Week Six

What a week. There's been a lot going on... let's see, where to start...

Lets start with some Italians. This week's assignment for digital imaging was to shoot documentary photos on the street of strangers. I took these pictures on my walk to school, at Piazza del Popolo, and at St. Peter's and surrounding areas.

musicians at Piazza del Popolo.

he was hammin' it up


the spraypaint artists are fun to watch

"gelato man pose"

these men selling chestnuts are everywhere. i got them
once near the spanish steps- they're good, but not worth 5 EURO!
mom makes better ones :)

beggars everywhere.

st. peter's & vatican

I also received 2 great Valentine's day packages this week! From Mom, I got a HUGE box, and the best present ever- a warm cozy comforter! I'm such a pillow and blanket person, so it makes me feel more at home here to have it :) I also got a package from Greg with a sweet card and FAT teddy bear! I feel so special, haha

On Thursday we also visited a photo exhibit in the morning by Ugo Mulas in the morning, and in the afternoon for Italian design we visited the office of architect Enrico Realacci, and saw some of his buildings and work, including this Haworth showroom.

oh, and some freakish bird-patterns

This past weekend I was in Milan as part of an excursion for my Italian design class. I had my first taste of the Termini train station and a super-fast luxury Eurostar train. It was a 5 hour ride.

I ate at McDonald's in Italy, but I don't even eat it at home!

We jumped right into visiting studios and showrooms after checking into the hotel on Friday. The first place we visited was the home and studio of architect/artist Caterina Crepax. She has become famous for her work with recycled papers and the dresses and accessories she creates from it. It was really fascinating, and also really neat to find out that she is the daughter of the most famous (adult) comic illustrator in Italy Guido Crepax, who did the Valentina series in the 60's, right before the sexual revolution.

Caterina Crepax (left) and my teacher

hand-made paper dresses

The next showroom, we went to, Dilmos, had furniture with her Dad's illustrations on it!

fun in dilmos

i fell in love with this furniture!!!


dinner on friday night during our free time-
I had veggie tortelloni with cream & balsamic sauce :)

On Saturday we woke up early, had a good breakfast, and visited a lot of different showrooms including: Cassina (furniture), Flos & Artimide (lighting), Alessi (home goods), Venini (hand-blown glass vases), and Dirade (more furniture). I won't bore you with a billion pictures of chairs, but here's a few.

our class. lots of estrogen.

i was amused by the grumpy robots placed around the cassina showroom!

word.

venini vases

And then we walked down one of the rich streets with all fashion stores: Prada, Gucci, Versace, blah blah blah. I saw more cars worth over $1/2 million dollars concentrated into one area than I've ever seen in my life.

oh hey look- ANOTHER aston martin. yawn.
!?!!!?!

After we were free, we checked out the Duomo- the 2nd largest Gothic cathedral in the world. I didn't really get any good pictures of the inside due to the low light, but here's a few others.

again, at night


the gallery next to the duomo

On Saturday night we had a good dinner at a Mom-n-Pop restaurant near the hotel, and I got risotto milanese, since I was in Milan and all!

This morning (Sunday) we went to the Trienalle museum and saw an exhibit on the 70's- very interesting. Here's was one "psychedelic" aspect of it.

This next week is midterms, and it's gonna be intense and frustrating!!! Ahh, NOT looking forward to it. I really don't feel like doing any work while I'm here! But so far I've been doing okay grade wise, and I think it'll probably continue *fingers-crossed*. Next week I have a portrait shoot to do for digital imaging, which should be fun. Here was a practice picture of Kate & I!

And then bright and early on Friday, me and this girl get on a plane to Barcelona!
Stay tuned.

Week Five

This week was not too eventful in comparison to the previous- and the forthcoming for that matter. But it was very relaxing. Sorry, I don't have 65,321 pictures to post this week!

Some things that did happen: on Thursday morning for Digital Imaging we went to Campo de Fiori to shoot street documentary portrait photos of strangers, which is pretty hard to do. There is a small market there during the day, and plenty of interesting-looking Italians. I'm not all that happy with the shots I took there, but we have to take 20 more for this Thursday's class, so I'll be sure to push myself to get some good ones.

sorry to the vegetarians :(

We also went to see a photography exhibit by Gregory Crewdson which was pretty amazing- he's able to produce huge-scale photographs by using a camera so large that it's negatives are 8x10- he's best known for creating complex surreal, sometimes scary staged images of life in suburban American towns.

one of Crewdon's photos I saw

oh, and we saw this on our way into the museum

On Friday I shopped a bit, and at night went to a friend's for dinner, then over to a new friend's apartment to have a few drinks and relax. We went to get gelato at a great place right near the Vatican called Old Bridge- I got banana, pinenut, and coffee-mmm! Then we went back to her place again, she cooked me an EXCELLENT grilled cheese sandwich- and we watched Planet Earth!!! :)

Saturday I was a huge bum and slept all day. I went shopping again, cooked dinner, read a book, and went to bed early. Ahhhh.

Sunday I forced myself to get up early and go back to Porta Portese, determined this time to find some more hidden treasures amongst all of the junk! I again didn't buy anything, but ohhhh will I be back. Again. I know I'm in ancient Rome and all, but I really wish I was a good judge of whether things there are really antiques/worth anything or not. Oh well. Before leaving, I stopped at one of the food trucks in the flea market and got something that I thought would be similar to a burger- not quite. It was a sliver of undercooked meat of some type (probably not beef), which had just about as much mayonnaise and ketchup as it did meat, all on a terrible roll. I'm really missing good ol' American food variety.

I stopped by to say hi to the kitties at the Cat Sanctuary before getting on the bus back home. That's probably one of my favorite places in Rome.

On Friday I'll be off to the Fashion Capital of the World- Milan, so there should be plenty to write about and show in pictures next week.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Refreshing start.

This week started off refreshing for two reasons.

1. PATRIOTS LOSSSSSTTTTT!!!! Greg called and woke me up at 4 a.m. to tell me the good news. Just wish I could have seen the look on Tom Brady's face, yessssss!

2. My alarm went off this morning at 7:45, I layed in bed for a few minutes, waking up slowly, trying to remember my dream... maybe it was about an island. I was on the beach, soaking up the sun and listening to the waves coming in. Then just before I woke up, I dipped my toe in the water. Ahhh.

But then I realized, I really was on an island when I woke up. BECAUSE MY ENTIRE ROOM WAS FLOODED.

So I screamed and woke Kate up, and rushed around picking up everything on the floor which had been soaking in the water which was cascading out from the bathroom sink for the past 2-3 hours. Luckily, there wasn't too much major damage, and it could have been a lot worse. Nothing valuable of mine or Kate's was lost. My Italian books and notebooks were in my bookbag on the floor, so they were all soaked. Kate got lucky, she usually leaves her Mac on the floor to charge overnight, but last night she took it out to the living room and charged it there. The biggest loss seems to be our friend Clare's laptop which she left here over the weekend- it was the first thing I picked up off the ground, but it isn't quite functioning as of now.

What happened was one of our roomates had gone out to watch the Superbowl at the HardRock, and got back around 5 when it was over. She went in the bathroom to wash her face but the hot water wasn't coming out for some reason. She thought she had turned the nob all the way off, but had actually turned it full blast since there was really no way to tell. After she went to bed, the problem with there not being any water was apparently fixed, and wallah! Two hours later there's an inch of water in my bedroom.

So we made the Italians here reeeally grumpy, they had to come up with an industrial shopvac and suck up all the water, probably mumbling about us stupid Americans the whole time... but in the end, we have something to eternally bust on Kiki about, and we did do a little jig in the water with the camera before it got cleaned up.

Horray for Mondays.

Week Four

I can't believe a month has passed already! Time has really been flying. Hmm, what happened in school this week... my Italian seems to be improving, I'm remembering how to say certain things and how to structure the sentences. I feel like I can understand and read the language better than I can speak it though. On Thursday we had a photo critique on an assignment that we had to do which focused on light. Here's a few of the ones I submitted.

a little self-portrait


Marissa

That same day for digital imaging, we visited 3 sites: an photo exhibit at a children's museum which featured a series of photos of homeless children (called "Bambini di Strada" by Mauro Sioli). We also saw an exhibit by an Italian artist named Flavio Micheli, who fuses found paintings with his own photographs, interesting. Lastly, we visited the church Santa Maria del Popolo to take a few low-light pictures. It was really neat, and also the home of two Caravaggio paintings, "Crucifixion of St. Peter" and "Conversion on the Way to Damascus", a Bernini sculpture, Raphael's "Creation of the World" mosaic on the dome... ya know, blah blah blah. Unfortunately I didn't get too many clear images, but I walk by it just about every day, so I'll be back.

On Friday I went on a school-organized trip to Tivoli, and saw both Hadrian's Villa and Villa d'Este. Our trip was run by professor Robert Huber, a Johnny Depp look-alike professor from Palmyra. Excellent. Hadrian was Emperor of Rome in 117 a.d., and had this beautiful retreat built for him. It had gorgeous architecture and landscapes, and definitely seemed to be just the place to escape from the craziness for a while.

the floors used to be covered in mosaics
bath houses

Next we checked out the Villa d'Este, which is another retreat built by another emperor in the 16th century who decided to jack all of the marble from Hadrian's crib above to make himself some shmancy fountains. But they sure were shmancy!

gandolph the grey?

there's Johnny!


Fontana di Diana Efesia and her many mammories

it wouldn't be a normal blog for me without
some kind of grumpy animal

It was also really nice to have the place to myself for the weekend. On Friday night I took a stroll by myself to try and meet up with my man the Pope, but he wouldn't pick up his cell, that jerk. But it was my first time seeing St. Peter's, which was nice at night and relatively empty since it was drizzling. Sorry, no pics of that.

Saturday was another early morning. School sent an e-mail out about the largest Carnivale celebration in the Lazio (Rome city-state) region, held in Ronciglione. The main event that happens is a rider-less horse race, preceded by a parade. But before we got there, I saw this in the train station:
(sorry, I try to normally keep these G-rated, but this was just too amusing!)

crazy Italians?!?!?!

Okay, how about those parade pics!

this little dog loved following the horses around

Then after watching the band, colorguard, and baton-twirlers march back-and-forth on the street about 12 times, they had some difficulty getting the horses in the gates, so we waited...

...and waited...

And finally, they were off!

Apparently the animal-rights groups groups are trying to
ban this event, due to horses getting injured- look closely,
one slipped and fell in this race :(

it was hard to get good pictures, they were fast!

After the race, we got some hot chocolate and enjoyed the town a bit before heading back to Rome.

On Sunday, I got up early again and checked out Porta Portese, a huge flea-market in Trastevere. I didn't get anything this time, but it was neat, and I'm sure I'll be back. For the rest of the day, I worked on my homework assignment for Painting on Paper, we had to do a self-portrait collage using painted color swatches. I went a little overboard and took about 6 hours to do it, but it was a rainy day with nothing else to do. Another motivating factor was my determination to make my teacher's head explode with my incomprehensible talent.

not quite perfect, but you get the idea.

another one we did in class on Monday

LET'S GO GIANTS!