luigi dei Francesi, and Sant'Agostino), and with my Late Antique class, visited St. John in Lateran (the cathedral of Rome), and the remain...