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!!

Assisi

Ciao, ognuno! I dropped Elizabeth off at the airport yesterday, but I still haven't written much about what we did while she was here!! It's about time I did that, starting with the beautiful Assisi!

Just for fun I'm including a map of Assisi. The town is very, very small. In fact we could walk from one end to the other in practically no time at all, that is, if you don't get distracted along the way! Assisi is like a little castle town; the streets own the same (or at least very similar) architecture as when it was originally built, old stones and brick paving the pathways and building the walls. The entire city was surrounded by a wall, containing it in the otherwise mountainous region. It was stunning, the views from anywhere in the city were gorgeous, you could see planes and farmland and forest all intertwined into the hills.

We stayed in a hotel right next to Piazza S. Chiara on the Eastern side of town. It was so easy to wander the city because you could always find your way back to the main roads due to how compact it was. Being built in the mountains, a lot of the roads sloped upward, giving you a great view not only of the mountains around Assisi but also of the city itself! 

Despite being one of the most religious towns in Italy, it looks like it relies heavily on tourism--though not in a way that could be described negatively! It was very modest and the religious aspects of the city, the churches, the priests, the nuns, and of course the history, intertwined easily with the sweet little storefronts and hotels that lined the city roads.

One of my favorite parts of Assisi was getting to feed the pigeons there!! The pigeons were incredibly tame and would fly up to your hand to eat right out of it. It was a blast, we had run into a woman doing just this and she was kind enough to give me a bit of the bread she was feeding them to try it myself!

The largest cathedral in Assisi is Basilica di S. Francesco which of course Lizabeth and I had to see. It is on the far west of town, just on the edge of the city so the view behind it was impeccable! There were many other churches of course, though this is the most famous and we stuck to touring this more than the other smaller ones. Although we did pop our heads into a few others just to see what they looked like!

The inside of the cathedral was beautiful and as you pass through the inside portion, you reach a small courtyard that was wonderfully architectured with archways and sweet little hallways leading to other parts of the church.

This was just outside the city walls!

How I said this was like a little castle town? It wasn't just because of the old brickwork and stone pathways that resembled medieval castles... There were actually castles on the north end of town far up in the mountains! There were two, Rocca Maggiore and Rocca Minore, as their names describe: a larger castle and a smaller. We hiked up to Rocca Maggiore and it was absolutely worth the hike!!! (It wasn't much of a hike, more of a trek through the outskirts of the city and through the northern end! Easy-peasy!)

The castle was extremely well preserved!! It actually felt like you were walking through a medieval castle... There were little corridors and holes in the wall that were open to the public, long, dark hallways like secret passages that lead to lookout towers, it was amazing!! Now that I think about it, I can't recall if anything was actually blocked off from the public. Despite being the larger of the two castles, it was still very small and not easy to get lost in! It was great to see.

Not to mention the views from the top of the tower!!!

That's all I'll say for Assisi as there is too much to put into words ;) I believe I continue saying this for all of my posts, but everywhere I've gone has been too spectacular to truly be able to write out adequately! Perhaps Italian would do it more justice!