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!