Val D'Orcia

Last Friday was our very last field trip for the semester. We took a bus through the Tuscany countryside and saw Val D'Orcia and Pienza. It was a pretty long day, and the weather was really rainy and foggy the whole time, which was a bummer. Our stops were Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore, Sant' Antimo--where we saw a Gregorian Chant in person, and then Tempio di San Biagio. I tried my hardest to take a few reasonable pics despite the rain, and they are posted, so feel free to have a look!! We're all trying our hardest here to not get too overwhelmed in our last week in Orvieto... It has been the most intense and exciting semester ever. I'll have one more blog entree I'm sure before we leave this beautiful town.

A Day of Modern Rome

Wednesday, April 21, 2010::My seminar took a day trip to Rome to see modern architecture. As much fun as ancient Roman Cathedrals are, it was nice to throw in some different sights. It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day. We went to Parco della Musica first, an auditorium by Renzo Piano. Here, we got a tour of the entire complex by a lady architect, which was very cool! Then we headed to the Maxxi Museum by Zaha Hadid; the exterior of this is finished, but the inside is not yet completely set up so the building is gated off. So we basically walked around it for a bit and tried our hardest to take photos over/through the gate. This was difficult for me, as I am a midget. Then we went to our last stop, the Ara Pacis Museum by Richard Meier. I like this very much and loved to photograph this building, but apparently it's a very controversial one throughout Rome because it houses a 2000+ year old Roman memorial for St. Augustan--"Alter of Peace", and many don't agree with the modern architecture that Richard Meier brought this piece. After sitting around this building for a while, Alyssa, Carrie and I stayed in Rome until later that evening and went to Piazza Navona, the Spanish Steps, and an Indian Restaurant that was basically in the Indian ghetto of Rome. Piazza Navona is awesome in the spring time, it's just so alive and entertaining. There was a band that marched through, and a countless amount of artists displaying all their work to purchase. The Spanish Steps were awesome, it was my first time seeing them, and they were covered in beautifully colorful flower pots that are only there for the month of May!! So pretty. And the Indian restaurant... well, I was scared for my life for the brief walk there, but no worries, we lived to tell about it. We took a 9:45pm train ride back to Orvieto and decided to get individual mini bottles of champagne for the ride home to celebrate..life. :) Thursday was our last Italian class for the semester! It's crazy. I've enjoyed studying Italian more so much this semester. That's all for now. I'll write about last Friday--our last field trip for the semester--later.

So much going on

So this past week was overwhelming, and I feel like I need to gather my thoughts/life before I explain what's going on in these last few weeks of living and traveling in Italy... But I just posted pictures to picasa so I figured I'd write a small jaunt for now to let readers know that the explanations are coming! Here's some random previews...

Latest Field Trip

This past Friday, our class took our second to last field trip of the semester (sigh) to Tivoli and walked Villa d'Este, Hadrian's Villa, and a suburb of Rome to see Richard Meier's Jubilee Church. I think this was a day high up on my list of trips we've taken.. It was definitely one of my favorite field trips of the semester. Tivoli is such a cool little town, although I thought it was surprisingly touristy.. Villa d'Este was not what I expected. (Let's be real, I'm not a landscape architect...) But it was stunning! Everything was so green, and the flowers were so colorfully vibrant--gorgeous!! I took a TON of pictures... Hadrian's Villa was really cool to walk around, also surprisingly pretty. It's always so amazing to see any ruins and imagine what it all looked like thousands of years ago when it was all occupied. Then Jubilee Church... well, what is there to say about that one except Richard Meier. It was one of the few modern architectural sights we've been to in Italy, and it was verrry cool. Basically, it was a very long, but very fun day. When we got back to Orvieto, my roommates and I raced around town to get fixins for a small dinner party we threw that night for our British neighbor Hazel. That was a fun night! Okay, that's all I've got for now. Ciao!

Overdue Update..

So I suppose I haven't updated this since we got back from spring break... Things got a little crazy when we got back from our travel madness. Our second project was due a week after we got back, so we were all working madly that week to finish. And our presentations all went well! (I think.) And our crits were on a Monday, and the entire rest of the week was a celebration... The group of k-staters studying in Santa Chiara came that Wednesday to visit Orvieto, and so that was fun to see all of them! Two boys studying in Germany this semester were visiting us that week also. And then two of our friends studying in Prague this semester came and stayed with us for one night that week while traveling through Italy! This is all the week before Easter, by the way. We went to Caprarola and Villa Lante a week before Easter weekend-that was a fun field trip! It was beautiful. The Friday and Monday of Easter weekend we had no classes. And this past Friday we went to Siena, which was awesome. That city is very cool, similar in a lot of ways to Orvieto. It was a beautiful sunny day and we basically spent the afternoon laying in the Campo! Fantastic. I'll post pics soon!! I can't believe the semester is almost over. We have less than a month left her in Orvieto, then I'll be off with my roommies to Barcelona + Paris for a week. Then the Pinks arrive. yay :):)

Spring Break + Preceding

The last two weeks have been the most eventful of my life. They consisted of a short class trip to northern Italy, followed by spring break. So for the sake of this blog, any readers, & my fingers, I'm going to sum up the highlights with as few details as possible.... I spent 13 days + 12 nights living out of a backpack traveling through 3 European countries on a total of 21 trains & more than a dozen buses/subways/railways, stayed in 6 hotels/hostels, ate many of my meals out of a Coop (grocery store) shopping bag, took a few short of 1000 pictures, & experienced buildings and places I've been dying to see for years. The first 4 days--starting on March 9--our class went to Verona, Vicenza & Venice. I loved these cities so much. THINGS we saw: Castelvecchio Museum (by Carlo Scarpa), Juliet Capulet's house and famous balcony, the ancient Verona Arena, Villa Rotonda (by Andrea Palladio), a cemetery by Carlo Scarpa, Doge's Palace, San Marco + Piazza, Frari Basilica (one of my favorites), Rialto Bridge, San Giovanni e Paolo, Santa Maria dei Miracoli. After the class trip ended, Saturday the 13th our spring break officially began. It was the craziest, busiest, greatest, most travel-packed week ever imaginable! I spent the week with 4 other kstaters, and after Venice we traveled to Milan, and Chur & Lugano Switzerland. Aside from seeing, sleeping in, and traveling to & from those 3 cities, we took day trips throughout the week to: Padua(Italy), Zurich(Switzerland), Vals(Switzerland), & Ronchamp(France)..OH what we saw.... In Padua: a 9/11 Monument, the University, Cafe Pedrocchi. In Milan: the grand train station, an A.C.Milano Futbol game, the Duomo, a large 'City Life' project (currently in the process of being constructed) by Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind + others. So, similar to how I gushed about seeing St. Peter's, the Duomo in Milan is #2 on my love list; we spent 2 1/2 hours on the top of that beauty. And the soccer game.. well, it was by far the funnest sporting event I've ever been to. Those Italians love their futbol! We all bought Red A.C.Milano scarves to represent... we still looked American. Ronald Dhino & David Beckham played; Milan scored in the last minute of the game to win 1-0; and Beckham ((sigh)) tore his achilles tendon (?), now has to have surgery, and we may very well have seen him play his very last professional game of his life... After Milan, well, we traveled and saw: the teardrop chapel (San Benedetg) by Peter Zumthor, the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) building, the Thermal Baths in Vals by Peter Zumthor (most relaxing 7 hours of my life!), Notre Dame du Haut by Le Corbusier. Other than all these highlights, every single city we went to was outrageously gorgeous. I have a ton of pictures, like I said, and I'll upload them asap!!

Assisi + Rome-again

Alright, this entry may be a novel.... Friday we took a field trip to Assisi. What is there to say about this city, it was beautiful. The weather was kinda rainy and seriously windy at one point in the day, but other than that it was nice and the sky looked, well, awesome. ((I've formed a new obsession for clouds, don't ask.)) We saw the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi, as well as many other churches, buildings + piazzas in the small town. There was so much that Marco had to say throughout the day, it was very cool. And the bus ride there and back was gorgeous, I'll post pics I took from that part too. Soo then comes my favorite part yet.... Saturday morning, my roommates and I all decided to get up early and take a train to Rome for the day to see the Vatican, Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's. And okay, I've been just dying to see the Basilica of St. Peter's in person for years now, so needless to say I was more excited than I've been in, well, years. I had dreams about it the night before.. anyways. We got to Rome at a little before 9am and we went straight to the Vatican Museum first and spent hours walking through it. (The 5 of us kinda split up cuz 2 of the girls were staying the night, so it was just myself, Brooke and Alyssa the whole day.) We finally got to the Sistine Chapel after going through a maze of museums, I swear we were starting to wonder if the place actually existed it took so long. But it was packed with people like you wouldn't believe. Unfortunately photography wasn't allowed inside the chapel. But we stayed and stared for a bit, and our necks hurt upon leaving. And at that point it was about one o'clock, we were supposed to meet up with the other girls at 2, so we kinda hung out outside for a bit before going to our meeting place-St. Peter's. By the way, it was 60 degrees and amazingly sunny and gorgeous outside all day. (Basically I was just in shock the entire day.) So we started to walk to St. Peter's, and I couldn't really breathe the whole way there. I could (did) take as many photos as I want of this and every other amazing building but when it comes down to it, nothing's gunna be as good as when you see it in person. This applies to everything I've seen here so far. So I'll just say that seeing St. Peter's was a dream come true. We wanted to see the Basilica at around 5pm when it's starting to get dark outside, so once we took a few (a ton for me) photos, we got some lunch, went back to Piazza Navona and the Pantheon for a second time, basically just walked around Rome enjoying the afternoon for a bit, and then headed back to St. Peter's at 5. Here's where it started getting a little crazy... We got back to St. Peters and went inside where there was a mass in session, (and oh my heavens, the interior is just as spectacular..) and we figured we'd stay until 6pm cuz we had a train to catch at 7. Once we got inside, however, all 3 of us realized that it was actually 6pm at that time and not 5pm like we thought...?! Not sure how we forgot how to read time and lost an hour. We also realized once inside that the mass that was in session was a 'special ceremony', as the guards told us, and they weren't sure when the church was closing. So we figured we'd hustle through the inside, take as many photos as possible, and head to the train station to catch the LAST train back to Orvieto for the night... We went toward the papal alter & the baldacchino, where mass was being held to take more photos, and we're still not sure what the special service was about, but we may or may not have seen the pope while we were there. Yeah, we're not exactly sure. So we left & started booking it toward the subway station to take us to the train station, and when we got to the ticket machines, they brought up No Seats Available for our 7pm train... So us 3 are thinking we're stuck in Rome for the night, but we got in the very long line to ask an assistant just in case, frieking out the whole time by the way, and when we finally got to the front we asked the very kind old worker man if he spoke English (cuz at this point we were all so frustrated and grumpy that we didn't even want to try speaking Italian) and he told us to try Italian. So I spat out some Italian phrase asking if it was possible for us to get back to Orvieto that night, and he found a train that left an hour later that stopped there. We were so relieved we were able to go home since for a while we thought we'd be roaming the city of Rome all night long until the first train in the morning left!! So yeah, we had the longest day of our lives, we went home after one incredibly successful day, and that is the end of this entirely-too-long story.