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.