I just flooded my kitchen. With the washing machine. Which happens to be located in the kitchen, naturally, because, well, I'm in Italy.

Il quarto.

I'm thinking it's time for me to stop writing this blog entirely in postcard lingo. I'm here, aren't I? Really living at an Italian address for the whole year, so I might as well just tell you about it instead of trying to document it.

I've just come from my Storia dell' arte contemporanea class, which translates roughly to history of modern art. The conception of modernity here in Italia isn't quite the same as ours. Modernity begins around the 1400s, (specifically when Columbus sailed...I seem to remember a rhyme about this), and ends roughly somewhere before the 1800s. The contemporary element of this art history class means that we start off in the 1850s and study mostly the beginning of the 20th century. It may just make more sense this way.

In class today, my professoressa arrived about ten minutes late, wearing her small, black, violently fashionable leather jacket, and proceeded to spend the next fifteen minutes of our collective time organizing her slides, supervising the "technician" who arrived when the computer projector proved disfunctional, and generally trying to appear more bored, or apathetic, really, than the rows of students seated above her. I've really come to appreciate how incredible it was to study modern art history at NYU, in a classroom structured entirely for the viewing of paintings. And with a professor who never once mixed up Renoir with Cezanne.

My appreciation grew when, after being unable to fix and then unable to turn off the computer monitor, Prof. Fiorillo very nearly decided to project the slides directly onto the Microsoft blue screen, which I feel may not have been the exact effect Cezanne had in mind. Thankfully another student recommended using the white wall as a background, and for the rest of the two hour class it was only my professor herself tinted blue, with the words "PROGRAMMA COMPUTER MODO 1" sliding back and forth across her forehead. Van Gogh, by the way, is pronounced in Italian like everything in Italian, exactly as it's spelled. That's right. There are two g's, allora, "Van Gog."

My other classes tend to be less of a spectacle than this one, although they all function fairly differently than class in the US. For example, we are more than one third of the way into the semester and I haven't actually chosen a fourth class. And that's fine here. My other two courses are both Italian literature. One I take with Monica Pavani, a Ferrarese native who conducts a class on writings about the city itself for just the ten of us Middlebury students in the program. She's very small and has an unusual manner of layering her clothing that she clearly considers fashionable in some offhand way, and gives the constant impression of having a sort of vague headcold. We're trying desperately to get her to accept an invitation to dinner at one of our casas.

My final (chosen) class is by far my favorite. It meets in the morning three days a week, two of them at 8 am, but as of yet I haven't slept through one. We all cram into the pea soup-green pews, as it were, that have been built close enough together that crossing one's legs requires standing, and make as little noise as possible while the unbelievably soft-spoken and even more unbelievably tiny Professore Cherchi reads Dante to us. He is an entirely humble scholar and probably the greatest story teller I've ever encountered. Occasionally he asks a student to come to the front of the class and read, which terrifies the several Americans and our one Dutch friend in the class.

I realize now that my attempt to tell you a little bit about my life here just became a long-winded and rather maudlin course catalog for the Universita di Ferrara. Which is a pretty inaccurate representation, considering the complete lack of emphasis placed on academics here, not only by the students but by the university itself. Graduation, however, is another thing entirely. Most students graduate in at the end of September or in October, after taking (or retaking, more likely) and passing their exams. Each separate facolta has its own graduation ceremony, and then a party that takes place at the castle for the students, friends, and families. Yesterday, one of my friends' Italian roomates, Carlo, graduated from the school of medicine. The specific details of the Italian graduation wouldn't interest me nearly as much if not for the huge crowns made of laurel leaves that all of the graduates wear, not just for the ceremony, but for the entire day and night of their graduation. And this has been going on for weeks, several graduations a week, several thousands of kids running around the city wearing leafy crowns with their skinny jeans and avant-garde sneakers.

It's drizzling today, and weather.com says it's going to keep drizzling for the next two weeks straight. Which is great news, considering Callie comes this weekend to do a fast-paced (haha) tour of Italy from Rome up, and then my parents arrive next Wednesday from Parigi.

I've pretty much mastered riding my bike while holding an umbrella, though.

Occasionally, it's a pizza instead of an umbrella. But I have yet to drop either.

Il terzo. The Dolomites.

I have too much Dante to read tonight to write out any explanations to these, but here are way too many photos from my trip to the Dolomites, a part of the Alps in Italy near the Austrian border.

Il secondo. Riot Coming

I could be so much better at this blogging thing if I tried.
This Saturday I’ll have been living in Italia for exactly one month. I can’t really decide if it feels like a lot longer or shorter since I first dragged my suitcase down the cobblestones. But I’m feeling settled in for the year here, especially with the recent addition to my life of a bici. With the narrow old medieval streets it’s impossible to get around any other way, so I’m paying exactly one euro a month to rent this ridiculous ancient orange bike that seems to be working out well so far. I just need to find a basket for the front, like everyone else here has.
And maybe a baby gatto to ride in it.

This weekend I hopped the 20 minute (3.50€) train to Bologna to explore another Italian city for the afternoon. Bologna is definitely a big city coming from Ferrara. And it’s filled with students due to the oldest university in Europe at the city's historic center. I just sounded eerily like Fodors.
Via dell' Indipendenza, the mainish drag in Bologna:

Molly, as touristy as humanly possible, in front of Nettuno (that's neptune) in the Piazza maggiore:

Chiostri! (cloisters):

Oncoming storm (or tempesta, maybe my favorite italian word):

My friend Molly (or Mollita, in italiano) and I walked around the big sabato mercato in Bologna together, very crowded with thousands of people and 10€ pairs of shoes, and then had a pizza pranzo (lunch) with a waiter who couldn’t understand why we were speaking Italian to each other. Later, we found literally the best gelateria on earth, called Gianni. I have a feeling we’ll be returning to Bologna very frequently with the rest of our friends, if only for the ice cream.

As we walked back to the train that afternoon, we saw rows of carabinieri, a type of police officer, lined up with those plastic shields disturbingly recognizable from any movie depiction of a riot. Further up the street, we found the manifestazione, or protest, with thousands of students massed in the street and heard “Fratelli! Sorelle!” (Brothers! Sisters!) and then the word “Sociale!” screamed over and over through a megaphone mounted on a van. It started to pour almost immediately and we basically ran back to the train to avoid the storm and the riot. We still never figured out what they were actually protesting.

The entire rest of my weekend was spent in my kitchen. A group of friends here basically moved in for three days to cook meals and hang out in my apartment. Out of all of our apartments here, the verdict on mine is that it’s the most homey. And this weekend, it was the best place to make mounds of pasta and apple crisp. Figuring out how to light the gas oven was yet another adventure. We’re fairly convinced, or at least I am, that we have an old Italian ghost living in the apartment with us. Her name is Elvyra (it’s handwritten on one of the wooden hangers in my closet), and seems to me to be very kind and really enjoying having so many young voices in her old apartment. She’s also left about 25 ancient tea sets stacked in her cabinets that all open with a variety of medieval-looking keys, and lots of strange and at least four decade-old kitchen utensils and silver picture frames and crackly air mail stationary and yellow newspaper cutouts along with maybe four or five heavy magnifying glasses tucked in the infinite number of cubbie holes in the fold up writing desk. Besides digging through my quirky old apartment, I’ve been making a lot of tiny cups of strong incredible Italian coffee and the occasional nutella and peanut butter panino with the stovetop sandwich grille I found the other day in my kitchen, drinking 2€ bottles of vino with my friends, and getting to know as many Italian students as possible on weekend nights (or more likely mercoledi sera, Wednesday night being the big night to uscire, go out, in Ferrara) when everyone comes down into the various piazze to dance and occasionally watch fireworks over the castello.
My room: My front door, Via Cassoli, 9:
Next weekend I'm headed to France on the cheap Italy-based airline MyAir, (that, don't worry, all of the Italian students have actually heard of and use), for about 30€ each way to see the Feist show and explore Bordeaux with Callie and hopefully eat tons and tons of good French bread and pastry. I've actually started learning French at the university here, from the incredibly adorable Madame Céline Jolly, but I don't know how far my two lessons this week are going to get me... In any case, au revoir.
I'm sure I pronounced that wrong.