mi è piaciuta la italia

It's no secret to anyone who's talked to me in the past few months that I am seriously in love with Austria and with my life here. I'm living like a normal student, which was my goal for the semester from the beginning. But that also means I need to remind myself that there's a lot that's special about this semester as well, and that I should take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities as much as the ordinary ones.


Case in point: travel. When I talked to my friend Josie, who's studying abroad this semester in Florence, she was shocked to discover that I've never left Austria since I arrived back in October. We decided to rectify the situation last weekend: I would fly to Rome on Saturday morning, we would spend the day together there, and then return to Florence on Saturday night. Because I don't have Monday classes, I would get to spend two days in Florence staying with her host family before returning to Austria on Monday night.

Josie, being an experienced Euro-traveler from all her weekends away, had the perfect plan for exploring Rome. We would first take the Metro to the Vatican, on the opposite side of Rome from the train station, and then walk our way back during the course of the day, taking in the famous sights as well as smaller nooks of the city on our way.

Our first stop was the Sistine Chapel. Google it if you’ve never seen it; pictures aren’t allowed. I think this was my favorite part of the entire trip, not because of the art (although that was pretty cool), but because Josie studies Renaissance art, and the look on her face when she first saw the Last Judgment was pretty comparable to the looks on the faces of the saints seeing God for the first time on the wall itself. Seeing people enjoying their passions so deeply makes me have hope for the human race.

St. Peter's Cathedral

After looking at the Sistine Chapel and el Piazzo de San Pietro (where you can see the pope, when he’s not too busy writing tell-all books about male prostitution, deadly diseases, and retired people), we walked to the Trevi Fountain, where I was forced to throw a coin in with the other ten thousand tourists there at the same time.

We then took some time to explore the side streets of Rome. Italy has a totally different architectural style from Austria, so that was interesting to see.

And of course, Austria is one of the least religious societies in the world, so you don't see large groups of bright-blue nuns walking around the streets of Vienna.

Then it started to get dark, which provided a cool view of the Colosseum:

But it also meant that it was time to go back to Florence for a late dinner of boar-meat pasta and some Italian wine.

Because we arrived in Florence so late on Saturday, I was first able to meet Josie’s host parents. They were incredibly nice: they explained the Italian adjective endings to me and even baked us a lemon cake! They also lived in a subtly beautiful neighborhood on the outskirts of Florence.

The street where Josie lives this semester

A pretty typical (in the sense of totally haphazard-looking) garden in Josie's neighborhood

Outdoor market near an underground passage

That meant, however, that the buses were kind of iffy. Josie explained to me that the bus comes every half hour, but can sometimes come 15 minutes early, 15 minutes late, or not at all. The posted bus times are meaningless. What a contrast to Vienna, where electronic boards tell you exactly how long you have to wait until the next bus, and apologize profusely for five minute delays.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see much of the stunning Renaissance art in Florence because all of the museums were on strike. I didn’t mind that much, though; from what I read, the situation is pretty depressing. Italy has so many world-renowned cultural sites that it’s practically impossible to upkeep all of them. Of course admission fees from visitors throughout the world help with that a little, but Italy and the Italians still bear the brunt of the financial responsibility for the maintenance of sites that are important for the cultural history of the whole world, not just of Italy.


I did, however, climb the 453 steps to the top of the dome of Florence's cathedral on Monday afternoon.

The Florence cathedral from the outside

View of the inside of the dome from a narrow passageway along its base

The view from the top of the Duomo was the first time I was actually breathtaken by the beauty of Florence. All of the things that irked me about the state from ground level (the dirtiness, the imperfections, the haphazardly-structured buildings) revealed themselves to me from the Duomo as part of the city's charm. How is this not stunning?

The Medici castle

I also had the opportunity to sit in Josie's Italian 101 class on Monday morning, which is how I learned how to say the title of this post: I liked Italy (in the imperfect tense!). I also learned how to order meals just by listening and asking Josie and her friends for words, and I was able to understand more Italian than I expected thanks to my half-remembered Spanish and Latin. I don't know that I'll fulfill my grandmother's dreams by taking up Italian as my next linguistic project, but I certainly had a wonderful weekend.