tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40822165836413007662024-02-18T23:01:06.819-08:00The Book of General WisdomLucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-37634972595263708402012-05-07T04:31:00.000-07:002012-05-07T04:38:29.121-07:00Sex and the City, feminism & book snobbery<br />
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>I have a confession to make. Once upon a time, I loved Sex
and the City.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>I bought the DVDs and wondered at the ridiculous clothes and
endlessly questioned whether the behaviour of Samantha, as HBO seemed to
suggest, really was the optimum way to live life as an adult female. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>And then I grew up just slightly and realised that a
programme where women, despite being intelligent and successful, are only
allowed to talk about men is probably not a very good feminist concept. Despite
what certain magazines might say about empowerment being reached by a woman being able to
buy her own shoes. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Also the ‘independence’ message was more than slightly
undermined by the fact that all the series was geared towards was finding a
suitable man. It was like a bastardised version of <i>Pride and Prejudice </i>set 200 years later, without the beauty and
with added lashings of gratuitous nudity. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>There were good points, obviously. SATC was of a time (late
90s, early 00s) when women talking openly about all things sex had never been
seen before and was probably needed. It seems superfluous (and borderline patronising)
now – the films highlighting this especially. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Still, I was 13 and I definitely shouldn’t have been
watching it – and it was a guilty pleasure. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Which is all a preamble to my point in this post, which I am
almost ashamed to commit to blog. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>I’ve been reading the biography of Sylvia Plath (see below
post). It’s heavy going. Sylv is in Mytholmroyd (so, so close to home for me),
getting laughed at by straight-talking, slightly bemused relatives of Ted
Hughes, and reacting by tramping off across the moors in that melodramatic way
that would eventually be her undoing, <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>So, I was getting annoyed with Sylvia and her non-problems.
I wanted to read some trash. I felt the overwhelming need to feed my brain with
the literary equivalent of candy floss. I went into our lounge, where my
flatmate had left a pile of books that will probably, although I doubt any time
soon, make their way to the local branch of Oxfam. I selected <i>The Carrie Diaries.</i> <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>For those lucky enough to not be enlightened<i>, The Carrie Diaries</i> is Candace Bushnell’s
telling of ‘the girl before she became an icon’, and it recounts Carrie Bradshaw’s
last year of high school. 17-year-old Carrie races around her tiny backwater
town (this is a tale of a small town girl done good, of course), wearing ‘genuine
1970s go-go boots’, sorting out the dramas of temperamental friends and sisters
and of course having man trouble. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>It’s utter bollocks. I’m apologising to my brain and the
people who awarded me with my English degree every time I pick it up; I’m trying
to push out of my mind the fact that I’m reading a book with an embossed gold
cover and scrawly pink writing across the front that starts with the earth
shattering lines “They say a lot can happen in a summer. Or not. It’s the first
day of senior year, and as far as I can tell I’m exactly the same as last year.
And so is my best friend.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Carrie and her ‘best friend’ then go on to discuss the fact
that they really, really need to get boyfriends. So clearly, nothing does
change in the life of Carrie Bradshaw. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>I’m still taking Sylvia on the train; I can’t have people
thinking I’m reading this shit out of anything other than desire for perpetual
brain-ache. </b></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQfjmOgWpMaR2bJy82VU3O9d3dnN8_bEOloIyqmkat-AUbpVUZ_U0X-nWR-g2r4tXu_VXyIBIgamUI0-TqPmbp1OuC2DRHUgiPmk68bzzUxzlsRStMClriv6Nhvh-IaAtKE6ck7cdh2gTs/s1600/The_Carrie_Diaries_Book_cover-593x954.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQfjmOgWpMaR2bJy82VU3O9d3dnN8_bEOloIyqmkat-AUbpVUZ_U0X-nWR-g2r4tXu_VXyIBIgamUI0-TqPmbp1OuC2DRHUgiPmk68bzzUxzlsRStMClriv6Nhvh-IaAtKE6ck7cdh2gTs/s320/The_Carrie_Diaries_Book_cover-593x954.jpg" width="198" /></span></a></div>
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<i><b>The Carrie Diaries, Candace
Bushnell, HarperCollins, 2010 </b><o:p></o:p></i></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-89083091152277372532012-04-25T13:47:00.001-07:002012-04-25T13:47:53.717-07:00Surprised by Sylvia...<br />
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>My tube reading this week has been the biography of
Sylvia Plath (<i>Bitter Fame: A Life of
Sylvia Plath</i>, Anne Stevenson, Penguin). <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Apart from causing a few people to throw me curious glances –yes,
I know it’s fairly heavy for 8am in the rain, but please– it has shed some
light on a writer that I clearly knew far less about than I thought. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdN5p-LMcCAJ_1YotOwjnfeRsVSMTgLfqme8b288iO88NH3zXL7-7sDKJuiyIYsvmgqGkwx-72lK3vu-AESjnlTQVL0l6-PApH8tEEchNoHXTc3A3AFLdy4N9MrozA0l-jkXs-Ik1VMZdW/s1600/sylvia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdN5p-LMcCAJ_1YotOwjnfeRsVSMTgLfqme8b288iO88NH3zXL7-7sDKJuiyIYsvmgqGkwx-72lK3vu-AESjnlTQVL0l6-PApH8tEEchNoHXTc3A3AFLdy4N9MrozA0l-jkXs-Ik1VMZdW/s320/sylvia.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Currently I’m in 1956, and our Sylv is a graduate student at
Cambridge. She is spending most of her time flitting off to Paris for trysts,
leading on a ridiculous amount of men, and having far more sex than I could
ever have expected from a writer who is most famous (and I don’t mean to
disregard her work; the facts are unfortunate) for her all-encompassing
depression. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>In general, she could not be pegged as,<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b> <span style="font-size: 7pt;"> a) </span><!--[endif]-->a recluse<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b> <span style="font-size: 7pt;"> b) </span><!--[endif]-->socially awkward<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b> <span style="font-size: 7pt;"> c) </span><!--[endif]-->overlooked <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>which are three things that I definitely considered her to
be, before I started reading Stevenson’s book. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>There are clearly a lot of misconceptions flying around
about Sylvia. But she certainly isn’t the only one who has been obscured over
the years. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>According to the book, when Sylvia first met Ted Hughes she
yelled at him before <i>biting</i> his face
(steady on, love). From this point on she seems determined to turn him into a
brooding, dangerous, Heathcliff-type character. It is the impression I always
had of him, so maybe Sylvia succeeded. It is at odds with how his Cambridge
friends saw him, though – gentle and kind are the words I seem to remember
Stevenson using. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>It is worth noting, if you weren’t already aware, that Ted
Hughes was born in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire – a village way up in the hills,
just a mere stone’s throw from the Brontes’ home at Howarth. It is, in my
entirely unbiased, Yorkshire-bred opinion, a place everyone should visit for
its literary associations. Was (and is) this location part of the reason why
Ted Hughes has been so depicted, by Sylvia and by history? I’d hazard a guess
at, um, <i>yes</i>. In reality, it doesn’t appear
that he was this person at all. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>I think, maybe, that Sylvia Plath was determined to play the
tragic heroine all along. Controversial? Possibly. It is unlikely, of course,
that her phenomenally bright, utterly unstable mind will ever be fully
understood – although biographers like Stevenson make a decent attempt. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>So, I’m learning a lot about Sylvia, and about Ted. <i>Bitter Fame</i> is throwing up a whole heap
of surprises. Slap on the wrist, history. You have misrepresented them both. </b></span><o:p></o:p></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-89960207624009951212012-03-29T11:51:00.000-07:002012-03-29T11:51:47.318-07:00RIP Adrienne Rich, hero.<div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This morning when I came into work and flicked through the news headlines/ trending tweets I was informed that the poet Adrienne Rich had died at the age of 82.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I was first introduced to Rich whilst I was at Lancaster (thank you for quite literally changing my life, now defunct Women Writers of Britain and America 302) through the Virago Book of Love Poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I can honestly say that some of the most beautiful writing I encountered throughout my whole degree was created by little known female writers and stored between the Virago collection’s heart-adorned covers. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Adrienne Rich was of course not one of the many unacknowledged writers that graced the book’s pages, although being female, gay and Jewish she was fighting on multiple levels. Due to copyright law, a lot of her poems that were previously on sites like poemhunter.com have been taken down, and her work is therefore not all that easy to find on the internet. So, I’ve been slightly sad today about the fact that my copy of the Virago collection, containing her work, is 200 miles away in a bag in the corner of my Huddersfield bedroom. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Adrienne Rich died yesterday in Santa Cruz. (Re)visit her work if you have the inclination or a few spare minutes. She was one of the greats. </span></b><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-38131363024655525812012-03-22T14:02:00.002-07:002012-03-23T04:12:29.773-07:00MATE, there is no talent here... oh.<b style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">Hanging around Alex Square in the rain, falling asleep in the Learning Zone and repeatedly getting told off for bringing my umbrella into Venue by the DON'T SHEK IT woman - t</span></b><b><span style="color: #0b5394; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif;">hese things were regular occurrences in my Lancaster life. Today saw the end to another great Lancaster institution: as of around 3am this morning, Carleton was no more.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #0b5394; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif;"><br />
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<b><span style="color: #0b5394; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif;">She doesn't even GO HERE (any more), I might hear you suggest. Well. Never mind. </span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #0b5394; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif;"><br />
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<b><span style="color: #0b5394; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif;">Here is a collection of my favourite Carleton moments. Just call it a tribute - to three years of Wednesday nights.</span></b><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0yt0-e9AzO-23l3UYwFF-zWq8raV09RgHPgjbKSG9lfOPHdrbyafDaliieHVVGFHMVm39ks2s6B2k-U7lRgfUDgZhiG4q3eD2RBIu4xvgJGSMAW291Q_2VOX6BnG90g6OfcMCZsYvM1fv/s1600/24394_1373472857965_1266093657_1063094_3195774_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0yt0-e9AzO-23l3UYwFF-zWq8raV09RgHPgjbKSG9lfOPHdrbyafDaliieHVVGFHMVm39ks2s6B2k-U7lRgfUDgZhiG4q3eD2RBIu4xvgJGSMAW291Q_2VOX6BnG90g6OfcMCZsYvM1fv/s320/24394_1373472857965_1266093657_1063094_3195774_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;"><b>Soz Katy.</b></span></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqU7bRqJ9kA3Y-gWb4gJF0TW1W5pduyn-pQw1Xxyq84mMF9Pg5EdHVNNgboOGPcgQm07SYyoFhXFNJ9mrAfhlWTt0JAEEqh_3Rz-t5DLbg1mMjTG_FCQZ8F3VBMjbSrSyAJ0OBXcZrjgH9/s1600/24578_1388500273641_1266093657_1096985_5500157_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqU7bRqJ9kA3Y-gWb4gJF0TW1W5pduyn-pQw1Xxyq84mMF9Pg5EdHVNNgboOGPcgQm07SYyoFhXFNJ9mrAfhlWTt0JAEEqh_3Rz-t5DLbg1mMjTG_FCQZ8F3VBMjbSrSyAJ0OBXcZrjgH9/s320/24578_1388500273641_1266093657_1096985_5500157_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #0b5394;">Patriot's Carleton... </span></b></div><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiDQnsMLIAe7DQelgzSYTkjWbatPB8GrJjJdDJA6ENz1uRPlohKI_YkFF5toq3L778RpGXEayk2LAe1hnlR4ouaAjcYTlpMQNfRA91PyMoQeK_2uhrA33I6T5KksWDwlezJXOoitIG9405/s1600/29058_10150187916980472_601270471_12709539_4651087_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiDQnsMLIAe7DQelgzSYTkjWbatPB8GrJjJdDJA6ENz1uRPlohKI_YkFF5toq3L778RpGXEayk2LAe1hnlR4ouaAjcYTlpMQNfRA91PyMoQeK_2uhrA33I6T5KksWDwlezJXOoitIG9405/s320/29058_10150187916980472_601270471_12709539_4651087_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkVya0lk1HToOnB2weDP6mjk1sCkf3XDc9rvbyqjpyu3deQU-5n-vvoyIxDJuEp5F0LTU8unz8DAY2bXvlUmOAjvo_Ddq5OaX3OhFln4sy0c7EOllEVver5oqCYZyRjvlo6ZjUNDfv3UeC/s1600/5009_1177517399201_1266093657_492613_2912553_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkVya0lk1HToOnB2weDP6mjk1sCkf3XDc9rvbyqjpyu3deQU-5n-vvoyIxDJuEp5F0LTU8unz8DAY2bXvlUmOAjvo_Ddq5OaX3OhFln4sy0c7EOllEVver5oqCYZyRjvlo6ZjUNDfv3UeC/s320/5009_1177517399201_1266093657_492613_2912553_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: #073763;">What beauts... just before we ended up in A&E getting told off. Class.</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw_k79szmsxk0SiJvTM7lGA3H365gIP3RD25haE7cTdVkOKMcDDqw9wWhJPFW5NGQLrRpk-frbyJP2U9eiNatrPkZMUzX48UBmrwO3_zXwwCT1TGo2QUmadmAmxoauUhwFmbBmKl-Fg8AC/s1600/29058_10150187917965472_601270471_12709616_4052785_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw_k79szmsxk0SiJvTM7lGA3H365gIP3RD25haE7cTdVkOKMcDDqw9wWhJPFW5NGQLrRpk-frbyJP2U9eiNatrPkZMUzX48UBmrwO3_zXwwCT1TGo2QUmadmAmxoauUhwFmbBmKl-Fg8AC/s320/29058_10150187917965472_601270471_12709616_4052785_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiawyJ4JfoNRxvX_2stH1yG_0ZpIoPdmmTzfGChYePkgd98jxhGijYrobTixhi1DQWd08h7ripVSca8xukc5e4gc2FIpj0wUERFipc-h7iAKOB3_cGpgDnu6lYhtnSn7jY_9A0zfmV1yUPG/s1600/29058_10150187918095472_601270471_12709623_5985191_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiawyJ4JfoNRxvX_2stH1yG_0ZpIoPdmmTzfGChYePkgd98jxhGijYrobTixhi1DQWd08h7ripVSca8xukc5e4gc2FIpj0wUERFipc-h7iAKOB3_cGpgDnu6lYhtnSn7jY_9A0zfmV1yUPG/s320/29058_10150187918095472_601270471_12709623_5985191_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #0b5394;">So much lovin'. </span></b></div><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFXUuCdeLoJK_MhHKTEh3SU791nZSmBmkEQ_JnHmRBJEbJUn3eLutz4gNv2EF4HJfkqXhYRan7WoQt7sh3ymsAQm1z2e-gCrn7bxY39f_sACKsWQYiBIIqddnUw5qzAi1v4mXeXo1WwXy6/s1600/29488_394646507201_647152201_4523379_7688996_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFXUuCdeLoJK_MhHKTEh3SU791nZSmBmkEQ_JnHmRBJEbJUn3eLutz4gNv2EF4HJfkqXhYRan7WoQt7sh3ymsAQm1z2e-gCrn7bxY39f_sACKsWQYiBIIqddnUw5qzAi1v4mXeXo1WwXy6/s320/29488_394646507201_647152201_4523379_7688996_n.jpg" width="234" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #0b5394;">FRINGED Wench</span></b></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitfoovhOgNudH-eyoBPEGtghua4TvtCaVHlOZR4qbN8gV8wHzA1Jkc4ZETr-OpRjjOfoUSP6lqJSt5jzj2hKgniOjxQ8F6LzB6AwBi3bXsqW25uksQ1B_uHl-vmg8btcRoqP0EvwA-n_kW/s1600/29488_394656337201_647152201_4523549_8193188_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitfoovhOgNudH-eyoBPEGtghua4TvtCaVHlOZR4qbN8gV8wHzA1Jkc4ZETr-OpRjjOfoUSP6lqJSt5jzj2hKgniOjxQ8F6LzB6AwBi3bXsqW25uksQ1B_uHl-vmg8btcRoqP0EvwA-n_kW/s320/29488_394656337201_647152201_4523549_8193188_n.jpg" width="234" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><3 </div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQEQ6koy3oN8o-6w6vzSrrEpHEZImZLpqW0eW7Z_-qxsKnnnG4BD4LdzpVrgfjF2JQuAJe-Aqey76KYZQP1RNyWe-7KRC_GIIwB9cJWVk-vT8FTFduRJNmDKpTAsex9iDWhUka17LgURbs/s1600/29488_394656367201_647152201_4523554_3621131_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQEQ6koy3oN8o-6w6vzSrrEpHEZImZLpqW0eW7Z_-qxsKnnnG4BD4LdzpVrgfjF2JQuAJe-Aqey76KYZQP1RNyWe-7KRC_GIIwB9cJWVk-vT8FTFduRJNmDKpTAsex9iDWhUka17LgURbs/s320/29488_394656367201_647152201_4523554_3621131_n.jpg" width="234" /></a></div><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG4SWiyplOZAwRWZEdujcJBvG8r7aONmH2xA0igtH-QtjKCVnhHdYrHnsA0YPfMi6879RhfSzVvKpcp7DGvAJq4aSGlUPc-6HCRgBrm1rNmF9DpopFzCC4gqSSKlXhHWD5VNH4krev-kqI/s1600/73810_1669584260565_1266093657_1781838_5001750_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG4SWiyplOZAwRWZEdujcJBvG8r7aONmH2xA0igtH-QtjKCVnhHdYrHnsA0YPfMi6879RhfSzVvKpcp7DGvAJq4aSGlUPc-6HCRgBrm1rNmF9DpopFzCC4gqSSKlXhHWD5VNH4krev-kqI/s320/73810_1669584260565_1266093657_1781838_5001750_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #0b5394;">We dressed as chimney sweeps and took a broom to Carleton. Couldn't do it anywhere else.</span></b></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUvCQ4h6ciI9OFNKnEagkdwfgSMH5FLZKH6srC4NAMZiHgq6sQGzhL8hgU1G-EU-y3o2Yr1rg07xVYJkRNBpiBWOZn3SYFXnpqdr3gPVNDHHrjwaKmCQ3u6zgSVHHl8kgZ6lJK9YPaHZlX/s1600/167010_1837034286711_1266093657_2136667_1501719_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUvCQ4h6ciI9OFNKnEagkdwfgSMH5FLZKH6srC4NAMZiHgq6sQGzhL8hgU1G-EU-y3o2Yr1rg07xVYJkRNBpiBWOZn3SYFXnpqdr3gPVNDHHrjwaKmCQ3u6zgSVHHl8kgZ6lJK9YPaHZlX/s320/167010_1837034286711_1266093657_2136667_1501719_n.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1ar76ZyUVFy1Ima6WJ-Y18e4cBQKysDwzczVXYTaALCuECfvsD_-TX7G-m3WVMM-ymhEGlVQX8VVEZmSEcpgGpq4W8dPZwS0ZbqhBG6uZRhUrRVajyc6aHwXZl5hvB_N_qfn_f1sLBBPZ/s1600/208578_1954911873577_1266093657_2322953_255690_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1ar76ZyUVFy1Ima6WJ-Y18e4cBQKysDwzczVXYTaALCuECfvsD_-TX7G-m3WVMM-ymhEGlVQX8VVEZmSEcpgGpq4W8dPZwS0ZbqhBG6uZRhUrRVajyc6aHwXZl5hvB_N_qfn_f1sLBBPZ/s320/208578_1954911873577_1266093657_2322953_255690_n.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #0b5394;">Tasty face.</span></b></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8NyknyMOXB2o7BFEn022V0Qf6SVYpNfv6N4jt7Tipr6pIz-76BWNcep-BrFHsbzUUi3XmVCT4NXljlBb4Pagx4_cd4j0mmqzwD7ajfEch9hEQ7HXfJp4kGU-GVksDebUYu6voR_G0ioFW/s1600/197510_1954901873327_1266093657_2322892_3418989_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8NyknyMOXB2o7BFEn022V0Qf6SVYpNfv6N4jt7Tipr6pIz-76BWNcep-BrFHsbzUUi3XmVCT4NXljlBb4Pagx4_cd4j0mmqzwD7ajfEch9hEQ7HXfJp4kGU-GVksDebUYu6voR_G0ioFW/s320/197510_1954901873327_1266093657_2322892_3418989_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVEoFNJnjzSXxGm122_BUHfN0wDralh-hInvnRK2dFteEKsKIxlkFDjGqF-YqbOt9oQKOIu8LGrWKX0h8s7cZSK6HvB9yBVlYH0mJRDdKv7QgC16sjKpBtoEgqwYkvLuueiBULuVbox7QY/s1600/224038_2035307123408_1266093657_2436942_3604783_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVEoFNJnjzSXxGm122_BUHfN0wDralh-hInvnRK2dFteEKsKIxlkFDjGqF-YqbOt9oQKOIu8LGrWKX0h8s7cZSK6HvB9yBVlYH0mJRDdKv7QgC16sjKpBtoEgqwYkvLuueiBULuVbox7QY/s320/224038_2035307123408_1266093657_2436942_3604783_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Cu3rXpn89ArHZhgktTCzJv2i8cO12VLGzXuSFtWAAl4gB3Fgp6zg0yM4JZDw43JbQKJd8XKVob0Rl_QVCbcHI31K2-PUeHJmm-Rna9YvuXFo6TSbh_FwfJ9rzNKojiAat7ScBTbo77Xt/s1600/230397_2035314363589_1266093657_2436976_6070030_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Cu3rXpn89ArHZhgktTCzJv2i8cO12VLGzXuSFtWAAl4gB3Fgp6zg0yM4JZDw43JbQKJd8XKVob0Rl_QVCbcHI31K2-PUeHJmm-Rna9YvuXFo6TSbh_FwfJ9rzNKojiAat7ScBTbo77Xt/s320/230397_2035314363589_1266093657_2436976_6070030_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #0b5394;"><b>Foam's about to hit.</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjAOAhqv2LEv6Bq7C9CKxR-rVl46SJ8Yvk-_MjBkWx1JhWxryL0K23hb7iqtx7kry5CSPw-PUj8rOlUONvTkYfkZXhT0bSqKG5S_-w9DDE6WxStE77giAwXZ54wIerKHnZ50kQTUBM_X46/s1600/208742_1954937074207_1266093657_2323010_7065355_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjAOAhqv2LEv6Bq7C9CKxR-rVl46SJ8Yvk-_MjBkWx1JhWxryL0K23hb7iqtx7kry5CSPw-PUj8rOlUONvTkYfkZXhT0bSqKG5S_-w9DDE6WxStE77giAwXZ54wIerKHnZ50kQTUBM_X46/s320/208742_1954937074207_1266093657_2323010_7065355_n.jpg" width="237" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #0b5394;">Came home later covered in washing up liquid and without golf club or glasses, gutted.</span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #0b5394; font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><i>Thank you Carleton! </i></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #0b5394; font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><i>xxx</i></span></b></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-19066289354622708122012-01-28T12:24:00.000-08:002012-01-28T12:24:09.589-08:00Last Chance To See... 'Alice in Wonderland' at the Tate Liverpool<div style="background-color: white; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: #351c75; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><span style="line-height: normal;">The spontaneous tale that Charles Dodgson made up for Alice Pleasance Liddell and her sisters during a summer riverboat ride down the Isis in 1862 has spawned more visual illustrations, retellings and cultural associations than any other narrative, possibly ever. Film versions of Alice were created in almost every decade of the twentieth century. The most likely Alice to spring to mind is Disney’s blonde haired, restless cartoon version from 1951, who questions the logic of books without pictures before curiously following a waist-coat clad white rabbit into the bowels of the earth, but other incarnations have included 1983 Japanese-German anime, Mia Waskikowska’s older, gothic 2010 Alice (thank you Tim Burton) and a peculiar Czech interpretation by Jan Svankmajar that began with a taxidermied rabbit smashing its way out of its glass case and ended with my friend and I rocking backwards and forwards in horror on the floor in my room and feeling more than slight apprehension about ever going outside again.</span> </b></span></div><div style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #351c75; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><br />
<span style="line-height: normal;">In the early years of the twenty first century, Alice has inspired resurgence in the popularity of everything from retro tea parties to floral prints to the <i style="line-height: 17px;">Urban Outfitters</i> golden pocket watch necklaces on long chains that never seem to leave the shelves. For her birthday this year, one of my friends threw an Alice themed garden party. During the course of my English degree, Alice appeared in modules dedicated to Victorian literature, literature and film, and children’s literature. Tim Burton’s film version saw an onslaught of Alice-related paraphernalia swamping our high streets. An alarmingly large number of British students, I have noticed, seem to have an obsession with tea drinking and cup-cake consumption. Alice in Wonderland has even passed into the medical lexicon, its eponymous Syndrome referring to the condition, usually manifesting itself in childhood or adolescence, whereby as a result of surplus blood flow to the brain sufferers experience confusion over their physical size.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: normal;">The affect that Alice has had, and continues to have, on our popular culture cannot be underestimated. Questioning why exactly this is the case, I find myself feeling just like Alice herself –<i style="line-height: 17px;">curiouser and curiouser</i>…</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: normal;">Why has Dodgson’s tale of a middle class, mid-Victorian girl child falling into a world of hookah-smoking felines and talking flowers been so successful at capturing both the public conscious and the cultural sphere for the last hundred and fifty years? Why, simply, is there (still) such an enduring interest in Alice?</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: normal;">Answers may be found at the Tate Liverpool, where the <i style="line-height: 17px;">Alice in Wonderland</i> exhibition brings together a collection of Alice related paraphernalia dating from its initial publication in 1865, through its later Victorian stage adaptations, its relationship with war-fractured Europe and influence on artistic movements including Pre-Raphaelitism, Surrealism and the psychedelic.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: normal;">We are first greeted with a collection of dream-like, psychedelic neon words that are suspended from the ceiling as if depicting thought clouds. The words appear random, as is the nature of dreaming, and indeed Wonderland itself – ‘Abraham’s Bosom’, ‘Trout Basket’, ‘Vice of Love’, ‘Peep’, ‘Cha Cha’. Suspended at various heights, they certainly seem to offer a manifestation of the wandering, unrestrained imagination – or, as my companion put it, ‘the wacky ramblings of Carroll’. On the floor beneath is a pile of towels folded into the shape of a bed, an incongruous pair of ears emerging from it. An attached label reads ‘#2 My Madinah’ – research later tells me that ‘Madinah’ is an alternative word for <i style="line-height: 17px;">Medina</i>, the supposed birthplace of Mohammad. Possibly this installation is suggesting that sleep and dream-like states, or the imagination that comes from dreaming, can offer healing and solace in the same way that religion can. The Freudian themes of the Alice books, then, can be seen clearly in the first room of the exhibition.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: normal;">On the walls are three paintings by Swiss artist Annelies Strba, entitled Nyima 445, Nyima 405 and Nyima 438, that depict a sleeping child in a wood. The colours are hazy and purple, again suggesting a half conscious state. Running above the works, around the walls of the room, is a thick black line – it is nine feet above the ground, the same height that Dodgson’s Alice grew to in Wonderland after imbibing the cake labelled ‘EAT ME’.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: normal;">Upstairs, we are given a wealth of information on the mid-Victorian context of the Alice books. The nineteenth century fascination with childhood, as seen in Pre-Raphaelite works such as William Holman Hunt’s <i style="line-height: 17px;">Triumph of the Innocents</i>, which is seen here, was one of the reasons for the books’ early popularity. The relationship between Dodgson and the Pre-Raphaelites can also be seen in the numerous paintings of him that they produced – including works by Dante Rossetti and Holman Hunt. Pre-Raphaelite inspired painter George Dunlop Leslie was the first to make a clear connection between the novels and seemingly unrelated art, with his 1879 painting entitled <i style="line-height: 17px;">Alice in Wonderland</i> – a portrait of his wife holding his daughter, who also happened to be named Alice.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: normal;">Quotations from Dodgson are printed on the walls, offering an insight into the spontaneity behind the novels: ‘In a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairylore,’ his words read from above a line of Pre-Raphaelite portraits, ‘I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole… without the least idea of what was to happen afterwards.’</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="line-height: normal;">Also included in this section of the exhibition are translations in Polish, German, French, and Russian –the latter the work of Nabokov. The real highlight though is Dodgson’s original, handwritten manuscript, set behind glass. It is bizarre to consider that all the cultural associations previously mentioned –tea sets, dressing up costumes, countless films– have stemmed from the small, slightly faded book that now sits in front of us unimposingly at the Tate.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="line-height: normal;">After the Victorians, we are faced with the first art movement to consciously engage with Alice in the twentieth century: Surrealism. Unexpected, anti-rational, uncanny –the suspension of reality required fits easily with the land beneath the rabbit-hole. The theme of displacement was adopted poignantly by artists as a result of the Second World War, and the movement of dispossessed peoples in mainland Europe. Here we see works by Max Ernst, a POW in France in 1939, and Oskar Kokoscha, whose 1941 painting shows Alice’s naivety as a metaphor for the Austrian government, closing her eyes to what is going on around her.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="line-height: normal;">A 1969 work by Dali shows twelve illustrations, one for each chapter of Alice. She is depicted as a young girl with a skipping rope, overshadowed by huge, psychedelic insects and bright swirls of colour.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="line-height: normal;">This leads us directly into the ‘altered states’ of the 1960s, the decade that saw Dodgson’s Victorian creation become ‘a poster child for the psychedelic generation’. We are faced with oils by Adrian Piper, showing a hallucinogenic version of the rabbit hole, the tea party and the card game. The LCD-esque creations that close the exhibition bring it full circle – back to the beginning, which saw neon words hung from the ceiling in an incongruous depiction of a dream world.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="line-height: normal;">The day after I write this review, I am sat in Revolution in Manchester when a stop-motion version of Alice appears on the screen next to our table. Mildly surreal, in a vodka bar on Deansgate Locks, but the hypothesis is proved correct: in late 2011, 146 years since its first publication, society is still taking Dodgson’s dream-like, unpredictable narrative and adapting it for its own ends. We aren’t bored of Alice yet.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="line-height: normal;"><i style="line-height: 17px;">The Alice in Wonderland exhibition runs until January 29<sup style="line-height: 14px;">th</sup>. </i></span><span style="line-height: 17px;"></span><br />
<span style="line-height: normal;"><i style="line-height: 17px;">Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4BB.</i></span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><br />
<span style="line-height: normal;"><i style="line-height: 17px;">tate.org.uk/liverpool</i></span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span></b></span></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-29840881776484044322011-12-18T12:58:00.000-08:002011-12-18T12:58:56.504-08:00Extra baggage allowance bought, final visit to Trastevere undertaken, many hugs given: I'm coming home...<div class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_qp0GQSivVcHOX09IOPT_zePFAKrv9BuCrHgkqEoFuPbY7JUTqNtWLjrsdOYargB7pUKckd7di515SndFT82N9dQUFiakZMJQ7IAs4DZeaQoOjrPapcpF2h519OOaL72oIZqwQGRY6Mu7/s1600/CIMG6140.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_qp0GQSivVcHOX09IOPT_zePFAKrv9BuCrHgkqEoFuPbY7JUTqNtWLjrsdOYargB7pUKckd7di515SndFT82N9dQUFiakZMJQ7IAs4DZeaQoOjrPapcpF2h519OOaL72oIZqwQGRY6Mu7/s320/CIMG6140.JPG" width="320" /></a><b>...to cider and black at The Star on Wakefield Road, to the smell of pine from a real Christmas tree, to my limitless supply of books, to my cat, who between naps on the back of the sofa probably hasn’t even realised I’ve been away for four months, to British television, to walks around the frozen lake at Cannon Hall, to tattoos that remind me of second year summer, to having a sofa again, to Love Actually and Bridget and Pride and Prejudice, to a snow covered Thorpe Lane, to mince pies, to Mingles, to Castle Hill, to the Comedy Store, to Dirty Dancing in Manchester, to Piccadilly station, to rolling hills, to mulled cider at Giraffe, to present exchanges, to my grandparents, to garden centres, to cheap, acidic wine at Huddersfield Yates, to the Kingsgate Centre in festive lights, to Haigh’s farm shop, to fireworks, to the Yorkshire accent, to gingerbread smells, to snow, to boxes of Celebrations, to baubles, to Christmas stockings, to woolly hats, to Morrissey and the Stone Roses, to driving back over Saddleworth moor, to pointing out the chippy with the mushy pea fritters, to my own quilt, to chocolates on the tree, to Nosh, to Zephyr, to Chaophyra, to exhibitions of Alice in Wonderland and Ford Madox Brown, to Christmas cake with plastic Santas, to cups of tea from an actual kettle, to 19 days of an unopened advent calendar, to a hundred photographs of Almondbury, to making Christmas cards of Siena, to Wench Banter, to everyone in the world that I love, to Lancaster in January, to Friary and Merchants and Bar Eleven (before 9pm) and Water Witch and The Sun and afternoon drinking at Robert Gillow, to hallucinogenic spinach wraps at Venue, to the castle, to catch ups; to London, to The Independent, to learning shorthand, to reciting media law, to the British Museum and the V&A and Kensington High Street and crowded tube trains, to Royal Parks, to a pile of journalism books, to newspapers, to no more procrastination, to the next chapter... </b></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-12664063309591686482011-12-13T14:42:00.000-08:002011-12-13T14:42:31.555-08:00A jolly good knees up... 12 reasons why England wins at Christmas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFhbNK6lBjiWgDqQx5JtikrkwWwkl3cPv9fsbrzPOEDp7jx0fJWLUIkjC9092VMghjlh5TM5cHkq6_YX0WFw94uk5xohsPYud_L3Fy67nWLzBYuOiAaFsowGmP8peW_80BW2u9oDDEQ7x1/s1600/xmas+5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFhbNK6lBjiWgDqQx5JtikrkwWwkl3cPv9fsbrzPOEDp7jx0fJWLUIkjC9092VMghjlh5TM5cHkq6_YX0WFw94uk5xohsPYud_L3Fy67nWLzBYuOiAaFsowGmP8peW_80BW2u9oDDEQ7x1/s200/xmas+5.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b>1. <span style="text-align: left;">A</span></b></span><b style="color: #990000; text-align: left;">dvent calendars. The Italian version of the advent calendar does not contain chocolate, which seems to me to defeat the entire point of its existence. I remember when I was about four years old, getting an advent calendar from my childminder that contained only festive drawings of deers behind every window. Luckily I had the real thing from my parents/ grandparents, but the disappointment of the one chocolate free advent calendar was palpable. Now, imagine that the pretty deer pictures were the sum total of what was behind the advent calendar doors for your <i style="text-indent: -24px;">entire</i> childhood. It’s a sad thought, isn’t it? And this is if they exist at all – I have been informed that they do, but I’ve get to see evidence of twin advent calendars at the Bellomos, and December is now two weeks old.</b><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpNliPZarGsyZkDZ-sTgfmjdN8jUbxGUwuvxFl5cAHqnMdpX-VS-uv23N8UlNfLYhKFfNSwlZAjLj7XzDC2x0xGowcKlCYx9bmpQ1g2FPy32n6x3yKonBqK2YWLZzHHFnloLcRh_tO78ep/s1600/xmas+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpNliPZarGsyZkDZ-sTgfmjdN8jUbxGUwuvxFl5cAHqnMdpX-VS-uv23N8UlNfLYhKFfNSwlZAjLj7XzDC2x0xGowcKlCYx9bmpQ1g2FPy32n6x3yKonBqK2YWLZzHHFnloLcRh_tO78ep/s200/xmas+2.jpg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAHFAyffw6ZsQq5hYUmJEHgLarrrCZvZ6Ep2I-77mbAdDpARTFrK1Zm0ZfsHsTLrgvPaDjfVPSE_3Pg-yVnuREfZwbbfkH5Y5BBDSwNgA51LDpjeQJt_qf6MHPV7BQ0LGsV3wa8QVPcaJ7/s1600/xmas+6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAHFAyffw6ZsQq5hYUmJEHgLarrrCZvZ6Ep2I-77mbAdDpARTFrK1Zm0ZfsHsTLrgvPaDjfVPSE_3Pg-yVnuREfZwbbfkH5Y5BBDSwNgA51LDpjeQJt_qf6MHPV7BQ0LGsV3wa8QVPcaJ7/s200/xmas+6.jpg" width="200" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b>2.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>We have Hyde Park Winter Wonderland. </b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b>3.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>We also have Christmas crackers. They don’t exist here. Wtf?</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b>4.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>Snow. Nothing says ‘festive’ like a glittery dusting of the white stuff, and over the last few years England has come up trumps in its provision of it. I find it extremely difficult to care about people not being able to get to work when the world is swathed in silver. The temperature here is autumnal, and the landscape is reflecting it. Rust coloured leaves do not say December to me. They say October.</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9NsNoLGs13uzJuXBXR9oG-GSifzsOSj3Ak4R_IoBOxOjSUIn-ZSCKj82e7t38Tjf2Qj3YPHTmnOOTl-iYlRS4L6-SOMT5Sz_P0zqPHg4Z6zJdZtVrkCli6IaLdyN30gpeGAJGhbXlpHgT/s1600/xmas+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9NsNoLGs13uzJuXBXR9oG-GSifzsOSj3Ak4R_IoBOxOjSUIn-ZSCKj82e7t38Tjf2Qj3YPHTmnOOTl-iYlRS4L6-SOMT5Sz_P0zqPHg4Z6zJdZtVrkCli6IaLdyN30gpeGAJGhbXlpHgT/s200/xmas+4.jpg" width="200" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b> 5.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>X Factor. A poor one, I know. But it’s going on the list, despite it being (in the words of my mother) ‘crap – apart from Gary Barlow’. Since X Factor hasn’t been in my life this year, I’ve been clamouring for it. It is a Christmas tradition for the 21<sup>st</sup> century. I have even forgiven it for providing the world with Jedward.</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b>6 Christmas Costa. I don’t care if I’m in the coffee capital of the world; get me a Gingerbread Latte and a festive cupcake. <i>Pronto</i>. </b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja0AWWxssiv0XH903sSwT7BUog1hK0G_cDwrZV0IgfQt9oDBD02EfAt_1RcwhNFEekVjWysz3K_TxnhrSN8agzV4S6EhfqWk4prgi7IC-lztLBSCoz5owko_o1eyz2RQE630W7F2IhiTUq/s1600/xmas+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja0AWWxssiv0XH903sSwT7BUog1hK0G_cDwrZV0IgfQt9oDBD02EfAt_1RcwhNFEekVjWysz3K_TxnhrSN8agzV4S6EhfqWk4prgi7IC-lztLBSCoz5owko_o1eyz2RQE630W7F2IhiTUq/s200/xmas+3.jpg" width="200" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b> 7.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>Christmas farm shops, particularly Cannon Hall Farm Shop at Haigh’s at Mirfield. Farm shops at Christmas, I feel, are a very British invention. Every year we troop to Haigh’s and buy our Christmas tree, and there is always a slight worry that it will not fit in the back of the Yaris. British farm shops make me stupidly content.</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b> 8.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>Love Actually. My absolute favourite ever; a beautifully put together piece of British cinematic festive fluff. It’s just so happy (apart from for Emma Thompson). I love Andrew Lincoln. I love Colin Firth. I love Hugh Grant’s dancing. I love Love Actually because it contains Andrew Lincoln and Colin Firth and Hugh Grant’s dancing.</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b>9.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>Christmas cards. Again, I see no evidence of this most traditional of Christmas traditions in Italy. Admittedly, the sending of Christmas cards has fallen over the last few years. But with all things retro currently <i>en vogue</i>, I sense a comeback. As soon as I’m home I’m going to make mine using pictures from Siena, and dash them off in the last minute first class post. </b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTRHbk38m5EsytHGjHnRnuPCwijIypJRzqk72dgo29x3_BefUGJjxjKOVKhapPIlsquFTqECWgtRfb60e1j-AS5FSAClp7-Krqz3qxON4xw1r-I09mvU4TpHU8KFEGhJcNwxyNC4XeVrC/s1600/xmas+7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTRHbk38m5EsytHGjHnRnuPCwijIypJRzqk72dgo29x3_BefUGJjxjKOVKhapPIlsquFTqECWgtRfb60e1j-AS5FSAClp7-Krqz3qxON4xw1r-I09mvU4TpHU8KFEGhJcNwxyNC4XeVrC/s200/xmas+7.jpg" width="200" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b>10.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>Rudolph. In Italy, there is no Rudolph. There is no red nose. There are just... reindeers. That’s all. It begs the question, how do they understand the songs?</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b>11.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>Christmas songs. They are all in English. I refute the probable fact that this is because English is one of the world’s dominant languages, and instead choose to believe that it is because, quite simply, England is best at Christmas.</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQo8nZK2On9eNOMhzOKJTzgkHPrp7ZT6u4bMZusrySkrgSyygljc2Ols9YE0SM2UONCDd2GAOFSeT1MaaUYYN4RMkVUDl4v31e3zOONBVUuuro5Q7TAClh5G3oW9i3tskhiJonrb6SJuk3/s1600/xmas+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQo8nZK2On9eNOMhzOKJTzgkHPrp7ZT6u4bMZusrySkrgSyygljc2Ols9YE0SM2UONCDd2GAOFSeT1MaaUYYN4RMkVUDl4v31e3zOONBVUuuro5Q7TAClh5G3oW9i3tskhiJonrb6SJuk3/s200/xmas+1.jpg" width="200" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b> 12.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>British Christmas television. Recent and not so recent years have provided us with Christmas Specials from The Office and Gavin and Stacey, amongst others, that have passed into the comedy hall of fame (if there is such a thing). What classics have I got to look forward to when I get back this year? Well, the annual Yuletide offerings: The Big Fat Quiz, the Royal Variety Performance, this year hosted by Peter Kay, and Micheal Buble all over my life, to name but three. We will also see Dickensian classics given a festive tint with Great Expectations and The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, starring Robert Webb of Peep Show fame. And then there is the Outnumbered Christmas Special, and The Many Lovers of Miss Jane Austen, and the return to our screen of Edina and Patsy in the first of two Ab Fab specials. After Christmas we will be treated to the wisdom of Charlie Brooker in his 2011 Wipe. Yes, British television is the best. I’m possibly most excited about 4OD-ing My Big Fat Gypsy Christmas. </b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b>13.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span>Alright, I know I said 12, as in 12 Days of Christmas, but I’ve thought of another. Yankee candles from Mellow Moments in Huddersfield. Lighting them in our cosy dining room. Candles that match the wallpaper. Cinnamon, baked apple, spice, wood smoke, pine. Nom.</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b> </b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><b> I love Christmas, I love England; the two combined is a fairly winning combination. Add Baileys and a box of Roses and I’ll be utterly content until January rolls around. Now, I’m going to dig out the wrapping paper and toilet roll tubes. The twins have crackers to make.</b></span></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-79794082426959383192011-12-12T06:43:00.000-08:002011-12-12T06:43:42.128-08:00Galleria Accademia & Siena<div class="MsoNormal"><b>In the morning I go to the Galleria Accademia, where I see a lot of pretty intense art, as well as some beautiful sculpture. Michelangelo’s <i>David</i> is the highlight, of course – it really is mesmerising. It takes me a long time to get round the Accademia, and by the time I get round to recounting it in this blog, whilst sat in a square in Siena, it feels like it was a very long time ago.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Accademia is the last thing I do in Florence, before collecting my bag from the hotel and catching the bus to Siena. I felt that I should really get to Siena before the evening, since my hotel is outside the city, a bus ride away, nestled amongst the Tuscan hills. I don’t particularly want to try and find it in the dark.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>On the bus ride I mainly read the <i>Daily Express</i>, which reminds me why, at home, I never read the <i>Daily Express</i>. I am also thinking, hmm, Tuscany. A bit like Yorkshire. </b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHA0_jvOV6EZwwmP6vAXAkuNXdvG9yZjYGPEbZ5i7exlxMUCP08QToC8w5ijUztcFhaBdSndIrwk93XNlruD4xLp7G3GiWPu5ruIcyQXvPyX_bluQgQvcp75Ab6k-zuN3NGepZjMjbWtyW/s1600/CIMG9072+-+Copy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b style="color: black; text-align: left;"><br />
</b></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHA0_jvOV6EZwwmP6vAXAkuNXdvG9yZjYGPEbZ5i7exlxMUCP08QToC8w5ijUztcFhaBdSndIrwk93XNlruD4xLp7G3GiWPu5ruIcyQXvPyX_bluQgQvcp75Ab6k-zuN3NGepZjMjbWtyW/s1600/CIMG9072+-+Copy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHA0_jvOV6EZwwmP6vAXAkuNXdvG9yZjYGPEbZ5i7exlxMUCP08QToC8w5ijUztcFhaBdSndIrwk93XNlruD4xLp7G3GiWPu5ruIcyQXvPyX_bluQgQvcp75Ab6k-zuN3NGepZjMjbWtyW/s320/CIMG9072+-+Copy.JPG" width="320" /></span></a><span style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: left; color: black; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</span></span><span style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHA0_jvOV6EZwwmP6vAXAkuNXdvG9yZjYGPEbZ5i7exlxMUCP08QToC8w5ijUztcFhaBdSndIrwk93XNlruD4xLp7G3GiWPu5ruIcyQXvPyX_bluQgQvcp75Ab6k-zuN3NGepZjMjbWtyW/s1600/CIMG9072+-+Copy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444;">The Historic Centre of Siena is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it is clear why. The streets are narrow, and cobbled – it is like the Ghetto in Rome, but a whole (tiny) city of it. If I thought parts of Florence were medieval fairytale-esque, they have nothing on Siena. The centre is also full of festivity – huge silver stars are strung everywhere, above the tourists as they squeeze down the tiny streets. Siena is the most festive place I think I’ve ever been (possibly aside from Whitley’s Garden Centre, Mirfield). </span></a></b></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">I go to check out Piazza del Campo, followed by the Duomo. Both are breathtaking. They look like settings from an over exaggerated Disney film. Here they are. See what I mean? </b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr3eqlfY_i60sFGn6HWi16_-QVxPKENqBhWDwO7VjYTb9utDNCTv5PL3xKr3ABsD0VAoQDL58FfNbmUB4_iA1kNfFHScjxF_9LFo6YrcK0v3-gEf5uAW34xp2GhnWg0Nl5jlwRESf2zi3r/s1600/CIMG9188.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr3eqlfY_i60sFGn6HWi16_-QVxPKENqBhWDwO7VjYTb9utDNCTv5PL3xKr3ABsD0VAoQDL58FfNbmUB4_iA1kNfFHScjxF_9LFo6YrcK0v3-gEf5uAW34xp2GhnWg0Nl5jlwRESf2zi3r/s320/CIMG9188.JPG" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvI1gJ5Ln4RcSH8e5gs7TyV0YicOggG2mJXWFvQqYLzKzihICYYSWwLgAAKocpPLWpXB2Ut7KFEAEZcBCnJxukwo5jiw3lYFfqxhBadAp8OmIDQS6Yg4urOUg6pT9671Xlg6yMtSREAga9/s1600/CIMG9089.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvI1gJ5Ln4RcSH8e5gs7TyV0YicOggG2mJXWFvQqYLzKzihICYYSWwLgAAKocpPLWpXB2Ut7KFEAEZcBCnJxukwo5jiw3lYFfqxhBadAp8OmIDQS6Yg4urOUg6pT9671Xlg6yMtSREAga9/s320/CIMG9089.JPG" width="213" /></b></a><b></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjIybwIBzGIVyXeG9ou7I7tN9Xm3F_7PwOSFJLKULWjuAxYs5cpAaGZvHG-CSCNvMK45lUYJNAeXn_uemT-Ab4p2sM49bHPYSXLpO-Dn2p89gfU_nVMXwdCHgYvueJsFIsa9chlVlTNzPg/s320/CIMG9134.JPG" width="320" /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Afterwards I go to a restaurant at Piazza del Campo and get pizza – again. I don’t meet any random friends tonight, sadly, but it’s ok because I feel like getting back to the hotel and being cosy (Alberto was right, Siena is freezing). </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Unfortunately, so is my room. Bizarrely, it has shutters that won’t open. When I checked in I took a photograph of the view from between the gaps: </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLfx8oISMrYN82atVbSdqVuORgVXSfX8CQqrYHmgYQu6KYZjfRosz3QUJm-WMN7-LpuhMDcsYbBA8h22SSYh24c4X-V7IQcxsVrXY7zcfVg7wty5vz8-1aqayVbiGJ_N0H6EFv7lnmgKxB/s1600/CIMG9074+-+Copy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLfx8oISMrYN82atVbSdqVuORgVXSfX8CQqrYHmgYQu6KYZjfRosz3QUJm-WMN7-LpuhMDcsYbBA8h22SSYh24c4X-V7IQcxsVrXY7zcfVg7wty5vz8-1aqayVbiGJ_N0H6EFv7lnmgKxB/s320/CIMG9074+-+Copy.JPG" width="320" /></b></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b>Here is the view from outside:</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOIQLNWYvwVBvQwRFa9Jk5HW7TfxJfkxneCsMhkH9T_P2jKAjE66PWbMGTJk1EUdIbag8-Qso1pm6wWrgtIXtJrRRDKBxnuEdc8KExVDpl1ZN7ber0j9JEucXVwkizaDliqh46WKiOf2oY/s320/CIMG9078.JPG" width="320" /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I get under a blanket and fall asleep straight away, and then am woken up at what I am surprised to find is only 11.30pm by my mother, who is ringing to check that I am still alive. I assure her that I am, and then immediately fall back to sleep. Tomorrow: further exploring of Siena.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I dispense with the map and have a wander on Friday morning. Beautifully and completely by accident, I stumble upon a food market at the bottom of a windy path. There are samples everywhere; I feast on cheese, pork, and bruschetta despite only just having had breakfast. I want to buy some cheese, but resist since I’m fairly sure the fridge will be full of festive <i>formaggi</i> when I get home a week before Christmas. Instead I purchase two jars of chutney, one spicy pear and one spicy peach. I feel very festive. I am so, so paying excess baggage to Jet2 next week. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>My first official stop is Siena Cathedral – the Duomo. It is without a doubt the best cathedral I have ever seen, probably because it is so different. The columns inside are black and white; they make me think of a fifteenth century jester’s tights. It is all very medieval. I feel like I’m in an Italian version of the <i>Hunchback of Notre Dame</i>. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>There are a lot of interesting things about the cathedral. On the left wall, amongst statues of various other saints, is a depiction of Saint Paul that has been attributed to Michelangelo. Next to Saint Paul is an image of the Virgin with child – a typical picture, at first glance. There are thousands of them, all over Italy. But no, at second glance it becomes clear that she is <i>breastfeeding</i>. The Virgin Mary, boob out. This is crazy. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>On the floor there is, in marble, a depiction of the She-Wolf of Siena. The image could easily be mistaken for the She-Wolf of Rome, as it is almost identical – but, the audio guide informs me, a different set is twins is present here. They are Senius and Aschius, sons of Remus, who fled from Rome to avoid the anger of their uncle Romulus, and went on to found Siena. On the founding of the city, they sacrificed a wolf. Black and white were decided as they colours of the new city, hence why the inside the cathedral is largely monochrome. The legend of the She-Wolf of Siena, being nothing to do with Italy’s capital, is obviously less well known than the story of Rome’s founding. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I also find out that the cathedral itself was originally built in around 1000, but that it was rebuilt in medieval times to such an extent that none of the original remains. There are around 170 busts around the ceiling of the cathedral, below the stained glass windows. All of them are Popes from across the centuries, from the cathedral’s beginnings to the end of the 1500s. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I am in the cathedral for quite a long time. Afterwards I decide, because I feel that I should whilst I am here, to climb to the top of the tower in Piazza del Campo. I had gone in earlier, before I returned to the Duomo, and found that the climb was not advised for those suffering from claustrophobia, or, I imagine, a fear of heights.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>But I climbed the Dome in Florence so now I decide to be fearless. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b>To a certain extent, anyway. I climb the standard 400 steps, but I decide to stay away from the rickety wooden stairs that lead to the very, <i>very</i> top. A sign at the bottom of them says that, in parts, they are ‘exposed to the elements’. Why would anyone inflict this upon themselves? There is no need for this. I have a good enough view after 400 steps. I stay exactly where I am. </b></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFCtHByhRF3FWV5v9GxFQhXoeVYki6MMpa1a-okD6fBj3pJTQkhLWlbF5l6XCy7LS3MktEjsfkR1S79ysSXlEzakQn8uBXaciglQhrV62SEG804iCcx-FGJuSYKPdG3x_f8KLrohaE27u6/s1600/CIMG9193.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFCtHByhRF3FWV5v9GxFQhXoeVYki6MMpa1a-okD6fBj3pJTQkhLWlbF5l6XCy7LS3MktEjsfkR1S79ysSXlEzakQn8uBXaciglQhrV62SEG804iCcx-FGJuSYKPdG3x_f8KLrohaE27u6/s320/CIMG9193.JPG" width="320" /></b></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>After the long climb back down, during which I almost trip and twist my ankle, I sit in Piazza del Campo and read my map whilst drinking an espresso. I had previously written down that I should visit the Sanctuary of Saint Catherine of Siena, so this is where I head now. On the way I stop at a beautiful candle shop where a couple of women are crafting away with hot wax, and purchase a candle moulded into the shape of an owl. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Sanctuary of Saint Catherine is basically a small church, but it is set high up in the winding Sienese streets and offers a lovely view. Here is Saint Catherine herself, guarding the entrance to her <i>casa</i>, and the panorama of Siena that I found around the corner when I visited the Basilica of San Domenico:</b></div><br />
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</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijtZgqY8n4s1-lpd_Z432nOwWLRa6gtFvfLgw3Z7XNRJDdTIouYyDh9VsBz94-pH6WlepxR2vwABqwxMfX4ENTFwXE2dhFtCSk25h-5AlQm9ZLvIONks2oWckOYnhDZZKH6Q5FO7bjNMwd/s1600/CIMG9219.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijtZgqY8n4s1-lpd_Z432nOwWLRa6gtFvfLgw3Z7XNRJDdTIouYyDh9VsBz94-pH6WlepxR2vwABqwxMfX4ENTFwXE2dhFtCSk25h-5AlQm9ZLvIONks2oWckOYnhDZZKH6Q5FO7bjNMwd/s320/CIMG9219.JPG" width="213" /></b></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH0rDSXdw62D-A7_WJJ8Z4bT846v9s5KuxoiFNTB8jpGrOipiYYkTDkrg8qLoEKcn1DKZo4rUvJMXBH1qCIgqwPZibd1btt8bd859w0G2qW0U5MEjkc7Z1OuXSA5gQ2DUa83mMZtjKR97x/s1600/CIMG9225.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH0rDSXdw62D-A7_WJJ8Z4bT846v9s5KuxoiFNTB8jpGrOipiYYkTDkrg8qLoEKcn1DKZo4rUvJMXBH1qCIgqwPZibd1btt8bd859w0G2qW0U5MEjkc7Z1OuXSA5gQ2DUa83mMZtjKR97x/s320/CIMG9225.JPG" width="320" /></b></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Gothic Basilica of San Domenico, just around the corner from Catherine’s sanctuary, is stuffed full of art. I read that it dates from the 13<sup>th</sup> and 14<sup>th</sup> centuries, and since then has survived 15<sup>th</sup> and 16<sup>th</sup> century fires, a 16<sup>th</sup> century military occupation, and various 18<sup>th</sup> century earthquakes.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The view of Siena from outside it is a beautiful way to end my visit.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>It is going up to 4 o’clock; I have to get the bus, pick up my bag from the hotel, get back on the bus, find some food to sustain me for the journey and locate the stop for the cross country SITA bus before it’s departure for Rome at 6pm. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I leave Hotel Vico Alto, and as I am waiting at the bus stop and taking photographs of the view, an old Italian man appears and tells me, in Italian, that I have a beautiful hat. It is a nice hat, purchased from <i>La Chieve</i> in Largo Argentina (thanks mother!), but still, how very surreal. I thank him. His tiny Chinese wife looks confused. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>And so, back to Rome. I am restless on the journey. I’m tired, and am not anticipating a late night change of metro from Tiburtina. As soon as I’m on the bus I want it to go faster towards the capital and the hotel and Alphabet House. My <i>Bronte Myth</i> book (by Lucasta Miller, weirdly) does not hold my interest. For a lot of the time I just stare out of the window, trying to distinguish shapes in the darkness. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The journey (three hours) feels overly long. Just outside Rome, I start to notice women stood at the side of the road. The first one I see is texting, from a lay-by. I think how unfortunate it is that her car has broken down in this particularly grim location. And then I see another women. And another. The third one I see is wearing bright red, patent leather boots. And it is at this point that I realise they are in fact engaging in the oldest profession in the world. This is extremely disturbing. They are touting for business on the main <i>autostrada</i> into Rome. And five minutes later, the bus drops me off at probably the most dangerous looking station I have ever seen in my life. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>My advice on Roma Tiburtina Autostazione is this: avoid it as if it were a Florentine plague. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Unless of course you enjoy being surrounded by litter, homeless people and questionable taxi drivers touting for business whilst you search for a metro station that <i>just doesn’t</i> seem to be around. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I am relieved when I find it, and even more relieved when, half an hour later, I let myself into Alphabet House dump my bags on the floor. Shower. Bliss. I then get into bed without even drying my hair. Sacrilege in Italy!</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Sleep, finally. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-46693181875419321392011-12-11T07:12:00.000-08:002011-12-11T07:12:43.587-08:00What happens in Florence...<div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>...will not remain in Florence, obviously, but will be recounted in minute detail on this blog. Would you expect anything less?</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Before 6am on Friday, I am sat on a train at Termini, waiting for it to pull out of the station. Florence bound! I left the hotel at quarter past five, and my fingerless gloves (I am prepared for the cold in Siena), new hat and departure under the cover of darkness makes me feel like something from a Graham Greene novel. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>There are a few tramps asleep at Termini, most of whom smell like fragrant piss. Incongruously, they all seem to have un-bashed, brand new suitcases to rest their trampy heads on whilst they nap on the edge of the platform. Bizarre. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Finding <i>piattaforma</i> 1 (East) isn’t difficult, but I am assisted anyway by an Italian man who seems to be wandering around the station. Clearly I look less like a spy than I first assumed – more likely I look tired and British. He appears as I am accidentally reading the Arrivals board instead of Departures, and having a momentary panic because my train doesn’t appear to exist. My helpful new friend offers me a few words of advice in Italian, before deciding that it would be better if we spoke in French. Yes, ok – who am I to question? In French, he tells me that I should go straight on, then right, then through a tunnel. I thank him in Italian, because this is what is in my head, and retreat with shouts of bon voyage following me down the platform. <i>Bon voyage aussi,</i> you helpful station wanderer. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>On the train, then. I am almost the only passenger, aside from a woman who is walking up and down the carriage and looking extremely confused. Our first stop is Roma Tiburtina, just down the track. I pay particular attention to it because this is where the bus from Siena will drop me off on Friday evening, leaving me to make the last stage of my journey by taxi or metro, depending on the time. Tiburtina looks a lot like Clapham Junction, with the tracks stretching on and on, but I doubt Clapham is ever this deserted at 6am. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>I fall asleep, while the train is still rattling along through indistinguishable Roman darkness, and when I wake up it is light and we are approaching Florence. An American couple have invaded my seating area and are talking loudly about the hilarity of almost having booked a hotel room in Rome, Georgia, by accident. Dear God.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>I find Hotel Fiorita easily (it is only 300 metres from the station) and am very happy to find that because of a cancellation my room has been upgraded to a double with ensuite. Yes, Florence! You are working well for me so far.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>After dumping my stuff and picking up a map I get straight on with exploring. My first stop is Basilica San Lorenzo, which the extremely friendly reception man has circled on my map. I reach it through an outdoor market, which is full of stalls selling ‘I Love Firenze’ hoodies. The Basilica is nice – my favourite part is the garden, which contains a big orange tree. It is very Florentine. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>(Did you know, also, that Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Galileo Galilee and Da Vinci have all called this city home? This is a fairly impressive list, considering that it takes in undisputed masters of literature, science and art, as well as the man who actually <i>invented</i> the sonnet. Mind blown). </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>I carry on walking, vaguely following the map. And then I round a corner and am visually smacked in the face by the most impressive building I’ve ever seen: the Cattedrale di Santa Maria de Fiore.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOXgKp-zmYLRljlgsg15cP0MWDBue87gFiuv4etSFFL2_OX79PZrYz8ME73dXe3nT_Tw4ROR9JvNjJaCAuF8F5qBgrYENhmBvi0VvvSUyxMWkuLNur-l7xQCbPg3-12ZdSaBzV1cyMsjVV/s1600/florence2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOXgKp-zmYLRljlgsg15cP0MWDBue87gFiuv4etSFFL2_OX79PZrYz8ME73dXe3nT_Tw4ROR9JvNjJaCAuF8F5qBgrYENhmBvi0VvvSUyxMWkuLNur-l7xQCbPg3-12ZdSaBzV1cyMsjVV/s320/florence2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>I go and sit at the top of the Dome. The view is <i>mental</i>. I could even go as far as saying that it is <i>off its</i> <i>tits</i>, but I feel that this phrasing may be disrespectful to Santa Maria. We are so very, very high up. Considering my all encompassing fear of heights (I could never even jump off the three metre diving board at Huddersfield Sports Centre without squeezing my eyes shut) I have no idea why I’m not shitting right about now. I’m not, though. I’ve even walked all the way around the outside and taken a video of the view. Maybe I’m growing. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Florence looks like a favela from this height. A low-slung, sunlit, red and yellow favela. With a few medieval towers. And clocks. And Tuscan hills closing in from every side. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>It is extremely humbling and melancholy. </b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvbkVFjotBgIBudDM6lXDKkVJtwV_iSoq7_6Ju_-0eVS21FbhGUTsewQOaYRULTfUIZrrrduyvXKC58r3sLrt-FPa4mezrgXCOMZi-McFQCNgn8edg5EITqNM1EzWFokYxXt8S4WYPBAiT/s1600/florence.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvbkVFjotBgIBudDM6lXDKkVJtwV_iSoq7_6Ju_-0eVS21FbhGUTsewQOaYRULTfUIZrrrduyvXKC58r3sLrt-FPa4mezrgXCOMZi-McFQCNgn8edg5EITqNM1EzWFokYxXt8S4WYPBAiT/s320/florence.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>And then hundreds of Japanese teenagers appear and start taking photographs whilst bouncing on the railings as if they aren’t about two miles up in the air. Time for dry land, I think. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Heading in the vague direction of the river (towards Ponte Vecchio and the Uffizi), I see a sign pointing in the direction of ‘Casa di Dante’. Well. I follow this sign now Via Del Corso (is there one of these in every major Italian city?) until I find not the <i>casa</i> of Dante, but the <i>chiesa</i>. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>This is a major event, I feel. The Church of Saint Margaret is better known as Dante’s Church, it being where he worshipped, where he married Gemma Donati, and where she is buried along with her entire family of thirteenth century Florentine nobles. I sit in a pew in the tiny church (it is so small there are only four rows) and try to get my head around the fact that this is where the creator of the <i>Divine Comedy</i>, the <i>Inferno</i>, etc, got married seven hundred years ago. It is also where he met Beatrice Portinari, who inspired his poetry.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Afterwards I go across the cobbles to his house, which is now a museum. Here is what I learn:</b></div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Dante Alighieri was born between the end of May and the end of June, 1265, to Alighiero di Bellicione and his wife Bella – a family of noble lineage, proved by its ties with other aristocratic Florentine families, including the Donatis, of which Dante’s future wife was a daughter. His great great grandfather Cacciaguida had been knighted by King Conrad II and had died in the Second Crusade in 1147. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>I also infer that Dante quite liked Florence:</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Where the lovely Arno flows,</i></b></div><b> </b><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>There I was born and raised,</i></b></div><b> </b><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>In the great city.</i></b></div><b> </b><div align="right" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: right;"><b>(<i>Inferno</i>)</b></div><div align="right" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: right;"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Since astrology was incredibly important in the thirteenth century, it was recorded that Dante was a Gemini. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>His mother died when he was young, and he was brought up with an older sister, a younger brother, and a younger sister from his father’s second marriage. He was educated at home, and first met Beatrice when he was nine years old; she would later become his muse. Despite this, a contract between the Alighieri and Donati families saw him betrothed to Gemma Donati at the age of twelve.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b><i>Dante’s Muse</i></b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Beatrice Portinari lived with her five sisters in Florence, close to the Alighieri house. Dante was nine when they first met; later she would appear in his <i>Divine Comedy</i> as Vita Nuova. ‘9’ is a number that occurs throughout Vita Nuova, symbolising a miracle. He began writing of Beatrice in terms of courtly love, in the traditional way of poetry, admiring her beauty, elegance and grace, but eventually moved away from earthly reality and began a period of deep introspection. Beatrice married Simone di Bardi and died at just 24, leading Dante into crisis and years of philosophical study.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>The museum tells me that,</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>In the </i>Divine Comedy<i>, she is the vehicle of his salvation and, as the symbol of theology, guides the poet in the last part of his other worldly journey.</i></b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>My humble translation of a plague on the wall, without any help from Google: </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>In the 8<sup>th</sup> month of 1991</i></b></div><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>In this church of 1033</i></b></div><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>A celebration</i></b></div><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Of the 8<sup>th</sup> centenary of the death</i></b></div><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Of Beatrice Portinari</i></b></div><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The inspiration of poet</i></b></div><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Dante Alighieri </i></b></div><div align="center" class="ecxMsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>A few more Dante facts:</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Dante’s teacher was Brunetto Latini, who had translated Cicero as well as working as Florence’s ambassador in Spain under Alfonso X. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Dante was in exile from Florence between 1301 and 1311, because of fighting between opposing families in the city. Little is known about his movements during this time.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>My life is crazy. I come to this conclusion not long later, whilst sat outside drinking espresso (to pep me for the Uffizi) at a cafe opposite the Ponte Vecchio. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Ponte Vecchio: a 10<sup>th</sup> century bridge, covered in tiny, brightly coloured windows, once home to greengrocers, now inhabited by goldsmiths and jewellers after an edict by the Pope. They shops are their original size, without alterations, and the doors are <i>tiny</i>. The bridge looks like something out of a Grimm’s fairytale. There is a gelateria at the end, and I indulge myself in a cone of <i>stracciatella</i>, whilst reaching the definite conclusion that I like Florence more than Rome. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Now, back down the river to the Galleria Uffizi. I’m hoping that when I come out it will be getting dark and that Ponte Vecchio will be all lit up. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Before I go into the Uffizi, I am busy taking photographs of the statues outside -Florentine luminaries including Galileo Galilee, Petrarch (of sonnet form fame), Da Vinci and of course Dante– when I am accosted by a painter who is going about his portraiture outside the ticket office. He asks where I am from, and I tell him England. His response to this is fairly unique: ‘You are of beautiful colours,’ he says. ‘Please, please let me paint you.’</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Good lord.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>The Uffizi stuffs my mind with artistic knowledge to such an extent that by the time I leave I feel like I’ve run a marathon (getting up at 4.30am is probably also a reason for this).</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Afterwards I wander back to the square, thinking about Lidia’s advice that I should ‘not go out in the evening’ – mildly worrying advice, that. It is half past five but already dark (it <i>is</i> December), and there are lots of people around in Piazza della Signoria. I was given a leaflet for a restaurant offering pasta/ pizza, a pint and icecream for ten euros before I went in the Uffizi, so I seek it out now – I’m not hungry after the massive <i>stracciatella, </i>but it is in the piazza and I expect will therefore provide a good people watching/ blog writing opportunity. The streets around are all lit up with Christmas lights, and on the way I browse through a couple of vintage shops – <i>bellissimo.</i></b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b><i> </i></b> </div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>The restaurant is closed, predictably since it is only 6pm, but there is an Irish pub next door – it appears to be called, simply, <i>Guinness</i>. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Well, this is extremely tempting. <i>Sider e nero, per favore</i>?</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Yes, I think so.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>While I am sitting with my cider and black, writing this blog and feeling extremely content with life, the lad who gave me the ten euro pizza leaflet and then found me lurking outside his restaurant comes over for a chat. He doesn’t like Rome, he says. It is too big and confusing. All the streets are the same. He has lived in Florence for eight years, but is actually from Kosovo.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>I don’t pursue this topic of conversation.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>After a while, when he has informed me that ‘Guinness’ will have live music on later, he goes back to work.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>There are two American girls at a table near mine. Can you guess what they are talking about? </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>The Wi-Fi in their hotel isn’t working. Seriously. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Also, Italians clearly do not know how to create a good cider and black, even if they are running an Irish pub. It is definitely not heavy enough on the black. I miss Wench and Meg whilst drinking this. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>When I was leaving the Uffizi I was informed that the best thing to do next would be to visit the Palazzo Vecchio. It is just across the square, so I go over to check it out when my cider is finished. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>It turns out the ticket office closed at 6.30pm, but part of the museum is outside and free of charge – I assume, I walked straight into it anyway. It is all statues and massive Florentine frescos. I wander back up one of the shopping streets afterwards. Something tells me that I should have a taxi number and credit on my phone if I’m going to end up at the ‘Guinness’ live music night. I deal with both these things before heading back to the restaurant, where I order pizza <i>e funghi</i> and swap the included icecream for wine. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>I feel that various surreal things have happened to me whilst I’ve been in Italy, but this evening in Florence, I think, might rate higher than any of them on the weird-ness scale.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>The pizza is good. Afterwards I watch some Italian football at ‘Guinness’ whilst talking to the Kosovan boy about Rome, about Italian language learning, about various things in this area. The live music starts. I acquire another pint. Kosovan Boy has had no one in his restaurant all night (bar me), so we carry on with our conversation, which is very interesting. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>We are having a nice conversation about Florence, when Alban (or Arban, or Ahban, or something else – not going to lie; I can’t remember though cider fug) tells me that he has featured in <i>Jersey Shore</i> and then invites me to Kosovo to meet his father. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>Pardon?</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>It turns out that he used to ‘stay with people from <i>Jersey Shore’ </i>and worked with ‘Mike’ in a gelateria just around the corner. Why <i>Jersey Shore</i> was filming in Florence I was unable to establish. But it is true. At the gelateria, there is a photograph of The Situation in the window.</b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>We discuss this for a long time. Alban (?) shows me a video on his phone of the house he and his father have recently had built in Kosovo. I come up with the bright idea that we should exchange contact details, so that he can practice his English and vice versa my Italian, and to this end we swap email addresses. He adds his phone number and full name too. Sometime between twelve and half past I decide that now would be a good time for me to leave. Alban (?) goes to talk to someone he knows –he appears to know everyone, working next door– and out of courtesy I wait for him to come back before I disappear. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><b>And wait. And wait. It is probably only about ten minutes, but I’m itching for bed and I really, really want to leave. And what am I waiting around for, anyway? So I go. I feel slightly bad about this (but not too bad). Honestly, I could have been waiting for half an hour, for <i>no reason</i>. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal"><br />
</div><b> </b><div style="border-bottom: dotted windowtext 3.0pt; border: none; mso-element: para-border-div; padding: 0cm 0cm 1.0pt 0cm;"> <div class="ecxMsoNormal" style="border: none; padding: 0cm;"><b>When I get back to the hotel I text, apologising for running away. I don’t feel mean, then. </b></div><div class="ecxMsoNormal" style="border: medium none; padding: 0cm;"><br />
</div><b> </b><div class="ecxMsoNormal" style="border: none; padding: 0cm;"><b>More tomorrow.</b></div></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-65415977600284701062011-12-02T13:53:00.000-08:002011-12-02T13:53:20.761-08:00So... Giorgio Armani built this Synagogue, yeah?<div class="MsoNormal"><b>Back to Diane’s visit, this time part II. I believe we are up to Sunday morning. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>On Sunday we get lost on the way to the market at Porta Portese, and fall off the bottom of my map. Second visit to the market, second time I’ve got lost on the way. An elderly German couple attempt to help us, and surprisingly their expressive gesturing and German directions do send us in the right direction, and we eventually reach Ponte Sisto.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Entering the market, we are <i>again</i> surrounded by a large number of nuns. They head to a jumble-sale like stall, where they proceed to closely inspect a pair of massive, Bridget-esque grey knickers. Diane and I are alarmed by this. Surely bartering for knickers from a bustling market stall is not the correct decorum for a shy, retiring nun? Clearly these particular nuns have rejected <i>Sartorial for the Ecclesiastical</i> in favour of finding a bargain. Scandalous! </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Now, it becomes clear that when Laura and I visited the market a few weeks ago we didn’t do it justice. Apparently, in the limited time we had, we only skimmed the surface and hence didn’t find it that great, the first part of the market containing mostly hats, tacky jewellery, scarves and <i>junk</i>. Diane and I venture further in, though, and find a wealth of clothes, bags, furniture, trinkets, and bits of decor that generally represent exactly what I have been planning on filling my future house with since I was about thirteen years old. I didn’t even realise that the market extended this far back, the first time I visited it. My favourite stall sells furniture – mirrors, dressers, chests– that are printed with art by Gustave Klimt. I do love a bit of Klimt, and having decor like this in my future home has been my plan, like I said, for years (see my Lancaster campus room as an example). So, as you can imagine I am very excited. Since I am waiting to be paid I walk on, but not before checking that the stall will be there every Sunday for the foreseeable future. I will have to look into shipping costs between here and the UK, because the things on this stall are too good to forget about.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>We walk into Trastevere after the market, and the restaurant where we get lunch immediately becomes one of my new favourite foody places in Rome. I have porcini mushroom and truffle fettuccini, and Diane has Tuna salad. The food is so, <i>so</i> good. I eat my pasta in wonderment that food can be this good. It is on a par with Sohra Margarita, possibly it is even better. I don’t ever want my fettuccini to <i>end</i>. Afterwards we have vanilla cream profiteroles and a pear, chocolate and cinnamon cake. Enough said. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The botanic garden is closed when we get there, which is a bit ridiculous since it is a Sunday and therefore the optimum time for a tranquil stroll through a fragrant <i>giardino</i>. Instead we go to Palazzo Corsini, which I first visited a few weeks ago. Diane likes a painting of the Virgin Mary, Jesus and Joseph, which I hadn’t noticed the first time I was here. The painting is understated because it is small, but the light is amazing – it looks like it has been lit from behind by a bulb. Unfortunately it isn’t one of the ‘of note’ paintings, so the details of it aren’t listed in our leaflet.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Afterwards we cross back over the river and go to the Synagogue museum – Diane has wanted to go since we walked around the ghetto on Friday. On the tour, which takes us into the Italian Synagogue, we encounter this week’s Stupid American. When the guide tells us the name of the architects, one of them has a name that sounds a bit like <i>Armani</i>. The Stupid American, who is wearing a <i>kippah</i> and is the <i>only</i> Jew there, raises his hand as if he is in school and asks if this was Giorgio Armani. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Wow.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>No, says the very patient tour guide. No, it was not Giorgio Armani who built the Synagogue. You idiot.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>After the tour and the rest of the museum, it becomes clear that the staff are closing up and that it is time for us to leave. This is easier said than done, however, since there are barriers blocking every exit. We try three different ways out, get waved at by some police because we are going the wrong way, and eventually go back inside to ask. We are directed up some steps, where we are promised we will find ‘a small green gate with a bell’. Getting out of this complex seems like a massive challenge. Clearly, I observe as we finally pass through the exit gate, they just want to give us the full ghetto experience. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>It is very sad times when my mother leaves in a taxi at 9.45am on Monday morning. I spend the rest of the day battling with the Alphabet House washing machine (the one at the Bellomos’ is temporarily on the blink) and reading about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Ashram adventures.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I spend Tuesday afternoon planning Christmas themed activities for B&B. Our last two weeks (I can’t believe it’s only two weeks until I leave) are mainly going to consist of glittery silver snowflakes, glittery cards for their friends, and glittery Christmas stockings. Hopefully, like shrieky magpies, they will be instantly attracted to the glitter and these activities will therefore keep them entertained. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The next day is the occasion of my last ever Wednesday lunch with Ashley – a week from today, the day I am going to Florence, she is flying back to Detroit to get married. It is a nice lunch. We go to Sohra Margarita in the ghetto and get the good pasta and red wine. I will miss our Wednesday lunch club, weekly ritual that it has become. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Afterwards I go and sit upstairs in Feltrinelli, where I am delighted to find a large selection of flavoured teas in their cafe (tea geek). As I said, this is where I sit for a large proportion of the afternoon and write most of this blog post. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I’m not needed to work until 5.40pm, which leaves a great deal of time for luxurious bookshop lingering. When I do get to the Bellomos’, I spend a lovely evening creating glittery snowflake decorations with the twins. A woman called Joanna comes round, to teach Irene how to cook roast beef and cous cous. The family’s old housekeeper Maria also visits with her tiny, tiny baby, and B&B demonstrate their gymnastics for her on the living room rug, making everyone increasingly nervous about the proximity of the baby to their flailing limbs. It is all very companionable. The roast beef is a blood dripping revelation (it hasn’t moved me away from being an almost vegetarian, though) and the cous cous is a world away from the packet variety that I ate so religiously at Lancaster. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>A truly devastating thing happens on Thursday, which completely ruins my plans for the next day. I hope you are ready for it, because it is a biggie.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The National Museum of Pasta is closed for renovation.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Honestly, I am so upset when I discover this. I was very much looking forward to visiting the Pasta Museum, as a break from all the antiquities and historical learning. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>But alas, this information presents itself firmly from the website as I am writing a blog post about nuns and drinking sugary espresso: <i>The National Museum of Pasta is currently closed for renovation work. A date of opening will be given in the coming months. <o:p></o:p></i></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><br />
</b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Not soon, then. Not in the next 18 or so days that I still have in Rome. Gutting.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Instead, I suppose I will have to use the day to visit the Capitolini Museum, and see some renaissance art. Which I suppose isn’t too bad a way to spend a Friday, although I bet I won’t be getting any free samples of <i>agnolotti</i> there. </b></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-20689033327025410462011-12-01T05:46:00.000-08:002011-12-01T05:46:22.136-08:00Chill, it's just a nun.<div class="MsoNormal"><b>So, time to catch up with the blog, whilst I’m sat upstairs in Feltrinelli’s cafe, drinking almond tea and eating biscuits (opposite the square where Caesar was killed). Seems as good a time as any.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I’ve been reading <i>Eat, Pray, Love</i>. It’s slightly surreal to read whilst I’m here, because of course she keeps pointing out places that I’m very familiar with. I pass through Republicca, where she has a breakdown over her ex boyfriend, almost every time I leave the hotel. Her description of getting lunch in Trastevere then crossing back over the river to Piazza Navona is something I’ve done myself multiple times. It is very bizarre. I can relate less to the India section, since whilst I was there I spent 90% of my time on a yellow bus, but it did make me start thinking about this meditation business, namely, if there are such huge swathes of the eastern world dedicated to the practice, then surely there must be something in it? It sort of made me want to visit an Ashram, but I don’t think I have the patience required or that I ever will.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The reason I’ve been reading <i>Eat, Pray, Love</i> is because my mother brought it with her when she came to visit, along with a coat and boots and various woollen items that will hopefully now guard me against the <i>freddo</i> Roman December. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Diane’s visit is my favourite thing that has happened in Rome in recent weeks. She arrives on Thursday night, after a stopover in Amsterdam, and we head for the piazza in front of the Pantheon to eat.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>My mother does not enjoy the darkness of the street that leads down from Largo di Torre Argentina. ‘Come on,’ she says, as I am admiring the decor in a brightly lit shop window. ‘Let’s not hang around.’</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Diane doesn’t want to linger on this quiet street because there is a group of people stood close to us, conferring in hushed voices. She is not accustomed to the kinds of people who spend their time on Roman backstreets near world renowned churches, however. We are from Huddersfield, therefore everyone is a potential assailant. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I have a quick glance over. ‘It’s a monk and a nun.’ </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Amazing. This sets the tone for the entire weekend. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>On Friday morning we head back the same way, to visit the Pantheon in daylight. I have never noticed before, but almost every shop on the street leading down to it is in the business of priestly attire. My mother is extremely amused by this – why, we question as we peer in the window, must priests visit shops entitled such things as <i>Sartorial for the Ecclesiastical</i> just to pick out their socks? Or umbrellas? There is also a ‘pin-up’ priest, whose face can be found adorning tea towels, calendars and placemats. I kid you not, reader.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>We visit the Pantheon, then walk on through Piazza Navona and around the surrounding streets, a lot of which I haven’t stumbled upon myself until now. We find a gelateria and get icecream that is a clear contender for the best I’ve had here so far. I get two scoops, Irish cream and biscotti, and manage to partially order it in Italian. It is working until the silly man insists on talking back to me in English. How will I learn this way??</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Afterwards we head in the direction of the Spanish Steps, once again taking in the Trevi Fountain on the way, and all the time taking care to avoid killer monks and nuns. They are all over the city this weekend, even more so than normal. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>We stop for a coffee and decide, since we are in Italy, to infuse it with a shot of grappa. Well. This is not advisable, I have to tell you. Grappa, it later transpires, is made from the <i>stalks</i> of grapes –so actually the most crap part of the grape. It is predictably gross, but I have an inability to let alcohol (or coffee) go to waste. So I drink Diane’s, too. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>After our delightful lesson in why we should always stick to liqueur that we already know, I take my mother to the Jewish ghetto. It is a far, far more interesting part of the city, in my opinion, that the Spanish Steps/ designer tourist area. It is getting dark when we arrive, which is slightly scary considering what I have learnt about what happened there, but I want to find Sohra Margarita – the incredibly good Jewish restaurant that Ashley and I went to a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I have no idea where the piazza is – even though I am certain that it is really, really close. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>We give up in the end and go to Campo dei Fiori, which is an excellent choice. We have cannelloni and rosemary chicken and salad and white wine, and the best part – huge, fat, salty, British pub chips. The chips are like heaven, or at the very least a little bit of Yorkshire that has somehow found its way to a blue light strewn restaurant in a flowery square in the middle of Italy. If I wasn’t sat outside under a patio heater in Rome I could be in a country pub somewhere in England, the chips were <i>just that good</i>. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>When we get back on the bus to head home, we find that we are again surrounded by lots and lots of nuns. There is almost no room for anyone else on the bus. I briefly wonder, in my post wine state, whether they have all been on a trip to <i>Sartorial for the Ecclesiastical</i> for their socks. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>On Saturday morning we have booked to go to Galleria Borghese. The whole visit to this, possibly the most famous of all Rome’s art galleries, is slightly tainted by over-efficiency and generic Roman arrogance. No, you cannot come in yet, go away. No, you cannot bring in your bag, get in that queue and check it in. The attendant actually points out the time on my ticket (11am) when we try to enter the lobby to wait at 10.55, and says, ‘the number is the same as in English’. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Needless to say, he is very close to getting the Huddersfield chav treatment.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Galleria is nice, but is overshadowed by the effort it has taken to get inside, and at ten to one a tannoy blasts into the room before we have finished looking at the paintings. ‘Get the f*ck out!’ it says. ‘Now! We need you OUT so we can get the next herd of cattle in. What are you DOING? Don’t linger! You’ll hinder our profits.’ </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>So we troop out, feeling a bit of annoyance, and also a lot of love for the British Museum (and every other museum in London and the UK) where you can just walk in and not be rushed or patronised by balding attendant men or over officious tannoy systems. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>‘I don’t like being rushed,’ Diane observes as we leave. ‘You see the paintings but don’t have time to <i>look</i>.’ Which is exactly the problem of Galleria Borghese.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>My two highlights from the Borghese collection are both statues. The first is of Pauline, sister of Napoleon, who scandalously had a semi-nude sculpture of herself made. She answered, when it was questioned why she had requested the sculpture, ‘Well, why not? It wasn’t cold; I had a fire.’ </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>This is a fairly impressive response for the nineteenth century, I feel. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Pauline was also a patron of the arts, which I suppose she would have to be, considering her connection to this gallery.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>My other highlight is Bernini’s statue of Apollo and Daphne, which depicts the moment when Apollo, in chase, reaches the latter and she begins her transformation into a laurel tree. The leaves that are coming out of the statue are very delicate; the audio guide tells me that it took almost two years for the statue to be restored to how it is now. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Afterwards we walk back up through the park, stopping at a cafe for lunch. We both get rocket and buffalo mozzarella pizza, which is extremely good, but difficult to eat. It has runny tomato sauce, and is the drippiest pizza that I have ever encountered. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Instead of getting back on the metro at Spagna we consult the map, before heading down through the beautiful hotels and shops of this area towards Via Sistina and Trinita dei Monti. I haven’t been all the way up here before, at the very top of the Spanish Steps, and there are art stalls all around. The view of the shopping area is impressive, too.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>On Via del Corso we stop for another coffee, avoiding the grappa this time – instead we have <i>espresso con amaretto</i>, which is about a million times better, and comes with cream on top. And then I order an apple pie. Like the vaguely annoying woman in <i>Eat, Pray, Love</i>, I am dedicating myself to the pursuit of good food this weekend. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>We had been handed a leaflet for a ‘concept market’ the day before, so we head there after the amaretto and apple pie. The leaflet says it runs from 10am to 8pm, which seems ambitious, but since we’re in the area we decide to check it out anyway. When we reach Piazza Montecitorio, however, there is no sign of it at all. We do discover some new and delightful little cobbled streets, and then to make up for the lack of market we head back to Largo Argentina and buy a hat from <i>La Chieve</i>, the oriental shop on the corner. It is getting dark by now, so as well as my new hat I throw on some red lippy too – voila, instant image change. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>We go across the river to Trastevere, where we go into a few shops before stopping at a cafe and ordering wine, which in a delightfully continental fashion comes with crisps and nuts. It is very clear that after all today’s food we don’t need any more, so in its place we just have the wine. A couple of buskers pitch up near our table and Diane gives them a Euro. Sat outside on cobbles, drinking wine, in late November, in a new hat. And it is still ridiculously warm. Bliss. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>(Just to cut back to the present, where I am sat upstairs in Feltrinelli, watching the world flitter past the window, once again full of pasta and wine. Two Americans at a table behind me are discussing the relative virtues of moving to London –it is a wonderful place for the kids to grow up, but so expensive– and on my right hand side an old man is taking notes from a heavy tome, scribbling in every free space he can find in his newspaper. This randomness is what I enjoy most about being here – today, I love Rome).</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Diane has brought me an Independent –among the many things I miss are newspapers– but because of our hectic schedule I don’t get round to reading Thursday’s news until Saturday. When I do, it tells me that there is currently a resurgence in gang violence occurring in Rome, part of which is manifesting itself in the San Giovanni area. Well, San Giovanni is at the end of my street, which is slightly unnerving. Diane adds it to the list of things that she is worried about regarding Rome, which so far includes riots, floods, protests, robberies, Beige Spectres and unaccompanied overnight trips to Tuscany. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-345025232265634962011-11-23T13:51:00.000-08:002011-11-23T13:51:59.977-08:00Thanksgiving & further guest stupidity<div class="MsoNormal"><b>So, blog update time.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I have so far failed to make a carrot cake with Bea, which is not entirely surprising, as I am too scared to even attempt it. I’m thinking about burnt fish fingers, porridge splattered on top of the microwave, and not knowing that I was supposed to put water in condensed soup. These are just some of my previous culinary triumphs, and suitably explain why I spent most of my evenings at Lancaster eating out. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>So. There will be no carrot cake. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Instead, I’ve spent the last few days finishing the <i>Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves</i> book, reading about the history of Rome, making headway with my Italian (it’s still poor), and co-ordinating the Katha buddy scheme. I’ve also found a hotel room for the trip I’m taking to Florence at the beginning of December, when the Bellomos are going north to visit friends. HELLO, productivity. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>On Saturday evening I experience my first ever Thanksgiving, which is hosted by Agape, an NGO that Ashley has links with. We are first required to make turkeys by drawing round our hands and then adding legs and sagging neck, before sticking them on a display of turkey hands on the wall. Amazing. The Thanksgiving meal itself is a lot like a traditional Christmas dinner, but the highlight of it is the pumpkin pie – just indescribable. Afterwards we head out to the Macro Museum –all the major museums in Rome are open for free, for one night only, with live music playing. We arrive at half past twelve, and find that The Macro has electro blasting out near the terrace. Have a quick look around the museum and go up to the roof before heading to the bar. It is so, so good to be out. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>In other news, we have a new housekeeper. Anna, it transpires, is going back to Georgia to potentially get married, although details of whether she actually is or not remain hazy. The new housekeeper is Filipino, and she has her first day of work on Tuesday whilst I am out getting spectacularly rained on at lunch with Ashley. Thus, I don’t meet her until the evening.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>In the car on the way to pick up B&B from school, I ask Alberto whether her first day has gone well. ‘I think,’ he says, ‘she may be too small.’</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I feel that something has been lost in translation here. Considering that Lidia told me she was only twenty one, I ask, ‘What, she’s too young?’</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>‘Yes,’ Alberto says. ‘But also too small. She can’t reach the salt.’ </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Classic.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Tuesday evening presents this week’s Stupid American in the form of a middle aged man who is finding the hotel unsuitable due to its lack of Wi-Fi. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Like every other person who <i>just cannot possibly be separated from their email for more than two days</i>, he asks me how I’m on the internet. I tell him that Wi-Fi is unavailable for guests because of Italian law and owner culpability and that I can only access it because I work here, before pointing out the Mac in the corner (which costs nothing to use, I might add). </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>This is not sufficient, clearly, because after listening thoughtfully he walks up to Miguel behind the desk and says, ‘I wouldn’t mind if there was no phone in the room – I wouldn’t even notice. But not having the internet is like not having a bathroom.’</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Pardon?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>‘It’s like saying, sorry, no bathroom this week,’ he says. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Well... no. It isn’t really, is it? </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>He isn’t finished, though. ‘I’m going to ring my travel agent and ask to move to a different hotel,’ he blathers. ‘They didn’t tell me that there wouldn’t be Wi-Fi.’ </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>In the midst of this conversation, on the other side of reception, the people with the Wakefield accents start talking very loudly about penis piercings. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Good lord. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-78030338832029554252011-11-20T10:05:00.000-08:002011-11-20T10:05:28.315-08:00Faaaacking birds!<div class="MsoNormal"><b>On Sunday I meet Laura and we go to the market in Porta Portese. The market itself isn’t overly impressive – it’s the kind where you really have to hunt of you want to dig out the bargains amongst the crap, a lot like a British car boot sale. But Lidia has already told me that she hasn’t visited the market for ten years because it is now ‘dirty’, so I am prepared , and I do manage to track down a few things – a couple of bracelets, a red dress printed with elephants, and a used leather satchel bag that I barter down from twenty euros (a good price in the first place –leather!) to just eleven. It is my favourite purchase so far in Rome, and in the week that I’ve owned it it has hardly left my arm. It is <i>beaut</i>. I never thought I could develop such a strong attachment to a handbag so quickly, but there you are.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>We find a cute arty cafe afterwards (love, love, love Transtevere) and have an espresso, before heading back over the river. Laura has been perfecting her British accent and she tests it out on me now – unfortunately it still sounds very much like an American being ‘British’. Sorry mate!</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>After she leaves I go into Feltrinelli and leave with a book called <i>Rome Tales</i>, which includes stories from the days of the Roman Empire and leads right up to the present day. The amount of reading I’m doing here is ridiculous. When Diane leaves after her visit next week she’s going to be laden down with books to take home. I’m currently on <i>Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves</i>, a study of the lives of women in classical antiquity. I picked it up last year at the Roman Baths (in Bath) when I was on the BBC placement, and I’m actually glad it has taken me a year to get round to reading it. If I read it before last year’s women’s writing module or even before I was in Rome I don’t think I would have appreciated it half as much. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Afterwards I sit in a cafe near Piazza Venezia and read the GWWS book over a Panini – and then my card gets rejected by the chip and pin machine. Aargh! I swear that was a substantial amount of money in it when I left England, and I’ve only used it in Hollister and for the <i>Rome Tales</i> book – so I’m fairly confused about what is going on. A slight dilemma presents itself in that I now have three euros in my purse and two weeks until payday. Eeek.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I walk home via the Colloseum and stop to read again in the park by the Domus Aurea. I feel that a lot of walking/ reading in parks will be done over the next few days. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I realise on Monday that I am rediscovering the glorious joy of wasting time whilst I’m in Rome. After three years of deadline/ exams/ lectures, by the end of my time at Lancaster I was finding it difficult, unless I was actually <i>out</i> and socialising, to actually relax. I was starting to think that I had forgotten how. This week, though, I am recapturing the art of the long, lazy lie-in. It is beautiful, and it means I have more energy for the twins when my working day starts at 4pm. Weirdly, my <i>eyes</i> look healthier. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>On Monday after school we make rice crispy cakes. B&B are very excited about this, and despite half the chocolate getting consumed before it even reaches the pan the cakes come out fairly successfully. They are extremely gooey. ‘Three kilos of fat,’ Lidia says as we eat them later. I think this is a fairly accurate assessment. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I am performing the nightly battle to get B&B to brush their teeth when Alberto comes into the bathroom. ‘A fucking bird has shit on my head and on my coat,’ he says. ‘Fucking bird!’</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>And this is Monday. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Tuesday doesn’t start well for the Bellomos (as if being shat on by a bird wasn’t bad luck enough). At lunch I find out that Bea accidentally slammed the car door on Bene’s head as they were getting out for school. When we pick them up the lump is obvious and Bene is in a subdued mood. I don’t know what to do – I hate seeing them sad.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Since yesterday’s baking was a success, over dinner I ask whether they would like to do it again next week, and if so what different things they’d like to put in the cakes. Bene would like <i>fragole</i>– strawberries. Yes, excellent, strawberries we can do. White chocolate and <i>fragola</i> rice crispy cakes, perhaps?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>And what would Bea like to put in?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>She thinks for a few seconds: ‘Carrot.’</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Carrot. CARROT. Whilst I applaud her healthy outlook, I don’t exactly feel that carrot goes with strawberries and chocolate, or with rice crispies.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>‘A carrot cake?’ I ask, against my better judgement, because, and it may come as a shock since I am quite clearly such a domestic goddess when it comes to rice crispy cakes, I have never made a cake of the traditional variety –with butter, flour, eggs, etc. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Disgusting, I know. But I’ve never felt the overwhelming urge to domesticate myself, and if I want a cake I’ll buy one, thanks. Most of the time, this is sufficient. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Not in this case, however. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>‘Yes,’ Bea says. ‘Carrot cake.’</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Shiiiiii. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-62960646684693653362011-11-19T05:07:00.000-08:002011-11-19T05:07:48.480-08:00I actually do run into Dominic Cooper... probably.<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>Friday 11<sup>th</sup> November, of course, is Remembrance Day. Italy does not honour this tradition and thus I have no poppy, which because I am out of England makes me feel especially guilty. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>(I am so, so behind with my blogs. Apologies).</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>I spend a while reading the poetry that has been posted all over Facebook. I really think some of the most beautiful poems of the English language came out of the trenches; my favourite is Rupert Brooke – ‘If I should die, think only this of me:/ That there is a corner of some foreign field/ that is forever England.’</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>It brings a lump to my throat every time.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>After rendering myself sufficiently melancholy I have a wander down to Via Merulana, where I purchase a badge pin and a piece of red cardboard –this year’s poppy will have to be a DIY job. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>Later, the twins are fascinated and we make poppies together – I try to explain, in the simplest way possible, that the poppies are worn to remember the dead men from the war. I think they understand. They say they do anyway, which is a good sign. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>Before the poppy making, however, I am walking back to the hotel via Viale Manzoni when I am alarmed to see a man walking down the hill towards me who bears a striking resemblance to Dominic Cooper. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>(It has since come to my attention that some of you cretins are UNAWARE of the hallowed beauty of Dominic Cooper, and this saddens me. So I will just remind you of <i>The History Boys</i>, <i>The Duchess</i>, and the 2008 TV adaptation of <i>Sense and Sensibility</i>, as well as <i>Mamma Mia!</i> and <i>The Devil’s Double</i>, neither of which I have seen. Especially as Earl Grey in <i>The Duchess</i>, Cooper is a fully fledged BEAUT. He has even edged out Gerard as my Brit actor-obsession of the moment). </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>So. This man is walking towards me with a gym bag and he looks so much like Dominic Cooper that I stare and stare and stare. He sees me staring. He smiles slightly, and walks past. I consider texting Wench – ‘I’ve just seen a man who looks like Dominic Cooper, NOM, nice bit of Earl Grey in the afternoon’ – but resist, because really, this is hardly news. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>Later on Facebook Chat, however: ‘Wench, I almost texted you today to tell you a saw a man who looked like Dominic Cooper... but when I realised it was just an Italian letch I decided it wasn’t really worth it.’</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="color: #134f5c;"><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="color: #134f5c;">Melissa then does a small amount of Google research, in the process of which she discovers that Doms Cooper was in fact HERE in Rome last week for the premier of <i>My Week With Marilyn</i>, which was showing at the Film Festival. We thus surmise that he is STILL HERE, and that it was in fact him walking down the road, and BLOODY HELL did I literally just walk past Dominic Cooper on his way back from the gym?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh85UkNDo00c4jXJGUVpfvsY4xC6Ba2dsg-n0_RjvIcA1pzZweBcmRReGg_4rc-pnh-PMmqoKVhAY481QcF5yUYGSfOsOZvI584ilZv6CA9CTBcB4YowquSYWxM0CMwT1UcZL8WcUy2d3xb/s1600/doms+coop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh85UkNDo00c4jXJGUVpfvsY4xC6Ba2dsg-n0_RjvIcA1pzZweBcmRReGg_4rc-pnh-PMmqoKVhAY481QcF5yUYGSfOsOZvI584ilZv6CA9CTBcB4YowquSYWxM0CMwT1UcZL8WcUy2d3xb/s320/doms+coop.jpg" width="204" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>Well. This makes my week. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>Twitter tells me that yes, Wench’s facts are correct, he was in Rome recently. I don’t delve too far into the Twitter archives though, out of fear that it wasn’t him at all and in fact really was just an Italian letch. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh85UkNDo00c4jXJGUVpfvsY4xC6Ba2dsg-n0_RjvIcA1pzZweBcmRReGg_4rc-pnh-PMmqoKVhAY481QcF5yUYGSfOsOZvI584ilZv6CA9CTBcB4YowquSYWxM0CMwT1UcZL8WcUy2d3xb/s1600/doms+coop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b></b></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>It would be a sad thing to destroy this feeling of having just walked past Dominic Cooper with the truth, so I choose to believe it. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c;"><b>Here, for aesthetic purposes, is a picture of Earl Grey.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-72502574198827999822011-11-18T05:56:00.000-08:002011-11-18T05:56:51.525-08:0018th November: Why Brit actors trounce the competition... always.<div class="MsoNormal"><b><i>People Magazine</i>, that purveyor of gossip to the good citizens of the US of A, has just named Bradley Cooper as its sexiest man alive.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I feel conflicted about this. Whilst I can’t disagree with the aesthetics (the man is quite clearly a cut above most other specimens of the human race) I don’t feel that I would place him this highly on my own mental list. Yes, he has a pleasing face to gaze upon whilst attempting to sit through <i>The</i> <i>Hangover</i> (again) – but <i>the</i> single sexiest man on the planet? I’m not so sure. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>But then, I’m far too into our very own British actors to give an unbiased opinion. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I reject the stereotype of Hollywood as a land of Adonises that exist purely to make our humble island-dwelling knees wobble. Here is my justification. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>British culture is built upon self-effacing humour. Mockery, sarcasm – it is what we have all grown up with. What actor, other than a British one, would take the piss out of himself by donning a reindeer jumper and then staging a ridiculous fight in a fountain over a slightly overweight and blathery thirty something woman whose culinary skill extends only to blue soup? (I’m looking at you Colin Firth, you babe). Can you imagine this level of self-deprecation coming from an American? No, thought not. They just want to be taken seriously. Yawn. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>My next reason is that I don’t like them polished. Every man needs a bit of stubble. Gerard Butler is my favourite example of this. Hollywood types are far too groomed, and honestly, it just ain’t appealing to a girl from Yorkshire. I don’t spend that much time in front of the mirror <i>myself</i>, so really, if you’re going to be there longer than me then it isn’t going to work between us, Mr Hollywood. You and your manscara can go on your merry way. I’m sorry to say it. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Our current crop of top Brit actors (James McAvoy, Andrew Garfield) also sort of look like they might have been in your class at school. This is nice, because it means they look like men you could date without feeling too intimidated. Also, the two mentioned here (from Scotland and Essex respectively) tend to look just a little bit scared by the position on the outer fringes of the Hollywood big league, which quite frankly is just adorable. It makes me want to buy them a cup of tea and crack open the therapeutic Hobnobs. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJGVb52PeIulPGNU5ABKDN15s1zGMW-1P5ZhghumSMRqWJzgH3t-06hyphenhyphen-oF94cSscnJ8Ca1eLSs9YooYZoiGvJgFYyk-PuCzw_hszQo7O4-ixoz_NciphLvx_Y-KsQ6PZDVoPdQ_4dwsf0/s1600/orlando.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJGVb52PeIulPGNU5ABKDN15s1zGMW-1P5ZhghumSMRqWJzgH3t-06hyphenhyphen-oF94cSscnJ8Ca1eLSs9YooYZoiGvJgFYyk-PuCzw_hszQo7O4-ixoz_NciphLvx_Y-KsQ6PZDVoPdQ_4dwsf0/s320/orlando.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Also, Britain is cold, and I have a weakness for a man in a good winter coat. Don’t ask me why. Leading the Brit actor pack with his exceptional coat wearing skills is Orlando Bloom, who seems to have been hanging around in his sexy coat with its upturned collar for my entire life. Here he is in 2010. See what I mean? Something about a man who understands the importance of spending money on a coat suggests to me maturity and intelligence. A good coat will last a long time. The man in it will be a keeper, too. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Finally, a large part of my Brit actor obsession is that, unlike the Hollywood stars, the sheer proximity of our Brit boys means they are so, so much more real. When I move back to England I’m unlikely to run into Bradley Cooper in my local pub in Wimbledon; running into Dominic Cooper, however, is a strong possibility. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>With that in mind, I’ll be in a cosy British pub within a few hours of getting off the plane. Call it patriotism. </b></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-62542514194486779732011-11-14T07:31:00.000-08:002011-11-14T11:22:53.835-08:00Caligula, Audrey Hepburn & an autumnal blush<div class="MsoNormal"><b>On Monday, I plan to visit the Audrey a Roma exhibition at the Ara Pacis.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The exhibition has over 150 photographs, mostly candid, of Audrey Hepburn’s life in Rome, as well as some of her clothes – including the pink wedding dress from her second marriage, to Andrea Dotti. I’m fairly excited about getting my Audrey fix. (Yes, I was one of those teenage girls who was obsessed with her, yes I watched Holly Golightly flitter repeatedly through New York, over and over again, and yes, I did have that depressingly common pink poster of her with the cat up on my wall for my entire three years at Lancaster). </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>But I haven’t counted on the weather today, and in a similar vein as yesterday it decides to gloriously piss it down whilst I am having breakfast. And then, because fate clearly just needs me to stay inside today, I find that there is a metro and bus strike going on until 5pm anyway. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>So. No Audrey/ 1960s fashion/ 00s teenage nostalgia for me. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Instead I wait an incredibly long time for the Mac so I can check Facebook and my emails (there is a man who looks far too old to be doing so playing a game called Farmerama and intermittently farting and then congratulating himself – WHY are there so many freaks in this hotel?) and then go back to my room and write the Beyond Africa exhibition article instead. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>On Tuesday rain threatens, but I risk the Audrey exhibition anyway. I head down Via dei Condotti pretending that I’m not even slightly awed by Prada, Chanel, Bulgari, Fendi, Dior, Gucci, etc. It’s a fairly intimidating street, but I walk with my head held high in the hope that this will mean no one notices my slightly worn tights and Topshop skirt (circa 2007). </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Ara Pacis is primarily a <i>museo</i> of Roman history, as well as currently housing the Audrey a Roma exhibition. The first thing I am greeted with is a huge Caesar family tree – its most famous patriarch Julius (c. 101 – 44 BC) is at the top; at the bottom is everyone favourite sexually depraved Emperor Caius Caligula (12 – 41 AD), who in my opinion is not depicted most accurately in one thousand year old busts, but in the hallowed words of Steven Patrick Morrisey, i.e. the impossibility of making Caligula blushhhhh. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Further inspection of the family tree reveals that Caligula was the father of Nero, which might explain why the latter was so bloody <i>mental</i>.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Ara Pacis was erected in 13 BC to celebrate the return of the Emperor Augustus from the western provinces – Spain and Gaul. Priests, magistrates and vestal virgins were ordered to make sacrifices upon it, which seems fairly out of order to me. The place itself consisted of ‘campus’, where the Republic’s heroes were buried, the youth did athletics, the army trained and chariot races took place. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Audrey a Roma exhibition is amazing. Partly curated by her son Luca Dotti, it shows photographs that are alarmingly personal – Audrey walking her dogs, picking up flowers and browsing at a bakery, even walking with her mother in Monti. There is a video of her wedding to Andrea Dotti playing alongside family holiday clips, as well as the tiny pink wedding dress. Seeing these things is bizarre, but even more so is her original script from <i>Roman Holiday</i>, complete with annotated scribbling – in one scene she reminds herself that Princess Anna should be having ‘the happiest day of her life’. Her passport is also on display, as is the vesper from <i>Roman Holiday</i>, which has its own guard watching over it. Surreal. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Afterwards I spend a bit more time browsing through the Ara Pacis antiquities, before catching the metro at Flamino and heading homewards.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>In reception later, I am bowled over by the demands of two female (American) guests. They tramp up the stairs (only one flight), loudly, before enquiring as to whether there is anyone who can carry their luggage. The receptionist says there isn’t, sorry – the hotel doesn’t provide a porter service. (This is because it is two star and wonderfully cheap, which he doesn’t point out, but really should). </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The elder woman says, ‘We’ve just had the worst day of our lives. We missed our plane in Paris because the taxi took us to the wrong airport, and then we lost our luggage.’</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>A number of things occur to me when she says this. Firstly, clearly the luggage is here, because I can hear her companion groaning loudly as she drags it up the stairs. Nice. Secondly, I bet you didn’t realise there were two airports in Paris and thus didn’t give the poor taxi driver the correct details, you fool. Thirdly, shut up.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I’m thinking about my pink Roxy suitcase and the time I dragged it, stuffed with a week’s worth of clothes, about ten books, and a laptop, with a sleeping bag strapped to the handle, from Chessington Travelodge to Waterloo during the London commute, and then the half mile to the TNS office in torrential rain. My Roxy suitcase has been on many wonderful adventures, but this was not one of them, and the fact that these women are moaning because they have to ascend <i>one flight</i> of stairs is beyond me.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>‘Oh,’ the receptionist says. ‘I’m sorry about that. Give me a minute and let me just create a porter from thin air; I can perform miracle acts such as this on days when guests are stressed out by their own stupidity.’ </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The woman says, ‘It’s really not good. People will come with luggage.’</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Argh. Two stars! </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>***</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>On Wednesday I have a browse in Feltrinelli, whilst waiting for lunch, and think about all the things I miss about England.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>A few days ago Katy told me that during her year in Madrid she missed carpet. I didn’t fully understand how one could miss carpet, but now I do. Aside from people, obviously, absolutely everything I miss is ridiculous. I’ll give you some examples. Costa Gingerbread Lattes. Ridiculous! I’m in the coffee capital of the world! Scrambled eggs (cooked by Diane, of course). Despite deriding it every year, the X Factor. Grimy British pubs/ cider and black. Most ridiculous of all -the <i>train</i>, specifically, the train journey between Manchester Piccadilly and Huddersfield and vice versa. Melissa believes this is metaphorical, and something to do with homecoming. I think it is because, in whichever direction the train is going, I know there will be people I love waiting for me at the end of it. And probably wine. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I also miss music, specifically the radio, which I have obviously never valued highly enough before. I’d never realised until I came here how much it is <i>on</i> at home. In the morning when I come downstairs, in the car – it is constant. I abandoned my IPod two years ago after spending too long fighting with ITunes and I haven’t missed it, but now without internet in my room I can’t even listen to YouTube unless I set up camp with my headphones in reception. Last week in Transtevere, I found myself hovering outside a cafe for close to five minutes just because it was playing Adele. So today, at the back of Feltrinelli, I am exceptionally pleased to find sample albums playing on headphones. I am happy that I will be able to spend a few minutes getting my English music fix, until no sound comes out of the headphones and I realise that they are broken. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I am gutted. Boo Italy.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>I meet Ashley and Laura and we pick up paninis and smoothies and eat lunch by the Pantheon. My peach smoothie is delish, and my faith in Italy is somewhat restored. After Ashley has gone back to work Laura and I wander down to Campo dei Fiori, stopping in a few shops on the way. At the market Laura searches for ingredients for her Thanksgiving feast for thirty family members (so, so brave) and I take in the beauty of the stalls, which are so swathed in autumnal colours that they don’t even look real. I love autumn, and it is out in full force in Campo dei Fiori today. </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Despite this, however, I still think that the best place to be in this season is Yorkshire, with cable-knit tights and crumpets and a proper quilt to snuggle in when it gets cold – sorry Rome! </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-87019472243018431302011-11-11T08:53:00.000-08:002011-11-11T08:53:28.478-08:00Muses, Hellenization & a very British weekend<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>So, after a week’s sojourn, back to ol’ Socrates and his Roman bust and its unearthing in Piazza Venezia. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>To be honest, the Museo Nazionale Romano feels like a long time ago. But I will recreate the potted history lesson it gave me as well (and as briefly) as I can. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>Because of the abundance of art, philosophy, literature, etc, in Ancient Greece because of its place as a centre of learning, an absorption of the Hellenic culture began to manifest itself in Rome in the second century BC. The ‘Hellenization’ came about because of increased contact between the Greece and Rome, for trade initially, and means essentially that a lot of the sculptures that I find today at the Nazionale Romano appear much more traditionally ‘Greek’ than Italian. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>Interesting facts on Muses: of Zeus’ nine Muse daughters (Clio, Thalia, Erato, Euterpe, Polyhymnia, Calliope, Terpsichore, Urania, Melpomene), Melpomene is the Muse of Tragedy and the protector of arts and sciences. The word ‘museum’, named after Melpomene, comes from ‘muse’. Greek poet Sappho was named by Plato as ‘the tenth Muse’. And of course, ‘muse’ has passed into our lexicon now as a thing that artists derive their inspiration from – the Pre-Raphaelites’ Lizzie Siddal and Andy Warhol’s Edie Sedgwick are the first that spring to my mind, and then there is of course the band <i>Muse</i>, and the epitome of all muses, Marilyn Monroe, whose status as an art object probably outshines that of her as an actress. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>My mind is constantly blown by how much our society relies on ancient Roman and Hellenic culture, usually without us even thinking about it. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>The politics of the ‘cult of personality’ (my extremely vague A-level political history is forced to come into play here, hello again Lenin) was prefigured by that pervert Caligula, miniature statues of whom once existed in their droves. There is one at the <i>museo</i> here. In contrast, few statues of Emperor Nero remain – most were destroyed after his death as a result of his <i>damnatio memoriae</i>, which to be quite honest doesn’t even need translating. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>Considering that the lovely bloke once burnt 200+ Christians in order to provide light for his evening meal, I’m not entirely surprised that his statues were irrevocably smashed up.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>The next statue I come across is of Aphrodite (Roman Venus; I was unaware until recently that they were one and the same) bending to bathe. It is not the Greek original but in fact one of numerous Roman copies, a manifestation right in front of me of the Hellenization of art in the Roman Empire. This particular statue has a fairly mind-blowing history – it was unearthed in the bathing house of Emperor Hadrian (he of the Wall fame). </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>Behind Aphrodite is her son Eros, God of love, winged, as a young boy. Both statues are depictions of the supposed Greek ‘ideal’. A large number of statues were discovered at Hadrian’s villa, near Tivoli. Villa Adriana was apparently decorated ‘intellectually, yet with Romantic taste. Aside from the Aphrodite, a bust of Marcus Aurelius, Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, was also found. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>Other important statues at the <i>museo</i> include two of Apollo, one of which was found in the Tiber, a potential Hera, sister and wife of Zeus, and Discobolo –a discus thrower, unearthed in the seventeenth century. Discobolo and his ilk were extremely popular with Roman nobles, who evidently enjoyed decorating their gyms with statues of young boys in loin cloths, lunging. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>Another interesting fact: the statue of Dioniso that I find upstairs was discovered in 1928 on Appian Way in Rome, and was taken to Germany where it was used for propaganda by the Nazis in 1944. It dates from between 117 and 138 AD, and was only returned to Italy in 1991. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>On the top floor my ocular senses are attacked by a recreation of the villa owned by Livia Druscilla, wife of Emperor Augustus. A huge mosaic has survived and it is mounted across the walls of one room here, in a reconstruction designed to represent the outdoors – it is a garden scene, with trees, birds and flowers in abundance, and I read that it was discovered underground and was probably used as an ‘indoor garden’ when the heat of the Italian summer got too unbearable. The colours are still vivid and everything is in high bloom, offering, like with the statues, an ideal rather than realism. It is <i>incredible</i> how much of it has survived.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b> </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>***</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>On Friday evening, I am letting Bea jump all over me (literally, from the sofa, while I only half pretend to cower on the floor) when Alberto tells me that they never played like this with their old au pair and that they must therefore like me. I am heartened by this. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>On Saturday I am free in the afternoon, which I luxuriously waste (I can’t even remember what I did; it probably heavily involved Facebook and the Guardian App) and then Lidia and B&B go to a friend’s for dinner and I attend Alberto’s football party, where I have a very interesting conversation with about India, the dangers of sharks, and the British education system (yes, diverse topics) with a man named Luca, father of B&B’s friends Polite Martina and Nintendo-Addicted Lucio. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>Once again, the fact that I can drink <i>two</i> glasses of wine AND an entire bottle of beer and not be on the floor leaves them astounded. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>***</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>Sunday, out of nowhere, is unbelievably, beautifully, unexpectedly British. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>This is what happens. We go to buy a washing machine. Such an English way to spend a Sunday morning! I entertain the kids with video game shopping and Disney books whilst Lidia and Alberto head off upstairs and purchase white goods like so many British parents do at the weekend. We could almost be in Ikea. While I am sat outside later, unpeeling oranges for the twins and waiting for Lidia to bring the car round, it starts to rain. We go to a McDonalds on the edge of a main road (just like Leeds Road McDonalds!) and sit outside under cover whilst the rain plummets down. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>A November weekend of washing machine shopping and McDonalds. I FEEL LIKE I’M HOME. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>It is amazing. I have never had a McChicken Sandwich and relished its greasy beauty so much. And then, because the gods clearly love me today, we go to a mall. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>The twins climb into a trolley and Lidia wheels them off to the Disney Store. Freedom! Freedom in a mall, for the first time since before India! The first time I’ve properly shopped since AUGUST! Ahhh. I go to Hollister, which is not advisable on an au pair’s wage but hey ho, and beauty of beauties, my card works in Italy! </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>I rejoin the twins after my Hollister excursion, briefly, and we count seven elves, a reindeer and the numerous presents that are piled up outside Santa’s grotto. B&B are enamoured by the fake snow; Lidia later tells me that they never see it. Once, she says, it did snow in Rome. <i>Once</i>. She thought the roads would close and she wouldn’t be able to get home, so she was preparing to camp out at her mother’s. And then the snow stopped after twenty minutes.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>***</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>Afterwards H&M steals away the last money in my purse, which I happily exchange for a light pink floaty shirt and a fur lined gilet. I am irrationally happy with my purchases, which mean I will no longer be gazed at worriedly by the Bellomos and the hotel staff when I step outside into the balmy Roman autumn wearing fewer layers than they deem suitable. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>On the way home, the lightening starts, and the rain gets increasingly torrential. Due to the homeliness of today, I feel like I should be in Lancaster or Almondbury (either will do) wrapped in a duvet, with a hot chocolate, writing shit poetry and sporadically napping. It is the only thing to do in this weather. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b>Instead I spend the evening with slightly damp feet, drawing pictures with the twinnies. But I suppose today was homely enough, and we can’t have everything in life. Today, my cosy new hoodie and a cup of tea will happily suffice. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #8e7cc3;"><b><3 </b></span></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-57975154400312943362011-11-03T02:37:00.000-07:002011-11-03T02:37:46.026-07:00Caravaggio & journo geeking.<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>Friday morning greets me with an email from the National Student, sat in my inbox like a gift from aspiring journo heaven: would I be available to interview Emma Thompson’s son about his recent trip to Burma and meeting with one-year-free-from-house-arrest opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi?</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>Yes, I think I would thanks. It might be the most important article I’ve done in my (almost) two years of journo-ing, as long as I can structure an interview without my absolute hero-worship of my interviewee’s mother getting in the way, which I cannot fully guarantee. In true geek fashion, I’m even more excited than when I got to interview Claire off The Apprentice and Maximo Park on the same day.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>Burma research takes precedence, then, over San Luigi dei Francesci this morning (sorry Lidia). Caravaggio has been in the church for god knows how many years; I’m sure he can wait a few more days.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>I have numerous questions for Tindy, and despite a lot of research I still fear that they aren’t politically intelligent enough. I do manage to resist adding a postscript for Emma Thompson at the bottom though, which would’ve gone along the lines of this: ‘Hello Emma Thompson, you are one of my biggest heroes, in fact you wouldn’t believe the amount of afternoons me and my friend Wench have spent watching Sense and Sensibility. THE AIR IS FILLED WITH SPICES. Also I agree with your views on religion, and I’m a feminist too! I know that you’re busy saving the world and suchlike, but I really think that we should be friends. Respectfully, Lucy Miller.’</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>I don’t write this.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>Instead I control my hero-worship, just, send off my questions for Tindy, post the ‘Indian Highways’ article for review on The Flaneur, and head off to another exhibition. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>***</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>The ‘Beyond Africa: From Africa to New York’ photographic display, in Arte 5, is an exhibition depicting the photographer’s journey from tribal Kenya to New York. I went to Namibia when I was 18 (I fell in love with Africa more than I did with India, but got less out of the trip), and I’m loving the contrast of the photographs I find here. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>The Kenyan photographs were taken during the time the artist, Speranza Casillo, spent living with the Maasai Tribe in the Chyulu Hills. The sparse Kenyan skyline, sometimes only broken by a solitary tree, set alongside the dirty and underground parts of New York brings about a rugged side in the latter that we rarely see. The question of civilised/ uncivilised, and what we usually deem this to mean, is questioned.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>As usual, a Flaneur article will follow. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>I buy two photo books of Paris after I’ve taken my notes (I know, I know – again nothing to do with Rome). One is pocket sized, and full of the monochrome early twentieth century Paris of Eugene Atget . After just a flick over a few pages I can attest that I agree with history’s view of Atget: he was a man with a very good eye for a shot. The other book is huge and contains hundreds of pictures, a lot of which seem to be of women in 1920s garb swinging off carrousels and the tops of buildings. I love the clothes, and the innocence, and the locations; it goes in the bag. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>I leave Arte 5 considering that the number of art books I’ve picked up whilst I’m here is going to do serious damage to my baggage allowance on the flight home. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>***</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>Saturday. I’m free! Lidia tells me that they will be going to her mother’s and that she will see me at 8pm for dinner. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>There are twat American girls at breakfast. They talk in that loud way that Americans do when they want EVERYONE TO HEAR THEM. One of them says that she broke up with her boyfriend because he wanted to take her skiing for her birthday, and, I kid you not, this was unacceptable to her because ‘he should’ve known me better – I don’t like to ski’.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>Words fail me.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>They come into reception as I am waiting for the Mac. They want to move to another hotel because they haven’t got ensuite, and from this I deduct that they must be staying in Alphabet House. The bathrooms have been vomit inducingly disgusting over the last few days, but since they are only sharing with me and Anna I have to conclude that the dirt all over the floor is <i>their fault anyway</i>. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>Also, they don’t think that the croissants, jam, bread, coffee, and orange juice count as breakfast. YOU ARE IN ANOTHER CULTURE. ITALIANS EAT BREAD FOR BREAKFAST. GO HOME IF YOU WANT A FRY UP.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>As I am about to leave, I hear a classic comment from the girl whose heinous boyfriend tried to take her skiing: ‘Do you think,’ she says, looking down at a leaflet with a perplexed expression, ‘that we should do some cultural stuff while we’re here?’</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>Oh my god, get out of my life.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>***</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>I spend Saturday morning at the Museo dei Fori Imperiali/ Trajan Market, which is not a market that sells things, but the remains of a Roman one. There is quite a lot to see and read, and it is mildly interesting in the way that all faceless ruins are. There is an exhibition of Japanese art running inside the main <i>museo</i> building (I can’t avoid modern art even when I’m in a two thousand year old ruin, obviously), and I take lots of notes. The tiny geisha figurines and pressed flowers set against the giant busts of Roman gods, for dramatic juxtaposition, is one of the reasons why the exhibition was chosen to be staged here. My verdict on the <i>mercati</i> – minus the Japanese art – is that it is ok, and I’m glad I came, and that there is a good view from the top, which takes in Piazza Venezia, the Forum and a few churches. The remains of the market, a video tells me, have layer upon layer of history in them – Roman, medieval, Baroque, and then all the failed and all the successful restoration attempts. And these are just the main influences.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>I’m fully aware that I should be fascinated, but I’m not for exactly this reason. Its history is too vast, too impersonal, too far reaching for me to fully comprehend. Without a bit of humanity I’m fairly lost. It reminds me of A-level history exam questions: ‘Assess the importance of the Roman, medieval and Baroque, and their influence on the Trajan Market of Rome as a whole across 2000 years.’ What, just me and my pen? In forty minutes? </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>***</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>Afterwards I walk down through Piazza Venezia and Largo Argentina, and past the Pantheon, in my second attempt at San Luigi dei Francesci. I love this part of Rome – it’s so cobbly and pretty, and I stop for a panini and an espresso at a cafe that is nestled between layers of peaches and cream buildings. There are vespers everywhere – it is so very, very Italian. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>The stomach ache that I’ve had all day is still lingering, so afterwards (after I’ve discovered that San Luigi dei Francesci is closed between 12.30 and 4pm – that is one long lunch) I buy a packet of miniature Bueno bars and eat three of them as I wander in the direction on Campo di Fiori (don’t judge me, I’m ill). At the market I buy four decorated bottle tops as souvenirs, which is entirely unjustifiable because it is very rare that the bottle doesn’t get finished, and then cross the river into Transtevere.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>I find myself without meaning to at the Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Antica, in Palazzo Corsini – once home to Christina of Sweden (thank you once again, 100 Influential Women book). Christina might have disappeared to Italy and neglected the poor Swedish working classes, but she was all about the arts. The collection here has existed unchanged since the eighteenth century, which is fairly amazing if you think about it. I pay for my <i>biglietti</i> (only two euros for a Caravaggio!) and spend a while browsing. It doesn’t take too long to get around; there are only a few rooms and the map is very helpful in pointing out the significant paintings. Caravaggio’s St. John the Baptist, displayed in pride of place at the end, is the highlight. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>***</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>Next on my Roman to do list is a Transtevere church, Santa Maria Della Scala. It is really beautiful inside, with chandeliers everywhere, much like the one just outside Celimontana that we visited with the twins. I sit for a while and soak up the atmosphere – there is tranquil music playing – before deciding to head back across the river to attempt to re-find San Luigi dei Francesci. The amount of effort it has taken to track down, Caravaggio better be worth it. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>I accidentally find two more churches on my way there. The first is dedicated to Saint Barbara, who was beheaded by her own father because of her Christian faith, and the second is Chiesa Nouva, which is adorned with frescos and ornate in the manner of most Catholic churches. A sign tells me that is <i>another</i> Caravaggio inside, the Depozitione – but once it has lured me towards it it reveals that it is fact a copy, and that the actual painting is in the Vatican Museum collection. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>I leave Chiesa Nouva after this flat out lie, and when I reach San Luigi dei Francesci I find that it is actually, <i>finally</i>, open. It is easy to find Caravaggio Corner, due to the obscene amount of tourists that are pressed into it, snapping away despite the signs everywhere warning against the use of flash. I take my time getting to it, and read about the rest of the church first. The three paintings, when I eventually reach them, are very dark and give off a feeling of foreboding (later, Alberto will tell me that Caravaggio is so famous because his work was so different to his contemporaries’ and was therefore seen as scandalous). I stay for a while, refusing to be jostled out of the way by Americans – I feel like it has taken a lot of work to reach the church during its actual opening hours, and that I should get my money’s worth (the church is free, but the analogy is one of time). After sufficient studying of the life of Saint Matthew, I head home, where I have a long and luxurious nap before dinner.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>***</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>With the Bellomos visiting friends outside of Rome, Sunday is a writing and doing nothing day. I have a lie-in and then a long shower, paint my toenails, generally rest, finish <i>A Passage to India</i>, spend a lot of time on Facebook, play virtual Scrabble, and then order takeaway pizza to come to reception. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>It is a good Sunday, but then Monday throws me a curveball. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>However, I’ve written enough for today, I feel, so my recount of the last few days will have to wait. Thanks for reading! </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><b>xxx</b></span></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-3459712907460510262011-10-30T15:29:00.000-07:002011-10-30T15:29:00.202-07:00This week in Rome...<div class="MsoNormal">My Monday morning begins with a worried phone call from Diane. I’m sorry if I scared people with the Beige Spectre blog<span> </span>–I’m fine, he’s gone!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He’s actually long gone now, since the last blog I posted was nearly a week ago. There is no particular reason for my lack of blogging over the last few days; for some reason I just haven’t got round to it. The Indian Highways article seemed to take a long time to finish, so I’ll blame my inefficiency on that.<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal">Nothing much of note happens on Monday; on Tuesday I decide to visit the Mel Bookstore to take advantage of its sale in big arty hardbacks, followed by Piazza Navona and San Luigi dei Francesci. The latter is a French church tucked in between Piazza Navona and the Pantheon, and Lidia has recommended that I go because it holds the three Caravaggios depicting the life of Saint Matthew – <i>The Calling of Saint Matthew</i>, <i>The Inspiration of Saint Matthew</i>, and <i>The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew</i>.<span> </span>Apparently they are fairly important and are one of the things I should’ve done first, if I hadn’t been spending my time staring at <i>modern</i> art instead. Oops. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The letching is out in full force today. On my way to the bus (five minutes) I get a ‘you so lovelyyy’ and an inexplicable ‘eyyyyy!’. The Chinese are unquestionably the worst. I think it’s the massive Indian palazzo pants. They give off an attitude.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I get off the bus at Via Nazionale and at the Mel Bookstore quickly dismiss, because I haven’t got <i>that</i> much time, all the art books that are in Italian. Eventually I select a book of Polaroid stills and a hardback on Japanese printing. It has dawned on me that the things I’m finding interesting in Rome – Georgia O’Keeffe, Indian 21<sup>st</sup> century sculpture, Japanese art– have nothing to do with the city itself. I don’t think Lidia is enjoying this, hence why she keeps directing me towards Caravaggios. However, in my defence I will point out that the classic art that is <i>everywhere</i> in Rome has probably been written about a thousand times; the current exhibitions that are showing at the Fondazione and the other smaller museums are what need to be written about. It isn’t like I can review a Michelangelo fresco and publish it on The Flaneur. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Back on Via Nazionale, a random man blows me a kiss and another tells me that I am ‘wonderful’. It is as if they’re taking the piss, to be honest. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And this is when I commit sacrilege. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m in Rome. I go to Burger King.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m sorry, I know it’s wrong. It is so very, very wrong. However, they keep feeding me sauce-less wholegrain vegetable pasta and minestrone and I want to eat something that is fatty and lovely and <i>bad</i>.</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am salivating for a Chicken Royale. I buy one. With French fries. They are so good I can’t even explain.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">***</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Afterwards I carry on down past Piazza Venezia and go into Arte 5, where I find a delightful exhibition depicting a photographer’s journey from Kenya to New York, and then discover that San Luigi dei Francesci is unfortunately closed – I’m guessing for lunch. I go straight to Piazza Navona instead. The Piazza is worth the wait: two impressive statues, one by Bernini, an obelisk, a huge dome sat on top of the former home of the notable Pamphilj family, and abundant flowers and restaurants all strike me as I turn the corner. There are artists selling their work all over the square, and despite the thousands of tourists that are milling around I have a wander around the outside feeling like I have found a tiny little bit of heaven. It would be a lovely place to sit with wine and people watch, which is one of my favourite European capital city activities. Bear this in mind for the future. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">At one end is the Museo di Roma. I spent a while looking around. The Museum is ok, but I’m glad I don’t spend more than five fifty euros on the entrance. It is mainly portraits depicting the changing status of the artist in the late 18<sup>th</sup> century, as a result of the French Revolution. The artists, no longer relying on the nobility to commission their work, found themselves with higher status and better financial security. Thus, they and their families often became the subject of paintings instead of just being the ones behind the brush. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The second floor offers more portraits, of influential families of la <i>belle époque</i> (thank god for modernism last year; I wouldn’t understand a thing without it). There are also late nineteenth century photographs of Piazza Navona, which are fairly interesting. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Cultural learning satisfied for today, it is time to head back to the hotel.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">***</div><div class="MsoNormal">At gymnastics, the corridors are decorated for Halloween. B&B are in a mythical orange and black wonderland, oohing and ahhing at spiders and pumpkins and crepe papers lanterns all the way to the changing room. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Later, I beat Wench at virtual Scrabble with 348 points. It is a good day.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">***</div><div class="MsoNormal">On Wednesday it rains, and B&B don’t go to school. I am still free though, and brave the mild drizzle (these Italians would have a fit if they were dropped in the middle of Lancaster in October) to meet Ashley and Laura for lunch, as per Wednesday tradition.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My mother rings me before I leave, in order to check that I am still alive, because I posted nothing on Facebook for the whole of yesterday. Clearly that I am a slave to Facebook has been well noted.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The bus ride to Largo Argentina is very, very bad. A man behind me is talking on the phone and leaning forward – <i>I can smell his breath</i>.<span> </span>It smells like dirt. Disgusted? You didn’t live it down two miles of windy cobbled streets. When I get off the bus I am almost ready to vomit. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I wait for Ashley and Laura in Feltrinelli, and pick up a Jeffrey Eugenides (‘Middlesex’) in anticipation of finishing my Forster. When they arrive we head towards the ghetto, and a pasta restaurant that Ashley knows. When we get there is turns out there is a powercut, and we end up at a table in the corner, eating broccoli fusilli and drinking wine by candlelight, thoroughly hemmed in by Rome’s Jewish community. It is a slightly surreal experience, but the pasta and wine are good, and we make vague plans for the International Film Festival that is starting in Rome in a few days time.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Heading back through the square, Ashley tells us that the sacred area in the middle, which I had previously thought was a generic collection of Roman ruins, is actually the spot in which Julius Caesar was killed. This is fairly monumental, I think, especially since the information boards make no mention of it at all. I would’ve thought they might point it out; it’s a <i>slightly</i> important part of history. Ashley says she is unsure why it isn’t better known, but that the Italians in her office believe it to be common knowledge. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When she has gone back to work Laura and I head towards the Spanish Steps, passing the Trevi Fountain on the way. We are going to a cake shop that she promises is magnificent. We find it after a short sojourn in an antiquarian bookshop, and I am not let down on the cake front. Even if it is heinously expensive (ten euros for a fairly large wodge; six euros for my espresso) I would recommend that every visitor to Rome goes once. The cake (pistachio with vanilla cream) was just as good as any gelato I’ve tasted, the servings are big enough for two, your surroundings are fairly sumptuous, and you’ll be sat in one of the nicest parts of Rome, opposite the Spanish Steps and Keats’ house. It’s a nice place to go, as a one off – although I can’t guarantee that the pistachio cake won’t be luring me back. Cafe Greco, Via Dei Condotti.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Afterwards I have to head back, and I catch the metro at Spagna after leaving Laura bargaining with a stallholder over the price of the pumpkins that she needs for her Thanksgiving meal. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">***</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">At London Underground stations, the ticket/ Oyster is needed at both ends of the line. In Rome, this is not the case – usually. Every time I have been on the metro the barriers have opened automatically, letting me sail straight through; consequently, in order to avoid clutching my ticket like a tourist for multiple stops, I have taken to throwing it in my bag.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This is a bad choice today, because when I get off at Vittorio Emanuele there are guards at the barriers. I have a huge shoulder bag, as well as two shopping bags. My ticket could be in any one of them; I wasn’t really paying attention. I’m pretty sure the guards could not be so bloody <i>jobsworth</i> and let me go – why are they checking anyway? They never have before, and how on earth would I have got on at the other end without paying? – but they don’t, and it is a good few minutes before I actually find my ticket. Annoying.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">***</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">At the Bellomos Lidia and Alberto head out to parents’ evening and I occupy B&B with sticker books for a while. Bea gets to work sticking helmets and swords and chainmail in a book based on every conflict from Ancient Greece to the Second World War; Bene has Polly Pocket and Friends picking outfits for a disco, then a picnic, then a birthday party. Afterwards we make glove puppets (tiger for Bea; monkey for Bene) and Bene actually manages to sew part of the puppet herself. Hello A* in GCSE Textiles, you’ve finally made use of yourself! I feel like I may actually have imparted a skill, even if it is sewing (zero points feminism).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Anna is snapping green beans (not sure why) for dinner when Bea, who has been good all evening, decides that it would be a good idea to take a handful and throw them all over the floor. I am unsure why she does this (the same unsure as when she pushed the tortoise in the pond) because afterwards she picks them all up again and later, after we have made bracelets, she sweeps the floor without being asked.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Smurf memory game with Bene once again before dinner, and again we tie – how this has happened for a second time I have no idea.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">***</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I go down to reception after my duties are finished, and wait for a while before the internet sorts its stability out. Miguel comes and sits with me and tells me that he is working at the hotel for the rest of the season, in order to get money together to build a home recording studio in Perugia, where he is from. We then have a conversation about how sad it is that Perugia will not only ever be thought of in tragic terms, and he makes his opinion on the release of Amanda Knox and Raffaelle Sollecito very clear. Before I can discover exactly why he is so convinced of their guilt, however, he is called away by some relentlessly demanding German guests. I am left intrigued.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">***</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am on rota on Thursday morning for Women’s Views on News, and since I am on a roll I keep writing after lunch too. Back in reception I finish my Indian Highways article, whilst blasting some 80s Manc through the BBC controller headset. A very strange debate over the situation of stray dogs in India then occurs over Facebook, with a Goenka student called Mudit. There are a lot of things that I could say about this, but since the debate is now fully over and the points have been made I won’t reignite it. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">After the bizarre dog related interlude I decide that looking into the plight of stray animals in India might actually not be a bad idea, since they were so obvious when we were there. Emily very kindly sends me some links, and it doesn’t take much Googling before a wealth of information on the dog situation presents itself. Research done, and with an article structure in my head, I head up to my room. Unsure of where I will publish the article when it is written – stray Indian dogs have little to do with art (The Flaneur) or women (WVoN), my two main publishing platforms aside from my blog. However, I have been journo-ing for ten and a half hours and by half past six it is definitely time for a break, so this problem can wait. In Alphabet House, I dedicate my evening to reading my new Polaroid book, and then fall asleep early.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">On Friday, something really good happens. However, I’m afraid I’ve reached over two thousand words for this particular entry, and Friday and the weekend will therefore have to wait. A lot happens! Check back soon <span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"><span>J</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"><span><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal">xxx</div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-90761655349424169162011-10-28T13:20:00.000-07:002011-10-28T13:20:55.290-07:00I'm wearing a green scarf to support #AfghanWomen. Join us!<a href="http://ch16.org/afghanwomen#.TqsNhsD-PUg.blogger">I'm wearing a green scarf to support #AfghanWomen. Join us!</a>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-67188294018803180632011-10-24T05:51:00.000-07:002011-10-24T05:51:31.622-07:00Little Red Riding Hood: an inappropriate tale for children<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">On Sunday we go to the Colloseum. It is the second time I’ve been, and although this time we are going with a group and thus mercifully avoiding the ridiculous queue, the visit itself isn’t that different. Controversially, it confirms to me what I thought before – that the Colloseum is one of, if not <i>the</i> most, overrated thing about Rome. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">Obviously, I understand that it has great historical significance. And it probably is worth a visit – a quick one, once. The Nerone exhibition, about Emperor Nero, is the most illuminating part. But the actual Colloseum, once you’ve seen it and ‘oohed’ for a few minutes, is not that incredible. Unless of course you are overly impressed by size and/ or have a burning desire to re-imagine the anguish of Maximus Decimus Meridius right in front of you.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">The guide is speaking Italian and I don’t pick up much. Alberto does translate a couple of interesting points, though. Did you know, for instance, that the original white marble floor (<i>bianco </i>is about the only thing I can translate from the whole tour) was stolen, allegedly by a pope in order to decorate a church? Also, the Colloseum is owned by a private company rather than by a heritage trust or a national one, which is fairly unethical, if you think about it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">Bene and Bea seem to enjoy it anyway, and finish the tour by colouring in a <i>gladiatore</i> and completing a quiz about what they have learnt, before they had their luminescent jackets back in.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">We drive to an organic market, where we are getting lunch. On the way we go past a hill that is made entirely of broken vases – I can’t ascertain from Lidia and Alberto <i>why</i> exactly this is, but they do tell me that the vases were collected from the old port, which used to be in this location.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">After a wander through the market (it is fairly small, but filled with good organic food smells) we reach the restaurant. Lunch is the standard huge feast that I have come to expect from Roman weekends. I can understand a lot of the menu, which is encouraging, and I order a vegetarian antipasto and pumpkin and ricotta pasta. The antipasto is huge, and as is usual with starters is enough on its own. Alberto orders beef, which turns out to be a bad choice: ‘It is full of nerves,’ he says, spitting it out into a napkin. ‘Urgh. This cow has died of sadness. I cannot eat.’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">The beef does look decidedly stringy. I am reminded why I usually choose the vegetarian option. My pumpkin pasta is lovely, and has a distinct lack of nerve endings. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">Afterwards the kids meet some friends from school (Bene learns to say ‘this is my friend Clara’) and occupy themselves playing with building blocks (‘building <i>blosss’</i>) in the outside seating area. Alberto tells me that we are in the communist part of Rome, and points out a red flag on the roof of one of the neighbouring buildings. Then Lidia takes him home so he can watch the football, and when she returns I am momentarily relieved of children. I go into the bookshop, which has a shelf focused on what appears to be women in Middle Eastern society – in Italian, obviously. Decide that I need to make more of an effort with my language learning.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">We visit Villa Celimontana on the way back. It is a really pretty and tranquil park, and even has a pond with tortoises casually swimming around. B&B are suitably enamoured by the tortoises for a while, and gather a group of children around them. They are admiring one that is sat at the edge of the pond when Bea decides, for whatever reason, that it would be happier being back in the water, and firmly pushes it off the ledge. The tortoise creates a small splash, before swimming away in a confused manner. I really think that it was quite happy at the edge of the water. The other children survey Bea quizzically. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">On the other side of the park is a church that is filled with chandeliers. B&B fall momentarily silent at the sight of them lighting the walls, then have fun striking matches for the candle donation. It is a popular church for weddings, Lidia tells me, and is right across the road from the television studios where Berlusconi films. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">Back in the park B&B find a climbing frame, and practice a charming new song: ‘Loosyy Loosyy go away, come again another day’. I pretend to be mortally offended by this and leave (I don’t go far, only to the benches) but am instantly called back (‘Loosyyy, can you ‘elp me pleeease?’) when Bea finds herself unable to get down from the monkey bars.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">They have a pony ride afterwards, and I walk behind with Lidia and talk about riding. She says she used to have horses, but it is hard for the girls to learn whilst living in Rome. There is a school near their house in the mountains, though, so they will probably have lessons there.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">I am once again put on the spot as we drive home. Benedetta wants me to tell her the story of Little Red Riding Hood. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">It is a task I find almost impossible, even though it doesn’t sound like it is a particularly big ask. However, you spend one quarter of an entire academic year researching and writing 10,000 words on the twisting and feminising of traditional fairytales and then try to remember the uncorrupted version of Little Red Riding Hood off the top of your head.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">It isn’t easy. The only images of Little Red Riding Hood that I have in my head are provided by Angela Carter, and consist of LRRH getting her rocks off and discovering her adolescent sexuality by seducing the wolf. More than slightly inappropriate; probably likely to get me fired. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">The version I recount in the car, then, isn’t going to go down as a classic of the oral tradition. I manage to remember the basics, though, after a lot of very careful thought as to what to say. Afterwards Lidia tells me that the wolf shouldn’t be killed, but sewn back together afterwards by the woodcutter. My hastily scrabbled together LRRH, obviously, is not factually accurate. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">When I bundle the kids out of the car and into the hotel Beige Suit is stood spectrally behind the glass doors at the bottom of the reception stairs. Just behind the glass, watching the road. It is the third day, at least, that he has been wearing his beige suit, which adds to the ghostlike aura. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">Dinner that night is fish fingers and salad, courtesy of Lidia. Alberto finds this hilarious – ‘This is all she can cook!’ he says. ‘Anna’s day off; this is what we eat!’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">Lidia says that she ‘’ates to cook’, which is a sentiment that I fully understand, and adds that they have fish fingers at the weekend so frequently that it has led to B&B begging for <i>any</i> other type of food at all. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">Later I have to read about Martha’s New School <i>again</i> (third time this week). I have no idea why B&B are so obsessed with Martha and her New School and her incessant whining. It is not a classic of children’s literature. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">That evening consists of Skypes with Louise, Melissa and then Katy. Beige Spectre is sat in reception for most of my Skype time. I don’t know whether he speaks English, but I attempt to convey his freakishness without it being too obvious. Whilst I am talking to Wench an American couple who have been on the Mac turn round to me and say that he has been following them too. Clearly he is just stalking everyone. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">He is so ghost-like that I keep expecting to see him staring back at me from the bathroom mirror, or lurking in the shadows of Alphabet House when I let myself in at night. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">After midnight, when he has gone on one of his terrifying random walks around the corridors, I take my chance to get back at AH via the street.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">‘Don’t worry,’ the receptionist says as I scuttle past. ‘After tomorrow, no more.’ </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #c27ba0;">Roll on Monday.</span></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-10891133030480415062011-10-23T13:09:00.000-07:002011-10-23T13:09:37.209-07:00Robberies and stalkers... all in a weekend's work.<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">After a quick supermercato shop on Friday morning (a lovely Italian man tells me to please, <i>per favore</i>, go in front – he has a trolley full; I have face wipes and a questionable chicken sandwich), I head to Flamino, in the north of Rome. I went to Piazza del Popolo, by the Flamino metro station, in July (the day it rained, Diane!), but I haven’t ventured north in the three weeks I’ve been here this time. Today my trip has a special purpose. I’m going to the Maxxi Museum (National Museum of 21<sup>st</sup> Century Art – XXI – clever!) to see an exhibition entitled ‘Indian Highways’.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I’m very excited about it. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">A minor bit of research has informed me that the ‘highways’ of the title symbolises India’s movement from rural to urban, in economy, landscape, etc, and how the development of cities has created a mass migration of people towards them. This is of huge interest to me, considering the impression I got of India being a lot like rapidly industrialising Victorian England, and the fact that I did Modernism last year at Lancaster. The exhibition is said to focus on politics, society and religion. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I get off the metro at Flamino, and am surprised to see a huge crowd of banner waving people in Piazza del Popolo. It is another protest, I assume, although luckily it looks as though it might be a peaceful one. I cross the road and enter the mass, for no other reason than that I am nosy and in a permanent journalistic mindset. I am handed a few leaflets, and from the speech that is going on over loudspeaker I ascertain that there is anger over universities and the environment. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Back on the tram heading for the Maxxi. I reach my stop, and before I move an inch an old Italian man tells me that this is where I should <i>shendi</i>. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">What?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">How he knows where I am going and where I should <i>shendi</i> I have no idea. It is fairly disconcerting. I give him a quick muttered grazie anyway, and remove myself from the tram and his psychic vicinity as quickly as I can. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">The first thing I see at the Maxxi is hundreds of Indian faces painted on the floor outside the building. It is ‘Strands’ by NS Harsha, symbolising the varied contemporary social scene in India –some of the women are wearing headscarves, I notice, whilst some aren’t. It turns out that there are over five hundred faces, all joined up, all engaged in different actions. They wind around the concrete outside the doors to the museum in a figure of eight; from the gallery above they can be seen collectively.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">‘Strands’ sets the tone for the exhibition, which is made up of sculptures, sight specific installations, paintings and films. Some of the pieces strike me more than others: a life sized truck, made of shiny metallic balls and full of metallic people on their way to work, is the first thing I see as I enter the gallery. It is so striking, I think, because these trucks were <i>everywhere</i> in Delhi. On the right hand side of the truck, a film is playing in the wing mirror – it shows a road identical to the ones that we spent so long driving down; I have similar videos that I took myself. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I’m extremely glad I’m seeing this exhibition after actually going to India – I don’t think it would’ve made half as much of an impact otherwise. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">There is a lot to say about ‘Indian Highways’, so I won’t go into detail here. A Flaneur article will follow shortly. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I am there for two hours before I realise I should probably head back; I could have stayed for longer. If done properly the exhibition could take all afternoon – and it is just one of the collections that is currently on display at the Maxxi . It’s a really interesting museum, and I definitely will be going back soon.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">A film is being shot outside the gates of B&Bs’ school. There are camera crews and children dressed in what looks like nineteenth century choirboys’ uniforms everywhere. I woman walks passed me in a nineteen forties dress, her hair up elegantly, lips bright red. Alberto dismisses this unexpected turn of events. ‘They make films here every week,’ he says, before, with even more unbelievable blasé, ‘Next Tuesday, they use the hotel.’ </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Oh, right. Feigned nonchalance.<span> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">While B&B are in gymnastics I carry on reading <i>A Passage to India</i> –today, apparently, is all about India. And then Alberto comes back, just as B&B and the rest of their gymnastics friends tumble out of the hall. He looks distressed. As I grab B&B to take them to the changing room, he says, ‘We must be quick. There is a problem at the hotel.’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Benedetta senses urgency. ‘Why, Lucy?’ she asks, as I kneel on the floor, simultaneously stuffing her feet back into sweaty socks and craning my head around to make sure Bea hasn’t disappeared out of the door. ‘Why fast?’ </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I don’t know, Bene.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Fire, is my first thought. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I will just say, for future reference, if you are a tourist in Rome, or if you just happen to be crossing the road in Rome and you’re an exceptionally slow walker, the sight of an irate Italian man beeping his horn and cursing at you from behind the wheel of his tiny car generally means that you should <i>move faster</i>, or, in plainer terms, <i>bloody well get out of the way</i>, because the likelihood is that he really is in a rush and he will be close to running you down. Just sayin’. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">It isn’t a fire, but a break-in. At some point in the afternoon, someone came into the hotel, not through reception but through the other door, smashed their way into six bedrooms, and made off with whatever they could get their hands on –the TVs from the walls, two unfortunate German women’s passports, a pair of trainers. Inexplicably, a profile of the thief can now be built – he left his original, strangely small sized shoes behind. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Later, when he comes up to the apartment, Alberto pours a large glass of wine and tells me that it will cost the hotel between ten and twelve thousand euros to replace everything. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">He looks so crestfallen that I don’t know what to say, so I make some insubstantial comment about him needing a drink and drowning his sorrows. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">‘Yes,’ he says, ‘we say this. But some sorrows, they can swim.’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">This is profound. There is no reply. In the other room, Lidia tells B&B that their friends will not be able to come around for dinner as planned (it is already after nine) and a chorus of uninterrupted screaming begins. I drink my wine.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Saturday’s episode of the daily drama that is this week comes in the shape of a letcherous, snake faced man in an ill-fitting beige suit.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">My first encounter with him starts just before lunch, when I am sat innocently in reception, as per, creating what you have just read. I’m so busy being dramatic about small scroat induced break-ins that I don’t notice him for a long time. I feel his grubby suited presence sat opposite me, but I don’t really <i>notice</i>. And then I get up to go for lunch, and that’s when I realise that he is blatantly staring at me, and that his eyes haven’t moved for –no exaggeration– close to an hour. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Now, you would think that if you were a tourist in Rome you wouldn’t be spending midday on a Saturday sat in a hotel reception doing literally nothing at all, unless something was severely wrong.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">This man, I quickly decide, is the thing that is severely wrong.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I’m not being overly judgmental here. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I get my things together, feeling mildly perved on but not overly threatened, then walk down the corridor, cross the landing, go up one flight of stairs and step into the lift, and this is when I look out through the glass and see him <i>stood on the stairs smiling at me</i>. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I can’t describe the smile he is giving me. In this moment of terror (he really does resemble a snake, and I hate snakes, and also, how on earth did he follow me so silently?) he lights a cigarette. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">My finger immediately goes into overdrive on the level five button. Fivefivefivefivefive... up. Aargh. <span> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">In the apartment, I debate for a couple of minutes over whether I should tell Lidia what has just happened, considering yesterday’s break-in and the ensuing amount of crap that she and Alberto will now have to deal with. I resolutely decide on <i>yes</i>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">‘There’s a man outside,’ I begin, tentatively. ‘He isn’t doing anything. But he followed me into the stairwell-,’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">‘He is dark skinned?’ Lidia says, ‘In a beige suit?’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">It turns out that she noticed his silent, leering presence yesterday. Five minutes later Anna lets herself into the apartment. She looks mildly worried, and immediately starts talking to Lidia (over the top of Bene, so I know it is important) about <i>beige pantaloons.</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Well. It turns out that she was walking up the stairs, talking on the phone, and he followed her and then tried to have a conversation. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Lidia goes to find Alberto. Anna walks to the front door, looks out of the spyhole, and quickly jumps back in surprise. I don’t understand any of the Italian words she says, but I understand that he is <i>outside the apartment</i>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">With Saturday rapidly descending into a horror film Alberto appears, and phones reception to ask them to be aware of the situation. Lidia tells me that she believes he is the husband of a guest, that he has stayed here before, and that Alberto has given instruction that after he checks out on Monday he should be not be accepted at the hotel again.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">The afternoon is a regular one, consisting of smoothie making, drawing, and a failed attempt to make crafty dogs out of cardboard, pipe cleaner and weird tinsel. After dinner I head down to reception again.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">He is there, of course.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I don’t know what to do when I walk round the corner and see his beige suited sliminess, and I am so shocked I walk to reception and give Miguel a wide eyed, <i>wtffff should I do?</i> look. <span> </span>He asks if I am ok; clearly I must’ve looked mental. I say yes, I am, and get a mint just so it looks like I walked up to the desk for a reason.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Beigey letch sits opposite me the whole time I am in reception. I sit him out. He isn’t going to scare me into running back to my room. This is my Facebook time! At one point he gets up, goes for a walk around the table, trips over my laptop wire, regains beige composure, and says, ‘English?’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Aargh! It talks!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I don’t say a word, or even let my eyes flicker from the screen. It is a good performance of being deaf. I decide that if he speaks to me again I will wave my hands around and pretend that it is sign language.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">He leaves, briefly, and I decide that it is my opportunity to safety get back to Alphabet House without him potentially seeing where I’m going. Speedily pack up, but then he appears and just <i>watches</i> me. Luckily there are other people in reception, and I get the feeling he may be with them, the hopeless tag-along ‘friend’ that no one wants there. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">So, split second decision. Walk back along the corridor, down the stairs and across the courtyard? No one would question if he ‘had’ to walk the same way –it’s the direction of all the rooms. Or down the main stairs, outside, and back through the bottom door? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I decide on the latter, because surely his companions would question why he was heading outside? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">And then I make a run for it. Downstairs, round the corner, laptop as a weapon if he appears (thank god, for once, that it’s so heavy!), key in the door, inside. Slight relief. But maybe he knows his way around the hotel if he’s stayed here before? He could easily have come around the other way!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">The lift takes what feels like minutes to reach the ground floor. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I have never been so happy to see the inside of my room in the whole time I’ve been here</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-12565601059253155452011-10-22T06:21:00.000-07:002011-10-22T06:21:20.265-07:00Lancaster third year, a snapshot of memories.<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b>Let me just say now, that if I made a list of all the things that I miss about Lancaster I wouldn’t ever be able to stop.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b>However. I can’t help it. I’m sat in a hotel reception in Rome and I’ve graduated and I don’t know where three years went or how I got here and soon I have to move to London and I’m (just slightly) scared.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b>So. Just off the top of my head. Iiiiiin review...</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b>Wednesday night, Bar Eleven two cocktails for a fiver, Friary afterwards, last bus, relentless frape, beavers, Shakespeare essay anger, Alan Rickman, Sense and Sensibility, the air is filled with spices, weekend afternoon, film on, cider at Robert Gillow, walk along canal, drunken Spanish, School Dinners, massive crocodile, having people I love a couple of minutes or a bus ride away, getting Chinese, having to lie on the floor because we ate too much, a ghost in Hustle, Barker House Farm, broken vending machine, it’s not a classic anecdote, is it?, taking a broom to Carleton, vegetable lasagne, nipping round for cuppa, being scared of Tonys, homoerotic wrestling, waking up at 4am because Emma and Becca are pretending to be wood pigeons, six quorn pies, bit o’ Colin, too much blusher, pub golf, losing my sunglasses, is this your boyfriend’s building and are those his keys?, I’ve never heard of a <i>Jonathon</i> cake, Greggs coffee, productive Learning Zone morning, Schad on Mrs Dalloway, you know when you have so much sex you want to die?, leave me alone ‘Sheer’!, sunny Wednesday afternoon walk to Rainbows, South West looming over the M62, where did you come from, planet loser?, lurking serpent, falling over in Revs, waving his Roman sword, stealing Meg’s lipstick, still having it, losing my keys, finding them in the door, knowing at girl at school called Pandora, never seeing her box though, Wonderwall playing at Grad Ball, boob popping out/ poking it, taxi to Cartmel, woke up in my coat, sort of... spacey, forgetting my pin, owing the taxi office, retracing footsteps, Windermere, rainy boat, fat swans, life affirming teacups, beef and black bean panini, Lonsdale bar, I’d smash that bitch up!, blue face paint, flashing Cartmel Extrav, results day, blind panic, relief, Pimms, boxes leaving, cougar!, last night scrabble, empty room, books gone, sleeping bag, no pillow, wardrobe of work dresses, not much left, leaving at 5am, first train to London, standing in the carpark as the sun rises and bursting into tears in the taxi, 5.35am, train leaving, gone.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b>It doesn’t matter where I am; there are far, far too many things (people) that I miss.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b>Reunion soon, please?</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><b>♥</b></span></span></span></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-63231384276146101332011-10-20T06:10:00.000-07:002011-10-20T06:32:19.691-07:00Today: flooding, sausage dogs & a potted Roman-Jewish history lesson.<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">So. The Synagogue Museum.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">I sit on a wall outside and write before I go in; Jewish children in little cloth caps file out on a school trip and look at me like I’m crazy. Go inside, bending the truth slightly by saying that I’m going back to uni in January (I sort of am), and get my entrance for four euros instead of ten. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">The guide first takes us to a room in the Spanish Synagogue, which is decorated lavishly with Hebrew lettering and candles. I find out that there are three branches of Judaism in Rome –the Sephardic, the Ashkenazi, and those that follow the Italian rites. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Spanish Jews have been in Rome since 1492, when Isabella and Ferdinand wanted to make a Christian community in Spain. However, there have been Jews in the city since 200 BC –so twenty two centuries of continuous Jewish presence in Rome. It is in fact the only city in Europe that has never expelled them. The ghetto was formed in 1555, and conditions were predictably bad –the Tiber regularly overflowing meant that the two thousand inhabitants lived their lives in permanent damp. How cramped it must’ve been can be imagined from the narrow streets in my pictures. Only one synagogue was allowed, despite there being different branches of Judaism in the ghetto, so five separate rooms were made within it. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Outside the doors to the Spanish Synagogue is the oldest artefact the museum has – a holy arch dating from the early sixteenth century, before the ghetto existed. The museum also holds more than eight hundred textiles that were used to protect Torah scrolls –they are embedded with gold and silver thread, which Jewish women would take out of their clothes and other furnishings. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">We then troop into the Italian Synagogue –it is just as ornate as any Catholic church I’ve seen, and is completely beautiful. It was built in 1904, contains the only square dome in Rome, as well as Doric columns and stained glass windows. Its architecture has been described as ‘eclectic’, and it is a symbol of freedom and empowerment. The square dome is painted in the colours of the rainbow, which are still vivid after over a hundred years.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">In contrast to our surroundings, the guide tells us a distressing story about the Roman Jewish community in 1939. In this year King Victor Emmanuel III signed an act to limit the rights of Jews –so, like in other parts of Europe, they were banned from attending regular schools and had to leave public office. Later, they were asked to pay a large amount of money in order that their lives would be spared. The community got the money together within thirty six hours, but the deal was not kept to and one thousand five hundred, mainly women and children, were immediately shipped off to concentration camps. Sixteen of these returned when the camps were liberated; in the meantime, Jewish books were stolen from the ghetto and taken to the north of Italy; they have not yet been recovered. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">She then tells us that there was a public blessing taking place in this building in 1986, when a terrorist bomb went off. This is why there are still security checks as visitors enter the museum –it is still a working synagogue. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">In the museum, when the tour has finished, I get a potted history of the community. I will recount it, briefly. In the Roman Empire the persecution of Jews began in the 4<sup>th</sup> Century AD, when Christianity was established as the state religion. Hereafter, Jews were seen as being responsible for the death of Jesus. It was Venice, in 1516, that invented the ghetto – essentially just building a wall around the already insular Jewish quarter, and locking it at night. The Papal states, including Rome, were quick to follow. Different Popes were inconsistent in their treatment of the Jews, and the laws they passed regarding them. The Talmund, the text symbolising Jewish culture, was confiscated and burnt in 1533 in Campo di Fiori. There was also the practice of forced baptism, where children would be baptised against their parents’ wishes. In 1625, Pope Urban VIII banned Jewish names from appearing on gravestones –instead they would dedicate carved inscriptions to their deceased and have them mounted in the synagogue; this practice continued until 1848. Hebrew was and is the language of Jewish prayer and culture; Judeo-Roman is what would be spoken in the streets and at home. The Jews were educated, and despite how they were treated they were needed – knowledge of Arabic meant that many were used as translators for medical, scientific and philosophical tracts. In 1805 Rome was conquered by Napoleon, who freed the Jews and imprisoned Pope Pius VII, but when the French left in 1814 the old systems were reinstated. Partly through the help of the wealthy and influential Rothschild family, the ghetto was extended in 1814 to include the Fountain of the Tortoises. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">The ghetto was eventually abolished in 1870.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">I go on to read about Jewish rites in the modern day, including Passover (Pesach), which commemorates the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. I didn’t know before this that the eating of unleavened bread came about because the bread didn’t have time to rise, the Jews had to leave Egypt so quickly. The collective experience of the Jews means that celebrations pay homage to events such as these; the eating of unleavened bread shows solidarity with their ancestors. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">At the back of the museum is a room entitled Emancipation to Today, which covers the period from 1870 up to the present –including, of course, the Holocaust. I am the only person in the room, and I can’t hear anyone else in the rest of the museum either –I think everyone has gone on the tour. I want to read everything, but hanging at the back is a pyjama suit from a concentration camp and I feel so spooked by it, and by being the only person there, that I leave fairly quickly. The next room has a video on the Holocaust, which is without a doubt worse than anything I have ever seen before –it includes numerous executions. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">After what the guide told us about only sixteen out of one thousand five hundred Jews returning to Rome after the liberations I find it very difficult to reconcile the museum I’m now in with the fact that it is stood <i>exactly</i> where these people were rounded up and shipped off to Auschwitz. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">The video then goes on to talk about the migration of Libyan Jews into Rome, which is interesting in light of recent events. Four thousand Libyan Jews came to Rome after the 1967 pogrom, a result of the Six Day War. About half of these remained; the others went forward to Israel. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">I leave, and outside find broken up plaques mounted all over the walls. Closer inspection reveals them to be the dedications to the deceased that Jews had put up in the synagogue when grave epitaphs were banned. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Feel very reflective. Stop at a cafe (the snappily titled Kosher Corner) for a very late lunch, and then head back towards the bus, and comforting routine of gymnastics, dinner, stories and bed. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">At lunch on Wednesday, Lidia tells me that the trip to the amusement park on Sunday was not a success, despite it touting itself as the best in Europe. ‘We go for lunch at half past two,’ she says, ‘and there is nowhere to have lunch. Everywhere is closed! And we go to the show, and the fairies are small and ugly... urgh.’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Lunch is once again minestrone, and I can only force half of it down. Afterwards I talk to Lidia for a while about Delhi –she and Alberto went ten years ago, and were as shocked as I was by the number of people sat listlessly at the side of the road. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">The afternoon’s attempt to Skype the India group sadly fails after twenty minutes, when a fuse is blown and the hotel temporarily loses all its power. It’s very annoying, since I had a lot still to say –but I have to go get B&B anyway so there isn’t much I can do. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">We stop off on the way home from school at a tiny shop near the Colloseum, which sells fancy dress costumes and vintage. Much debating over a pink frilly <i>principessa</i> dress is done, and Bene spends a lot of time dancing around wearing a long blonde wig and a tiara. Eventually, the princess costume goes in the bag, along with a red Indian, an ornate feather headdress and a couple of witches outfits for the approaching Halloween celebrations. The blonde wig and tiara go back on the shelf, and as we head back to the car we walk past Chocolate Boutique, which I have to stop and investigate, because really, who wouldn’t? It turns out it is salon that gives chocolate massages. I think it may become my new favourite place in the whole of Rome. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">At home, B&B want to make sausage dogs from the insides of toilet rolls. I draw on my wealth of Rainbow experience to assist them in this. Bene’s sausage dog is a wonky-eyed triumph; unfortunately Bea loses interest after five minutes and is extremely displeased when I won’t abandon Bene’s cutting and sticking immediately and entertain her. This sets her off for the rest of the evening, and she completely refuses to play the matching up Smurf cards memory game with us later. Bene is loving it though, and I think this is the most successful game I’ve played with her. She starts saying what the Smurfs are doing in English too, which is good. Less good is that she smacks herself on the head every time she doesn’t make a correct pairing. D’uh. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Lidia had said earlier that the rain was supposed to come today, and she was surprised when instead she found bright sunlight. It doesn’t last long, and the rain does indeed come tonight. The rain (as bad as the rain we had here in July) is already battering the windows as I go to sleep. I am woken up three times during the night by a combination of wind, rain and growling thunder. It is like no thunder I have ever heard before. I turn off my alarm and go back to sleep at 8am, and don’t wake up until nearly ten, completely missing breakfast. I find that there is water underneath my window; it has leaked through the wood because I didn’t have my shutters closed. Have to lean out into the rain to reach them, which is not a particularly pleasant way to be woken up, and afterwards decide to abandon the plans that I had (Piazza Navona in this weather?) and spend the rest of the morning writing this blog and reading my Forster in bed. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">It’s probably a very good thing that I didn’t venture out today. When I get to the Bellomos’ for lunch, I am greeted at the door by a very lively Bea, dressed in her Red Indian costume, complete with foot high feathered headdress. Bene skids out of their bedroom, squealing, still in pyjamas. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Alberto tells me that he didn’t take them to school this morning because two people have died on the roads as a result of the weather. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Now, I don’t mean to sound disrespectful or anything, but all the drama is starting to get ridiculous. Riots across England in August, two bombs, a hurricane and an earthquake in India in September, and now a weekend of violent ‘protests’ followed by potentially life threatening floods in Rome. I feel like the chaos is following me and that I might soon be doomed. Hello, Final Destination. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Gareth then sends me a picture of the floods via Facebook: </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibVXF9SZLy68Zu6h95egeUX4k8lhhw4qA2UquNVcm-MimW239mjogPVsTAUHjMHV97bewVvTJv4pc9kQW96h71h8rwZ9rlMyP8yvemaoqQ1ziBS2RaBey_WEZvKkA9EYq48TZSywyTdj1L/s1600/rome+flood.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibVXF9SZLy68Zu6h95egeUX4k8lhhw4qA2UquNVcm-MimW239mjogPVsTAUHjMHV97bewVvTJv4pc9kQW96h71h8rwZ9rlMyP8yvemaoqQ1ziBS2RaBey_WEZvKkA9EYq48TZSywyTdj1L/s320/rome+flood.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
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</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">The weather (at least where we are) seems to have cleared up by lunchtime, and Lidia tells me that they may go to the cinema this afternoon as planned. As they are seeing an Italian cartoon, my services will once again not be required. She assures me that there is food in the fridge for me to cook this evening, and I head down to reception with the laptop, where I discover that Colonel Gaddafi has been captured and according to Reuters possibly killed, although this is unconfirmed. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Consequently, a large portion of my afternoon has so far been spent refreshing the BBC homepage, although as yet (3pm, Rome time) I still don’t know whether Gaddafi is dead or not. I miss Sky News! If anyone has better access to the news than I do at this present moment I’d be grateful if they let me know, because not being able to get on an English news channel is driving me into a journo-geek frenzy. What IS going on? </span></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082216583641300766.post-6442291667314063262011-10-19T12:57:00.000-07:002011-10-19T12:57:51.238-07:00Riot aftermath, Indian vintage... and letching.<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">The hotel is still standing on Sunday morning, which is a relief. I go down to breakfast, where the receptionist tells me that last night he was caught in a stone fight just outside and that bins were on fire in Plaza Vittorio Emanuel II. Later I read online that they were the worst riots Italy has seen in years and that damages have already run into over a million euros. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">The Bellomos head off to an amusement park, and I spend the day sifting through emails and article planning. Go back to Alphabet House early to read (<i>100 Most Influential Women of All Time, </i>from the Katha’s Storyshop; Forster is on the backburner for now). Get all the way from Elizabeth I to Coco Chanel, and when I fall asleep I can still hear helicopters and sirens circling outside.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">On Monday morning as I get my coffee, Pina the housekeeper looks at me strangely and asks, am I not <i>freddo</i>? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I’m not <i>freddo</i> at all, but I tell her that I’m on my way to buy a more substantial cardigan because I didn’t expect the temperature to drop this early. She clearly doesn’t understand my blathering and just smiles. It is a smile that suggests, put on more clothes, you British freak. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">(FYI, <i>freddo</i><span> </span>–nothing to do with small frog shaped confectionary– it actually means cold).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I go to Oviesse, but find no appropriate knitwear. It is all sleeveless, which makes absolutely no sense to me, and the few bits I do find all cost fifty-odd euros. I can’t justify it, and decide that I will just have to put up with strange looks and occasionally being <i>freddo</i> until wench or Diane visits, which hopefully won’t be too long.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Afterwards I go for a walk to see if my surrounding area really is as smashed up as seems to have been reported. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">This is what I find at Via Merulana:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVkM7LDrRS_4jBn2vEe1CGP_xf33JDz9Yufn_niEzMGnBKgm9WiM0zPG_9Q8vxCtBSEWX6RWGqiTQbb6rZ4SA8KsRkYUh7ol64euWY8Eoj7cl56_0rJJU1jpDg1T_4tXCyVyjFwXKJZ7Lk/s1600/CIMG8494.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVkM7LDrRS_4jBn2vEe1CGP_xf33JDz9Yufn_niEzMGnBKgm9WiM0zPG_9Q8vxCtBSEWX6RWGqiTQbb6rZ4SA8KsRkYUh7ol64euWY8Eoj7cl56_0rJJU1jpDg1T_4tXCyVyjFwXKJZ7Lk/s320/CIMG8494.JPG" width="320" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"></span></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl-hUWQezxH0ehX-lFQBRHqVZ32tUJPLWRyApyH0lPDO8z8JZaWaNaQJIDjKZHnC7Y9JhuSbPdT0E4EdLqybMwHX3mQ37ABCAiMicWbchHeT3Msc8QFb1Rpxs0PZPXqWNetUBXh_l3MotT/s1600/CIMG8496.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl-hUWQezxH0ehX-lFQBRHqVZ32tUJPLWRyApyH0lPDO8z8JZaWaNaQJIDjKZHnC7Y9JhuSbPdT0E4EdLqybMwHX3mQ37ABCAiMicWbchHeT3Msc8QFb1Rpxs0PZPXqWNetUBXh_l3MotT/s320/CIMG8496.JPG" width="212" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuxV10_DHnct9jXbZ_5pVJQ48b2HriTmlkkA-L1pxcjC9WDtrbbfQPQZQPgbnEpF8wnsechGzP34Lj0556fFjfVl0StfQtOM5F8ZFR7ga2PiIxjoK9JewcAkBGZ-T1WsINTCckENUHk93n/s1600/CIMG8499.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuxV10_DHnct9jXbZ_5pVJQ48b2HriTmlkkA-L1pxcjC9WDtrbbfQPQZQPgbnEpF8wnsechGzP34Lj0556fFjfVl0StfQtOM5F8ZFR7ga2PiIxjoK9JewcAkBGZ-T1WsINTCckENUHk93n/s320/CIMG8499.JPG" width="212" /></a></div><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">And at San Giovanni:</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0jZ7yDmgXN0giHMQ4uBxtEmQPj6cuRnqkRAnsxrQVxDCJUY8oF8Wfs-SoiwvnUROVk03y5aNx0UDuJzr-R86-xfsOj_AElNRL_DZiEymDuDhVHJMkibtdnBgkgInxPNyb-mQsi6-jrOM1/s1600/CIMG8504.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0jZ7yDmgXN0giHMQ4uBxtEmQPj6cuRnqkRAnsxrQVxDCJUY8oF8Wfs-SoiwvnUROVk03y5aNx0UDuJzr-R86-xfsOj_AElNRL_DZiEymDuDhVHJMkibtdnBgkgInxPNyb-mQsi6-jrOM1/s200/CIMG8504.JPG" width="200" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifbMfIy1huVpvoK6k7_yMQaXCwYfDa-X-dxybxfT_7yC4-pfSZcDnF6qp4aQs-kEQpEAcgnPXCFZNFmpb6TgvxCSiHb0BrvhtVftVhcD6UTtOSr4j781toqetn47bcnbGouWN_oyWybGZJ/s1600/CIMG8512.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifbMfIy1huVpvoK6k7_yMQaXCwYfDa-X-dxybxfT_7yC4-pfSZcDnF6qp4aQs-kEQpEAcgnPXCFZNFmpb6TgvxCSiHb0BrvhtVftVhcD6UTtOSr4j781toqetn47bcnbGouWN_oyWybGZJ/s200/CIMG8512.JPG" width="200" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2Y_S-apdDLGlOToTh_61fRBSm1kG_7xbSQL6IfmV_bwtpM3Qd651t-ZpLBI7wq2tPTj9dn_P26lzrvdWcc31B4zqNeqToHxFRMFJwy5AVF49GnbxtqxidIwOHnqGrdNE47sLTvuYM9iBy/s1600/CIMG8511.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2Y_S-apdDLGlOToTh_61fRBSm1kG_7xbSQL6IfmV_bwtpM3Qd651t-ZpLBI7wq2tPTj9dn_P26lzrvdWcc31B4zqNeqToHxFRMFJwy5AVF49GnbxtqxidIwOHnqGrdNE47sLTvuYM9iBy/s200/CIMG8511.JPG" width="200" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGsWFwMUvHgNjsoJxtSaEO9YaYvwD11kSsYcTzx4Vw2IIYe5AImb663YGSsqZLFnKktLWZjMr7-gNom4xT1-4O_wZrabGWFA9rMIfM29Gg7oAVNLX8XqToV52fHbknpjAruymXLv-rtT_r/s1600/CIMG8513.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGsWFwMUvHgNjsoJxtSaEO9YaYvwD11kSsYcTzx4Vw2IIYe5AImb663YGSsqZLFnKktLWZjMr7-gNom4xT1-4O_wZrabGWFA9rMIfM29Gg7oAVNLX8XqToV52fHbknpjAruymXLv-rtT_r/s200/CIMG8513.JPG" width="133" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgci9NJ9PiDi6-frrT5zD8VVMmrZWcL0kbGzk-v4GCv1ovUZZgNXa3-wVfqi-uFIPA93YoNB7B2l6xFy8yjOLVAB5CSC5Ma2K86OXd87r5KKkKMBVA1Rk-eUqm0t4rnHDsxJ9S-yelEDKYq/s1600/CIMG8514.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgci9NJ9PiDi6-frrT5zD8VVMmrZWcL0kbGzk-v4GCv1ovUZZgNXa3-wVfqi-uFIPA93YoNB7B2l6xFy8yjOLVAB5CSC5Ma2K86OXd87r5KKkKMBVA1Rk-eUqm0t4rnHDsxJ9S-yelEDKYq/s200/CIMG8514.JPG" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpSppDFR-Rnl0nmwPVx5UAXkIHPQqCcWfD4pA1BxPOtqE2OF4d0BqQWxSE6cS-RoKhFDI9HhbvQme1bX56S5TdKg1vi-zRJxZhbxVWxZwfeqmWKg1VfqzkIIr5gQUjNHs5XPfNgnrvvLfT/s1600/CIMG8517.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpSppDFR-Rnl0nmwPVx5UAXkIHPQqCcWfD4pA1BxPOtqE2OF4d0BqQWxSE6cS-RoKhFDI9HhbvQme1bX56S5TdKg1vi-zRJxZhbxVWxZwfeqmWKg1VfqzkIIr5gQUjNHs5XPfNgnrvvLfT/s200/CIMG8517.JPG" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUCiUIMk3uksP4icnffdohu18y1srCyvzHjxj6wdHzU77ICKGFFgp_RXtp16ZRlFcar7KzWNRFOjMSEWmxfpky40S6PXMO-dcKgrh3ll0NwNaFq7HuX6_UPHKQByXnuEOUueAU4gpOKIhA/s1600/CIMG8518.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUCiUIMk3uksP4icnffdohu18y1srCyvzHjxj6wdHzU77ICKGFFgp_RXtp16ZRlFcar7KzWNRFOjMSEWmxfpky40S6PXMO-dcKgrh3ll0NwNaFq7HuX6_UPHKQByXnuEOUueAU4gpOKIhA/s200/CIMG8518.JPG" width="133" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8LTK3QmPKmMWXV4cWQLFYu_pmCpYw_97rXxBo2KlqKljT9FBRr1ozpmE9iu2iMdB5zVMGkgK5w0M-2ahgEoUwRTqlZCIrkBTCLd1oBZntKFJ1MxsTefUcU-byqgnR0X28X51L5B_6cmyq/s1600/CIMG8520.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8LTK3QmPKmMWXV4cWQLFYu_pmCpYw_97rXxBo2KlqKljT9FBRr1ozpmE9iu2iMdB5zVMGkgK5w0M-2ahgEoUwRTqlZCIrkBTCLd1oBZntKFJ1MxsTefUcU-byqgnR0X28X51L5B_6cmyq/s200/CIMG8520.JPG" width="200" /></a><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">This is after a full day of cleaning, too. I stop at Santi Marcellino e Pietro, the church I visited on my first Monday here, because I feel like it might be here that had an eighteenth century bust of the Virgin Mary destroyed. I can’t see much evidence of this, aside from a cameraman outside. I sit for a while; as I am leaving I notice that the front window is cracked. When I get back, I find out that the church was ransacked and that the Virgin statue was thrown into the street, where it was trampled by protestors.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">My mind is happily distracted from the riots later –thank god for B&B. In the car, they demand that I tell them a story. Cue moment of panic –tell a story? Do I have to make one up?! Talk about being put on the spot. Lidia tells me it is ok, I can just tell them Snow White. This is <i>not</i> ok! I can hardly remember the story of Snow White, and if they expect me to come up with the names of all seven dwarves they’re going to be disappointed.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">In the end I remember five dwarves, which I think is fairly impressive, and the twins are actually <i>quiet</i> and sit still and listen and don’t hit each other for the whole drive home. This is a fairly huge achievement, and I feel that my storytelling skills must therefore actually be pretty amazing.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">We spend a while painting – Bene wants me to draw her princesses and pretty girls in dresses so she can practice staying in the lines; Bea wants a night sky, then a beach, then a picture of herself. The Horrible Science kit comes out afterwards, and we make a volcano and then an endless supply of fizzy ‘potions’ from vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. Messy is not a word that describes the Bellomos’ dining table when we are finished. Destroyed may be a better one. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Afterwards is a dinner of chicken, spinach, and inexplicably huge slabs of mozzarella. Whilst putting on pjs, Bene teaches me how to count to twenty in Italian –which is kind of her. Twinnies are exhausted from all the crafting/ science experimentation and kitchen destroying, and I am free after a couple of standard weird stories. Tonight, Babar the elephant takes his incongruous monkey-child, bizarrely named Zephir, on a trip to the forest, where they make bows from tree branches. I have stopped trying to get my head around the trippy aspect of the stories by now. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Finish my day with lovely Skype catch-ups (catch-ups? Catches-up?) with Katy and Matt, then go back to the influential women book. Fall asleep feeling scandalized that Coco Chanel only received 2% of the profits from Chanel No.5 – damn that patriarchy!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I was reminded last night that I still need to visit the Jewish Synagogue, so this is where I head on Tuesday morning. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I will take this opportunity (whilst I’m on the bus) to highlight the number of inappropriately letcherous men that there are in this city. On Saturday evening, as I was walking back from Termini on the outer fringes of a riot, I was letched on four times. It is a ten minute walk. On Monday, assessing damage at Merulana and San Giovanni, it happened six times. I was out for maybe an hour. Consequently today, when I get off the bus at Largo Argentina on my way to the Synagogue, I am less than surprised when an Italian teenager steps into my path and says, deadpan, ‘You have the fire.’ (This is the kind of thing they say).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I am about to brush past in haughty silence, as I have taken to doing in these situations. The letching is getting tiresome after two and a half weeks. And then I realise that he is holding an unlit cigarette, and is actually asking if I have a lighter.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Oops. Lost in translation. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I tell him I don’t, I’m sorry, and then beat a hasty retreat whilst making a mental note to reassess the level of arrogance that I am clearly gaining whilst in Rome.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Walking down Via Arenula, I am suddenly faced with a swathe of colour that is cascading out of one of the shop fronts. Oh look, I think, it’s like India. Wistful. And then I notice that the window is full of Ganeshes. It’s an Indian shop! Yes!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I go in and discover that it is so packed with clothes, scarves, wall hangings, etc that I can hardly fit between the shelves. It is a vintage shop –Indian and vintage! A fusion of two of my current obsessions. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I am in the shop for a long time. The scarves are nicer than the ones I found actually <i>in</i> India. I have a lovely conversation with the till girl about Delhi, then select a black and white dress with beading in the front and force myself to leave before I spend all the money that’s in my purse. Vintage dress from an Indian shop in a Jewish ghetto in Italy – wow. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">I find out a lot about the history of Rome/ the Jewish in Europe whilst at the museum. It’s all very interesting – and I want to do it justice rather than firing off a quick blog post, so I’ll save it for tomorrow. Instead, I’m going to Skype Louise <3 </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Night all!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">xxx</span></div>Lucyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13112495062606160661noreply@blogger.com0