SPQR Fellowship

To start, we owe you a couple days of pictures and sketches!

I am actually going to start by saying that we made it back to Minneapolis after a long, long day of traveling. I am glad to be home. There is something about coming home to Minnesota that is as exciting as venturing off to other countries to explore different cultures – comfort I guess. This intro is a procrastination of sorts. I know the trip is over, i’m sitting in my own living room, but wrapping it up on the blog is the ‘period’ to our adventure. My hope now is that our stories and experiences in Italy will inspire those around us to embark on similar travels – that has, after all, been our goal all along. So I think what I’ll do as the sign-off to our section of the SPQR blog is to recap some of my favorite moments of the trip including some that really helped to give me a sense of life in Italy and specifically in Rome as well.

Most generally, my favorite part of this trip was all of the new things Dave and I were able to experience that we hadn’t on our last visit to Italy. I like to see as much as I can of new places and things so the more new things the better! The list is very long on what this actually includes so I’ll give a few examples. 1 – Ostia Antica, and generally more ruins in Rome. Ostia Antica was cool because it was like a playground as ruins go. Barely anything was blocked off so climbing on the ruins and walking within them was allowed and we had a lot of fun doing it.  I really liked seeing more ancient history explained as well. Clues to ancient times are often buried until a group of people feels the urgency to unearth it. The people of Rome are proud to share the history beneath them with visitors like me. 2 – Giving Florence a chance. The first time we were in Italy, Florence was a very abbreviated stop due to various timing issues. This time Florence was an important first stop and I’m really glad for that. Seeing the David, climbing the Duomo, residing right in the middle of the city center – these are some of the highlights from our stay. 3 – Venice was entirely new to me and completely worthwhile. A city on the water – fascinating. I continue to think about the effort that the citizens must put in to dealing with the Aqua Alta – where only the building facades show evidence that the salty sea has a less than positive effect on life there.

Getting the answers to our daily questions was another part of the trip that I really enjoyed. Constantly questions would come up that we couldn’t as a group answer, so they would be stored away in our brains for nightly wiki-fari’s. Information is at the tip of our fingers using the internets and our group was curious to have all questions answered before starting the next day. I think this really allowed us to pack in as much knowledge on many different things during the day knowing that later that night we would be able to get the story on everything that was not immediately presented.

Another extremely important part of my time in Rome was when David and I would stop for periods of time to take in, through sketch, what we were seeing. Not only did those sketch moments allow us to rest our running feet, but we slowed down enough to consider the architecture. We were slowed enough to represent the architecture through drawing and throughout our time drawing make observation of the people around us – to get a sense of other people’s experience of the space.

A couple very specific events that stand out in my memories are the Panda moving and the choir in Sienna. That was a good day in Sienna! The boys moving the Fiat Panda was probably one of the funniest things that happened on our trip. It is a good thing that small cars are the way to get around on the road otherwise that may not have happened at all. Other funny car things to note: we saw multiple smarts cars corner backed into a parallel parking spaces (they were perpendicular to the larger cars), Italians making up their own parking spaces in the middle of the roads, smaller cars might make people drive more crazily. The Sienna Cathedral choir performance was a pretty cool experience to get to witness. I was so impressed by them and the building being able to take their voices and project them – very cool.

When walking around Rome, I couldn’t help but to spot every instance of ‘SPQR’ all across the city. It was kind of fun – a little distracting because I just couldn’t stop! 🙂 Kelly’s last post from her trip I think put this in my head as something that I wanted to look out for. I didn’t realize that it would consume my mind so effectively. She had noted that this has been a banner of sorts since ancient times all the way to now. I kept seeing ‘SPQR’ and thinking about it as the banner that marked the services to the people of Rome and those of us visiting. A label that announces that someone is keeping the lights on in the dark of night, the water running and clean, the streets clean, public transportation running, historic sites preserved and ready for thralls of tourists. It is a symbol that unifies the city

We witnessed a lot of other cool examples of communities coming together to make thing happen. In Rome – Critical Mass – the mass of bikers filling Via dei Nazionale, coming together in an effort to bring safer bike ways to the people of Rome. Many times we saw shop workers working with each other to come up with change when all we had to give them were 50 euro bills. Even the street vendors worked together in an effort to move their product. We never really figured out what kind of network was going on between them, but we saw vendors on phones communicating location of polizia so they knew to get out of the area if any were near by. In Venice we saw many guys with illegal knock off bags sprinting down the street… Cinque Terre showed the most amazing community togetherness. I didn’t write about Cinque Terre originally. I had been there two years ago, before the mudslides. I remember the color, the bustle of happy people, the paradise that is Cinque Terre. The hotel we had stayed in two years ago was totally gutted along with many other shops coming into Monterosso al Mare. The devastation of the mudslides made this visit particularly hard for me. I did enjoy the hiking we did and the rental lady we worked with, the sea always visible, and the random cat roaming around, but I couldn’t get out of my mind the memories of what the towns had been like before. The thing that kept my spirits up was the way in which we could see the people working so hard to get the towns back to that place. We were told how the surrounding towns of Cinque Terre had taken in residents left homeless by the mudslides and how people were volunteering their time to make things right again. It was good to see the strength of that community.

The last favorite thing I’ll leave you with, because I could go on and on, is how Dave and I sought out all of Borromini’s work. I think I will plan to do an additional post just on this to really finish things off, but for now I can say that I really enjoyed this time with Dave. Some of the sites we visited without the others and I liked having that time with my best friend to really be able to take in the work of that Baroque genius. I would have liked to have shared all of the spots with the others, but I think it worked out to show them our sketches and pictures.

Look forward to a final post about all of our Borromini visits and pictures from the last few days!