Allora...

Allora, ognuno, ciò è tutta... This is my last day in Italy! I spent the day train hopping and visiting Riomaggiore in Cinque Terre. It was one of my favorite spots and I wanted to visit one last time! I can't believe I'm flying home tomorrow already, the semester went by so fast. It feels like just a month ago I just moved in! It's hard to believe it's been over four!

Grazie mille, for keeping up with my silly blogging while I've been on this trip! I haven't posted half as much as I should have liked though I believe I'll try to keep up with this blog when I return home more as an art blog than anything, so you may want to poke your head in the blogging world's door once or twice a month :)

In the next few days I may post a few more times because I've surely missed some really cool things! I'll see most of you soon, those who follow this blog, as I return to the west! Thank you again everyone, I learned so much here and I can't wait to come back!

Spain

Ciao, ognuno! I don't have many pictures to show you of Spain. The friends I stayed with there are both artists and we were so excited to see each other and watch each other draw that we did a lot of sketching! They showed me around Barcelona a bit, though we were all just so eager to draw and hang out I forgot to take pictures!

I arrived later in the day on Monday and so we stayed in their apartment to hang out, draw, chat, watch movies, and eat chips and popcorn together like any friends should ;) The next day though, they showed me around the main areas of Barcelona. The more famous piazzas, some of the beautiful buildings (usually banks and hotels, but gosh was it gorgeous!), the side streets that donned music shops and curiosity shops, and they took me to a few parks.

There was so much green in Spain! I keep saying this, but Florence, as marvelous as it is, is really only brick. The architecture is beautiful and the way the light hits the walls and streets and bridges, it really makes the city glow, but aside from the tiny scattered parks and the green along the Arno, there really is very little green to see. Spain was lush with trees and grass! Along with the old archways and buildings and walls, green seeped its way into every free space and it was really amazing to see again!

The next day they brought me to Parc del Laberint, a labyrinth park! Along with waterfalls and small paved paths in multiple garden spots, right in the middle of the park was--you guessed it, a maze!

It was so much fun! We kept running in opposite directions and tried to find each other. Despite it  being pretty small, it was really easy to get lost in.

We visited a gothic cathedral, completely different than the ones you see in Italy which was a nice change. The gothic architecture was beautiful and the inside just as elaborate as the out.

The last place on Wednesday they took me to was a castle! The view from up in the hills was stunning. The castle itself is now an Art Gallery, that if I return to Spain (with more money and time!) I'll definitely want to check out!

Va bene, sorry to make this short but I'm stuck in bed with a nasty cold today! I might go in and write more later!

Abby to English Dictionary!

While I was in Spain, my friends made me a page-long dictionary of Spanish to English phrases that they say all the time. It was SUCH a good idea and so much fun I thought I'd make a quick Abby to English dictionary of phrases I've gotten into the habit of saying while I've been here...

Va bene: Okay or alright (Lit. Translation: it goes well. Most important phrase in my vocabulary.)

Scusi / Scusa / Scusate: Excuse me or I'm sorry (This rolls off my tongue all the time, I think I say this more than anything else here.)

Sei pazzo!: You're crazy! 

Vai!: Go! 

Grazie: Thank you (Another one that rolls off my tongue without my thinking about it.) 

Posso?: May I? (A polite way of asking for something. I have to catch myself everytime I'm about to say this to anyone who doesn't speak Italian.) 

Suona bene: Sounds good (Lit. Translation: he plays well. This phrase isn't ever used in Italian... I started saying it because I say "sounds good" in English all the time and it wasn't until after I got into the habit of saying it that my Italian friends finally told me it didn't mean the same thing in Italian but it apparently sounded cute so they didn't tell me.) 

Vale: Alright or okay. (This is Spanish, something I started saying literally the second I got back from Spain...) 

Tio!: Dude! (Another Spanish word. I was excited to find a word in another language that meant "dude" as Italian doesn't have one.)

Due Giorni in Roma! Giorno due!

Woah, long time no see! I meant to update this blog before I went to Spain, but I was too excited for Spain to even think about this! Let's see if I can remember our second day in Rome.. So much has happened this semester!

The second day we were there we went into Vatican City. It was beautiful!! But there was so much to see, in a way it was overwhelming in just a day, I could have spent a week in Vatican sketching and looking at each piece of art. Our main goal was to see the Sistine Chapel but as we were making our way there, we realized just how much there was to see in the museum!

Alright, this was taken in Florence actually, but  just found it! This is one of the cutest pictures of me and Elizabeth I think... I don't have any idea what I was looking at though (Look at how much taller I am than her haha!)

As long a we kept our flash off, we were allowed to take pictures in the Vatican museum which was great, but again pretty strange as I've said in past posts that Italy is pretty strict about photography in their museums.

I really can't believe how many pieces of art I recognized here because of Craig Farmer's art history and AP art history from highschool. I kept stopping in front of certain pieces and smiling because it would immediately come back to mind what he told us about them!

He hadn't told us about this one, but I
simply really enjoyed the painting :)

The courtyard in the middle of the museum. It was crazy how large it was! So many rooms to explore and things to see! The first thing we saw was a hall of sculptures.

The most exciting thing I saw in the hall was a sculpture of Ganymede!!! I adore Ganymede... My favorite sculpture of all time is in the Minneapolis Institute of art simply titled Ganymede and the Eagle. (Here is the link if you'd like to check it out!) So I was pretty thrilled to see a sculpture of him in Vatican!

I really admire sculptors and sculptures so it was a lot of fun to see a whole hallway filled with beautiful casts and figures!! It's something I know I could never create in my life, I don't have the technique or mind to do so, so I take to admiring from afar and drawing the beautiful figures instead!

Each room was gorgeous and so different from one to the next!

This room is very very important! It was blocked off which I was SO bummed about. I'm glad I got a picture through the gated off entrance though (a security guard was giving me some strange looks because of how excited I was!) I'm worried most people pass by this room because it is closed off but there is one incredible sculpture there that should have much more recognition.

Every year at Perpich, the AP Art History kids have to take the AP test at the end of the year. Craig Farmer dresses up as a work of art each year to cheer us on. For my year he dressed up as this sculpture, donning a toga and the disk and posed as the disk thrower at every encounter we had with him in he halls! I was so excited t see it there! I had no idea it was in the Vatican!

The ceilings in every room were painted wonderfully... I have so many pictures of ceilings on my laptop now, but they were so gorgeous it was impossible not to take several pictures of each one! I was more inclined to look up to the ceiling than the walls!

This was by far my favorite room! A room filled with intricate maps painted on the walls all the way down the hallway. It was gorgeous and I was so distracted in that hallway, wanting to memorize each of the map. Just after this hallway was the Sistine Chapel. We weren't allowed to take pictures there but it was beautiful. I had no idea just how many panels were painted in the chapel! 

Woops, sorry guys!!! I've been in Spain the past couple of days. I keep forgetting this blog exists.... I'll update today and tomorrow!

Due Giorni in Roma! Giorno Uno!!

Our next stop after Assisi was Rome!! To everyone that's seen Elizabeth's pictures by now, this might be a lot of repeats! Rome felt like much more of a busy city than Florence... That may be because it is a much busier city than Florence!! Though things felt a bit newer which might seem silly, but Florence has more of a old-time brick work to it while Rome keeps to the white marble pillars and sculptures. The buildings are much taller, a bit more intricate. Not to mention the city is waaay larger than Florence!! It's also much easier to get lost within Rome while you can walk from one end of Florence to the other in less than an hour. It seems like it could be a bit like going from Minneapolis to Chicago.

It of course had many of the same features, seeing as how it is still in Italy after all ;) The sculptures on all of the bridges and the fountains in the Piazzas were a familiar sight! I suppose what I'm getting at with these paragraphs is that Florence has become my home, it is much more familiar to me while Rome seemed so much bigger, so much whiter and busier! I can't even imagine what people from Chianti going to Rome let alone Florence must be like! It's probably so different!

Anyhow, we stayed in a hotel just on the edge of Vatican City and decided to explore Rome our first ay there and then visit Vatican the next day. I think we might have seen almost all of Rome in just that day! We covered a lot of ground!

Our first goal was to find the Pantheon which was gorgeous. Elizabeth mentioned right away that it seemed strange that there were old buildings such as this surrounded by the newer, tall, modern buildings. Perhaps that's why Rome felt so different than Florence: all of Florence is older and everything appears to match in appearance. As the day progressed, I grew much more used to Rome's mix of architectures from different eras and I quickly grew to like how buildings like the Pantheon stood out in the massive city.

I kept thinking of Craig Farmer's Art History class from Perpich. If anything stuck with me, it was Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian architecture in pillars!! Don't ask why, I just always am reminded of it when I see the old architecture of Italy!!! All of the Corinthian pillars in the Pantheon were beautiful! The interior too was gorgeous. We were allowed in for free which was fantastic! Everything inside was beautiful!

It was a bit odd, it appeared that there was a mass service going on while everyone was touring inside. It was neat to see a glimpse of the service nonetheless, though I never imagined during a service they would allow tourists in. There were beautiful sculptures every which way inside, though I'll spare you all of the photos I took!

We stumbled into the Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II some time after our trip to the Pantheon. It is located just on the west side of Foro Romano which is, from what I've gathered, a large park with ruins of ancient buildings which have been preserved and saved to view nowadays. We walked around Foro Romano to (finally) find the Colosseum which was one of our main goals in the day!!

I'll admit, before we found the Colosseum we'd found a much smaller version of it called Portico d'Ottavia and we simply couldn't figure out what it was. After finding the real deal it seemed silly we couldn't figure out what the Portico d'Ottavia had been since the real Colosseum is massive! Even more stunning than I'd thought it be, honesty. We didn't get the chance to go in, something I definitely will want to do when I return to Rome for the outside is incredible, the inside must be just as intricate!

We stayed at the Colosseum for white a while. Afterwards as it was getting dark we headed back west to find Piazza Novona which we kept seeing on the map and wanted to take a look at it.

It was a really neat Piazza! A courtyard almost surrounded by buildings in an oval shape. The streets were lined with artists and venders selling pictures and paintings. We stayed there until it was dark, watching spraypaint artists work away on their art and wandering the Piazza. Rome is beautiful at night! The street lights are gold against an otherwise completely black night and especially along the Fiume Tevere you can see jut how gold the city is at night.

That's all for the first day, we had hit many more monuments and took many pictures though these were the big things we had seen!! I've gotten a little obsessed with feeding the pigeons over by the Duomo (I learned they're just as tame here as in Assisi when they want to be) so I've been outside a lot hanging out with the birds and sketching them while they flutter up to my sketchbook thinking I have more food for them than I do :) Second update will come soon!

I'm only uploading this one for the birds flying around!!