Veteran's Day: Random Thoughts

Italy, as always, is wonderful. And I, as always, am distracted and going to ramble about something else altogether.

I was very pleased to see facebook full of "Happy Veteran's Day" etc. posts today. Whether or not you agree with the war(s) happening, the people standing face-to-face with their mortality should be thanked for their gusto. We need them to keep living the way we want to. So way to go, my generation, on not being mindless fools and blaming soldiers for the decisions of Washington. That's a change.

Also, thinking about this has made me kind of nostalgic and a little sad; my grandfather fought in Korea. I remember one of the last lucid conversations he had with me before he died: he told me some stories about the war. It was the only time I ever heard him talk about being a Marine, and one of only a handful of times I ever saw him get emotional (he was stoic to the end). I'm missing him a lot today, and wishing I could have known him as an adult. I could have learned so much from him. So. Grandpa, I love you and wish I had said that more often while I had the chance. Thank you for everything. We miss you.

On a final, lighter, note: is it "Veteran's Day" or "Veterans' Day"? I'm never sure. Also, happy 11/11/11, folks!

Reflections on Firenze, Part I: Galleria dell'Accademia

There's just so much I could say about last weekend...I got to spend an incredible amount of time with Dief, I had a great pot luck with the people in my program, and I had an amazing time in lovely Florence. Naturally, the thing I'm most itching to write about is the art I was able to see, not least because one cannot take many pictures and I want a way of recording my thoughts (aided by pictures I'm stealing from Google, of course.) So I've recorded some of the highlights here.Disclaimer: none of you probably care about any of this. Sorry.

The first museum we visited was the Galleria dell'Accademia, home to Michelangelo's David. Yes, the David is astounding, but there is also a ton of other incredible art in the Accademia that people seem to overlook. First of all, Fra. Bartholomeo's Prophet Isaiah (1516). Kind of a side-note, but I found this one interesting because of its similarities to Michelangelo's prophets in the Sistine. Pretty cool.

Also, Lippi's Deposition from the Cross  (1504-7). This is a work I studied pretty carefully for my art history class last winter, and it really struck me when I saw it in person because Mary (bottom left) is utterly green, which just doesn't transfer into photos and reproductions very well. She stands out against all the other, more realistically colored, figures, and her grief seems all the more real for her unreal coloring.

Lippi's Annunciation, part of the same cycle as the Deposition, is also pretty cool. For one thing, it differs from many other annunciations, in which Gabriel is depicted as partially outside of the architecture housing the Virgin and also partially inside, signifying the breaking of the barrier between heaven and earth with the breaking of the pictoral frame. In Lippi's rendition, however, Gabriel is fully inside the architectural frame with Mary, though a separation is still delineated by the arcade of the middle ground and the pedestal holding Mary's book.





I also particularly enjoyed Pieri's Deposition (1587) because of its motion. It has a very circular element, drawing the eye from the top left, at Mary's head, around the curve of her body toward the middle of the composition and Christ's head, and then along his body line around to his feet at the bottom left. The extreme tilt of Mary's head, echoing that of Christ, as well as the similarities in the positions of both of their right arms, clearly draws them apart from the other onlookers in the scene who reinforce, but do not replicate, the clockwise motion created by the Virgin and Christ.




One of my favorite things about the Accademia is the presentation of David as a kind of god. The layout of the room he is in mirrors the layout of a basilica, with a long nave and a transept, placing David, on top of an altar-like pedestal with expensive porphyry marble inlays, at their intersection (the place of the high altar of a basilica) in front of what can only be described as an apse. Where there would ordinarily be chapels or oratories in a basilica are placed Michelangelo's unfinished Prisoner sculptures. I absolutely love these. They give real insight into the way Michelangelo worked, and it's incredible to see markings in the stone, invisible in a polished, finished work, from his chisel. I could almost hear and see him working away on the marble as I stood in the museum. I felt as though the sculptures were about to come alive and step out of the marble, a la Pygmalion.


Of course David is amazing. I cannot even begin to put it into words, and I'm not going to try.

...in which I don't talk about Italy at all.

This is off topic, but I feel the need to say it anyway.

When I got home from class today, there were unsubstantiated reports that Gaddafi had been killed. Then I took a nap. I woke up to find that story confirmed and all over the internet, and I have three brief things to say about it. I'm no current events/world politics expert by any means, so forgive me my naïveté.

First, I think it's important that this was done by the Libyan people themselves. They started the uprising, they installed their own interim government, and they killed their tyrant, similar to the situation in Egypt and the other nations involved in the Arab Spring revolts. Iraq is a great counterexample; the United States had it's nose in all of Iraq's business, which is why, in my opinion, the situation has been so prolonged and messy. It harkens back to decolonialization problems in Africa: when and how does a nation leave another?  I just feel that it is not the place of the US, or any powerful Western nation, to claim to understand the sentiments of and be able to aid the changes happening in the Arab world. So props to the Libyans who fought for their own freedom in their own country.

Second, I feel like the world is about to boil over. There have been so many protests and big movements of late. I could just be more attuned to them now than in the past because I'm older and more aware of world news, but something powerful seems to be happening. From immigration marches in the US, to the Arab Spring movements, to the Global Occupy movement, it really feels like someone has lit a fire under everyone's asses, and it's kind of exciting in a watch-from-my-couch sort of way.

Lastly, being the history nerd that I am, I'm intrigued by the label that has been put on this movement, the "Arab Spring". I can't help but be interested in the fact that the next generation will be memorizing that term for their world history classes. It blows my mind a little bit. It also makes me think about the history I study. For example, "Renaissance", renascimento, these are 18th century labels put on an era by a historian named Jacob Burkhardt. And we learn about what was called the Great War while it was happening as the First World War. So how do we label things to study them? Is it fair to think about things in terms of late labels given them by historians? And how does this work when Western news outlets label movements in the Arab world? How can we conceptualize the events happening in Libya, both as they relate to us as the so-called Arab Spring, and as they are being experienced by the Libyans, who, as far as I can guess, are not thinking about this movement in those terms? Something I just can't not think about.

Coffee e cornetto: A brief note

Something the US needs to get behind: super cheap and delicious cappuccinos and pastries. The coffee here is FAR superior to anything in the States, and only costs .80EUR. Why is coffee stateside so overpriced and sugared up?! I can already tell that I'm going to miss the Italian breakfast tradition: go to the local bar (here bars function as coffee bars during the day), pay first, then go up to the bar, get your coffee, drink it while standing and chatting with people, munch on a croissant filled with chocolate, and then go about your day. It is one of my favorite things ever. Get on it, America!

Chocolate and Chaos

Yesterday was delicious. Yes, delicious. I hopped on a train with the roommates to Perugia, the capitol of the region Umbria, which is famous for it's chocolate. Every year for they host EuroChocolate, a GIANT international open air festival centered around chocolate. There are thousands of vendors, a million visitors, and more chocolate than is easily conceivable. We arrived and were amazed. I ate a lot of free samples, bought a lot of not so free chocolate goodies, and ate a Nutella-filled cornetto (croissant). We also bought the local lunch standard, porchetta, which is sliced wild boar, served panino-style. It was incredibly tasty. Perugia is, also, gorgeous, so the day was amazing overall. 

When we got back to Roma, dragging ourselves out of the Termini train station to wait for our bus home, we saw a lot of Carabinieri. (They're like cops, but all they do is keep the peace and control tourists. The equivalent of traffic cops are the polizia.) There were also news crews and helicopters. We continued to see Carabinieri everywhere on our bus ride home, and even a Carabinieri van badly burnt on the street. Naturally we were confused and looked up the news when we got home. The Global Occupy movement has come to Roma, a city that likes to protest and strike at any opportunity. (I've encountered 3 public transit strikes, a protest of firemen, and several political protests in the past 3 weeks.) The initially peaceful protest was co-opted by anarchists and became a full-out riot. Shop windows were smashed, tear gas was used, cars were lit on fire, Molotov cocktails flew...Rome really was burning,from   Termini (the second busiest train depot in Europe) down Via Cavour (a main drag through the city) to Piazza Venezia (one of the biggest piazze, and an always crowded area). Several people were badly injured and hospitalized, but thankfully no one died. It was striking to watch news coverage of a city on fire after having just crossed it via bus. I've never been so close to that kind of event before. It's both scary and exciting; the world is really fed up with the status quo, and people across the first world are fighting back. It really is turning into a global movement. I think that's kind of cool, but I also worry that other cities will follow Rome's violent example, not to mention that I worry about friends in Chicago; CPD has started arresting some protesters there, and I have several friends heavily involved in the Occupy Chicago movement. Hopefully the "99%" will manage to get their message across without causing too much damage to their cities or to themselves. That being said, I agree with the message of the movement and am interested to see what will happen in the coming weeks. Be safe, everyone.

Ruins, Turtles, and Time

Something very mundane happened today, but it has really made me think. You know, because I'm a nerd and all that.

My civilizations class was tramping through ruins for the umpteenth time. Today we were in Tivioli, at the Villa Adriana, the emperor Hadrian's summer Villa turned permanent residence. He had this giant manmade pond built outside of the triclinium (dining room, basically) that had columns and arches and statues surrounding it, a few of which remain. A lot of times I find ruins like this eerie, especially when mostly bereft of tourists. They seem so dead and sterile; hard like the marble and brick they're constructed of. But today, beside that pond, there was a young turtle sunning himself and warily watching a class of 28 parade past his favorite spot. The juxtaposition of color against white marble, life against sterility, the new against the ancient, was striking. It made the enormity of the meaning of 2,000 years really hit me, and I haven't been able to shake a sort of weighty feeling about it ever since. That many years does a lot to make my own silly life seem like less than a speck of dust in the sands of time. Italy is certainly good at giving me a big doses of perspective.

(Again, not my picture.)

Happiness in a Keyhole

I am such an easily-pleased person. I was having a 'meh' kind of weekend up until this afternoon; I was sick and tired and sore and unable to escape my roommates (whom I really like, but you know...some days you hardcore need hermit-mode.) At any rate, I was very cranky when I left my Italian class today, which is silly; who wants to be cranky in Rome?!

Sarah, Tammy, Jan and I decided to go on an adventure, to walk around on the Aventine Hill, a part of the city none of us had explored yet. At the top of the hill is the teeny sovereignty of the Knights of Malta. In a gate in one of their walls is a keyhole that looks clear across the city to St. Peter's. You literally look across 3 countries to do this: Territory of the Knights of Malta, Italy, and the Vatican. We stood in line to see it, and it was fantastic. Not to mention that the Aventino neighborhood is beautiful and quiet. (A quiet area is a rarity in this crazy city.) The weather is finally cooler, there was a nice breeze, and the view was awesome. It took just this to completely turn my mood around. I need to always remember to appreciate small things, like staring at St. Peter's across the city through a keyhole. That's how small a thing it takes to make me happy: it can fit in a keyhole. And I consider myself lucky for that.

(I stole this picture because it's better than mine. The black stuff you see around the greenery is the keyhole.)