Ciao!

The Orvieto Cathedral - Within decorated frescoes by Fra Angelico , etc. .



The Dying Gaul statue



I did not Understand what a "Roman nose " WAS until I saw this statue ...

I've been quite busy for the past few weeks trying to get acclimated to schoolwork again and haven't had the time to sit down and write. I'm going to organize this blog in bulleted format because I'm having trouble trying to weave it into paraagraphs.

• Our group had a private tour of the Capitoline Museum by one of the directors a few weeks ago and we were able to see the original Equestrain Marcus Aurelius statue as well as the statue of the Marble Faun (Hawthorne's muse). We were given some time to walk around by ourselves and I particularly enjoyed a new exhibit featuring ancient Roman gravestones and was touched by some of the epitaphs. One read: "Here lies our beloved son. Evil spirits cut his life short like a storm from the south cuts a tender plant."
• I became enraptured by Kenyon's very own James Wright and his The Shape of Light and I have committed a few of my favorite lines of his to memory. Also, speaking of Kenyon, we were recently ranked the most beautiful school in the world by Forbes/Yahoo. Unfortunately, we still have ugly students. This is true as well, more or less, for our Kenyon in Rome program. I have taken to growing a very ugly mustache--it's a result of what my friend, Clint, has termed the Adonis Factor.
• It has cooled down considerably here, especially today. Regardless, I haven't work socks once since I've been here. My two pairs of Birkenstocks have served me quite well.
• I've been to a few contemporary art shows--one, titled The One Night Stand II, featured a tuxedoed man who was giving people handshakes full of wet paint. I shook his hand and gave him a pat on the back, leaving my handprint on his tuxedo. In another room of the show an overweight Asian woman in a velvet evening dress held two very large fish (who began the show alive), each weighing about 15 pounds under her arms. Still, yet another woman, a hefty German, spent the duration of the show profusely sweating under a hot lamp in a wool dress, the material of which she was meticulously wrapping back into a ball of yarn. The program says her agenda was to "find out the audience's limits and where her own mental limits are, the limits between strength and pain". I didn't stay to see her finish unweaving her dress.
• One of my friends on the program was mugged as he left a gay bar by the Coliseum two weeks ago. He was hit a few times in the face, and more gruesomely, had his ear sliced by a small knife. He had left the bar by himself and presumably, a local committed a hate crime against him. Rome is not Gambier, OH.
• I visited the Villa Giulia, the National Museum of Etruscan Art, a few weeks ago and spent a few hours there taking notes. Later that same day I stopped at the National Museum of Modern Art and was intrigued by the Sala del Giardinere where works by Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne, Degas, and Courbet all reside. The painting I liked best in the museum was a work by Gustave Klimt, The Three Ages of Woman.
• Two weekends ago our group went on a field trip to Orvieto. We toured the Cathedral and were able to walk around the quiant town for quite some time. The stillness of the town reminded me just how loud Rome is. On the train ride home I sat next to a Kenyon student who lightly chanted Hare Krishna before he napped.
• Our program director, Professor Clarvoe continues to wow me. She's fluent in French, German, English, and Italian and studied Middle English, Ancient Greek, and Ancient Latin. I am loving her classes and I leave every class enlightened. Evidently, I'm not the only impressed by her--she's dating a man considered to be the best Bernini restorer in the world whom I was able to meet a few times since he's been in Rome.
• I've befriended the porter at our residence, Armando, who has been very cordial with me and patient as I struggle with my Italian. Also, I met one of the elderly residents across the courtyard named Atilio. He was a very accomplished sculptor and painter and his work can be seen in numerous churches throughout Rome. He's an 88 year old father of 8 and a WWII veteran. He bought me a coffee on Sunday afternoon and as we were walking back he tripped over an exposed grate and fell onto the gravel of the courtyard before I was able to catch him. Luckily, he really only bruised his knee but I hope that doesn't have other complications. I help him struggle to his feet and was able to get him medical attention from the nurses. I was worried about his well being but he waved my concerns away and said the Italian equivalent to "Shit happens."
• In my poetry workshop we're focusing on Ovid's Metamorphoses and in our Poetry and the Visual Arts course we're reading  works by Elizabeth Bishop as well as various other ekphrastic works including Homer's description of Achilles' Shield in the Iliad.
• Out of class I've been obsessed with an Italian author, Italo Calvino, and the English translation of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a collection of lectures he was supposed to give before his unexpected death at Harvard which centers around his thoughts about literature. His lecture on "Lightness" is particularly captivating and pertinent because it is just this quality that my writing professors have stressed--to be light and quick, rather than heavy and overbearing on the reader. "Take the weight out of language to the point that it resembles moonlight." Also, I'm currently reading an excellent biography of Caravaggio written by Hellen Langdon. It was one of the books alluded to by Ingrid D. Rowland, an art historian at Notre Dame, whose From Heaven to Arcadia I finished during one reading intensive day last week. She's in Rome for the semester as well, and a friend of Professor Clarvoe's so hopefully we'll be able to tour museums with her.
• It looks as if I may be going to Venice this weekend. I'm psyched to see some Giorgione and Titian. Also, an intern on the program, Kenyon '09, and I are planning on a trip up to Parma in the near future to check out Correggio's decoration of the Parma Cathedral, of which I did extensive research my freshman year.

Phew! Until next time!

Ciao!

A chamber room in the Palazzo Doria Pamphili Where the priest if he Would greet visitors Indeed Were visiting . You can vaguely see His throne under the portrait bearing His Likeness .

I Think They Went a little overkill with the whole fertility reference. A statue of Diana in Villa D' Este.

A view from behind of the cascading fountains and monumental (and Rome in the distance ) as if the almighty water flows directly from Villa D' Este to the Romans .

Hadrian's Theatre Maritmo - his own private island ( included moat ) on the Villa Adriana grounds. here I thought of Mom and how sheWould like her own little island .

My roommate has the roman Fever. It is not atypical for him to ooze sweat or stay in bed for days no end or smell of week-old soup but it is uncommon for him to run a fever of 101degrees. He's a jolly white giant, 6'4 240lbs. of body hair and pimples and he thinks he's Rodney Dangerfield 2.0 which would be quite funny if I didn't know some of his jokes came straight from the mouth of Rodney Dangerfield 1.0.

Anyways, I'm in the kitchen (while the rest of the coop is at la playa scaring away the beachgoers with their very unbeachy bods. There's a reason why poets are pale.) You'd think they'd know better coming from a school which E.L. Doctorow once wrote, "At Kenyon we did poetry like Ohio State does football." I've been venturing off by myself fairly frequently and as a result I know Rome fairly well on foot. I've been waking up at 7 AM most days to hit the streets before the forestieri mob the piazzas. This week one day I spent time at the Fountain of Trevi (absolutely packed, I must go either late at night or early morning) and the Palazzo Doria Pamphili. The Doria Pamphilis rose to prominence when Cardinal Pamphili was elected Pope and became Pope Innocent X. The palazzo was built for his nephew (cough, cough son) and I was fortunate enough to have the extravagant palazzo basically to myself for the afternoon as I took a few hours to examine the vast collection. Works by Lorrain, Caracci, Del Sarto, Corregio, Caravaggio, Jan Brueghel, Bernini, Parmigianino, Rembrandt, Durer, Rubens, Veronese, and the most famous of the collection, a portrait by Velasquez of Pope Innocent X. It is said that when the portrait was unveiled for the Pope he despondently exclaimed, "It is too real!" for it captures his aging visage too well.

The art gallery is quite overwhelming as pictures are hung from floor to vaunted ceiling (which of course are painted as well). Fun macabre fact--the Pamphili's had the remains of two saints, Theodora and Justin, exhumed from the catacombs to be put on display (literally their decomposing bodies are visible) in the family chapel.

Other destinations this week included a guided tour by the Pantheon Institute director, Romolo Martemucci (architect and blabbermouth). Romolo was backed into this free tour of Villa D'Este and Villa Adriana because he neglected to tell our own program director that electives (like my Vatican course) wouldn't start until two weeks after we arrived in Rome.

Villa D'Este was a vacation home for Cardinal Este before he too became pope in the 16th Century, 25 miles to the east of Rome. It is one of the most complete and refined examples of Renaissance elegance and has been my favorite spot thus far. Romolo gave us the longest winded speech I thought I could ever bear (only to trump it with an even longer one at the Villa Adriana) during which he explained quite eloquently the philosophy behind the architecture of the sprawling gardens. Renaissance artists and aristocrats were obsessed with connecting themselves to the classical ideals and thus modeled their home or homes to reflect their elite status and intelligence. For instance, Hercules is the recognized mythical forefather of the Este clan and his likeness can be found at the Villa D'Este and in the Este family tree where firstborn sons as named Ercule.

The villa overlooks the river valley and the city which Este would come to govern and the gardens are meant to showcase water, where all life springs, in its most grandiose. Romans were particularly fond of their water systems and fountains are everywhere, even some that shoot 60 feet in the air. Water is further paralled to life and fertility in the Fountain of Tivoli at Villa D'Este which portrays a narrative of Sibyl, a wet nurse to Bacchus, and at another fountain of the myriad breasted Diana (get the fertility references yet?)

After lunch we took a trip to Villa Adriana, one of the homes of Emperor Hadrian during his reign in the second century, only about 1/3 of which has been excavated. Romolo talked for an hour and a half at the gates before letting us walk about. Somehow he managed to tell us not only the history of Hardian and his villa but also on the reach of his empire, the tenets of democracy, Plato's Republic, tennis, Genesis, the Egyptians, his years at college, and his grandkids. It was actually not going to end until Professor Clarvoe had to stop him, and only after that were we able to walk around on our own. I promptly headed past Hadrian's private island, Teatro Maritimo, to his palazzo where I napped under an olive tree praying Romolo's voice would somehow get out of my ears.

Classes are here, too, and I am already swamped with work. I spent all of Friday and Saturday reading and writing and today will be spent drawing, and surprise! more reading. Currently I'm trucking my way through Hawthorne's Marble Faun and also prose poetry (although he would die, again, if he heard the phrase "prose poetry) by a Kenyon alum, James Wright, a Pulitzer winner whose verses have been particularly refreshing and captivating recently. it seems always to be a breezy summer day in France or Italy or some cobblestoned city in his reflections of his time away from Ohio, yet there is a strong undercurrent of melancholic tones. "The men and women and their children are still arranging for our slow ambling choice the heaps of grapes, melons, peaches, nectarines and all the other fruits of the season in a glory that will not last too long. But they will last long enough. I would rather live my life than not live it." Wright's ethereal, fleeting scenes, just as the piccolini he writes of, leave a ripple in my mind to ponder and remind me (as if we all need reminders) of our transience.

To return to the quotidian we have dinner as a group in a local restaurant. The locals in Trastevere are quite hospitable and I just happened to meet an Italian with an Australian accent which I was thoroughly amused by. He left me with a "Buongiorno, mate" and I bid you good day as well, mates.