Pillar #15: Romans are a superstitious people--at least when it comes to soccer

This will be short because I'm procrastinating and should really get back to my studio work, but Sunday night, we went to the Roma v. Lazio soccer match. For my first European soccer game, I have to say it was really great, and it was really nice to do something unrelated to architecture or urbanism for once!
I may have mentioned this before, but Lazio is the region in which Rome is located, so basically, it's a rivalry along the lines of Georgia-Georgia Tech or Georgia-Florida football. The only difference is that die-hard Roma and Lazio fans are even crazier that American football fans, which I never really thought possible.
We arrived at the Stadio Olimpico (the 70,000+ seat arena which was the site of the 1960 Olympics) around 6:10 pm for the game, which was to start at 6:30. It was eerily quiet and empty walking up to the stadium, but when we got there, it was apparent that most people were already in the stadium, cheering, chanting, and singing their Italian "fight" songs. When we got in the stadium, there was a very clear divide between the maroon of Roma and the light blue of Lazio, and at midfield was the press area on one side and a completely empty section on the other side. We were informed that that is sort of the "no-man's land" where people only buy tickets to fight with the opposing team's fans, and sure enough, we were not disappointed. A few minutes before the game started, people began rushing into that section and quickly started throwing punches, but they were pretty quickly subdued by the security. The section remained empty the rest of the game--kind of a waste of the best seats, if you ask me. (We were quite far from this section, so there was no real danger for us.)


When we got to our seats, we realized that there were already people sitting in them, but they made room for us. An English speaking Italian behind us informed us that the guy in our seat HAD to stay there because he sat there all season and Roma hadn't lost a game yet, so Claire, Huaxia and I squeezed into two seats for the first half. Lazio scored pretty quickly into the game, so our section was pretty subdued for the rest of the first half. During halftime, Huaxia got up to take some pictures and decided to just sit in the aisle for the start of the second half. Roma quickly came back, scoring two goals on penalty kicks, and our section instantly came alive. The chanting, which as far as we could tell was led by a few random gesturing people at the bottom of the stands rather than by loudspeakers or a band, became even louder, and after each goal, there was a lot of jumping and thrashing around. At one point, Huaxia came back to sit with us, and a few things happened. Previously, Claire and I were sitting with Huaxia between us, since she was the smallest. When she came back though, Huaxia sat to one side of us. Immediately, the guy behind us told her that she HAD to sit in the middle because we couldn't just change seats around like that. Huaxia returned to the middle seat, at which point the couple back on the aisle started objecting. Huaxia couldn't back with us because Roma didn't score at all while she was sitting there in the first half but they scored twice while she was sitting in the aisle, so she HAD to move back to the aisle. Huaxia agreed, reluctantly, and she returned to the aisle with a hero's welcome and offers for free beer and snacks.


The game ended without Lazio scoring again, so, of course, the Roma section went wild, and we were informed that we HAVE to come back next Sunday and sit with them again. We didn't have the heart to tell them we'd be finishing up our work in studio, and that they'd just have to go on without us. I certainly hope Roma wins again though.

Pillar #14: Wide street + tall buildings + no trees + diesel engines = Unpleasant Street

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I've been expending my writing energies on several papers due at the end of the semester. As of today, I am done with two of my classes- one completely and one I have to finish a paper, and then of course we have our studio presentation a week from Monday. Almost done!

It occurred to me that with all of my travels, I've neglected to write much about some of the cool stuff I've done in Rome, the best of which was visiting St. Peter's Basilica, the seat of the Catholic Church in the Vatican City. We actually waited until mid-February to go for the first time, mostly because Claire has never been to Rome before, and I wanted to make sure she saw plenty of other stuff first. St. Peter's is so incredibly breathtaking that everything else seems pretty insignificant by comparison. It was designed in multiple phases by some of the greatest architects in history and became a model for future Renaissance and Baroque churches throughout Italy and Europe.

The original basilica (Side note: Basilica comes from the word for Roman law courts that were located in the forum and could be entered from all sides. Early Christian churches adapted the same basic plan but you could only enter from one of the short sides on axis with the center.) was begun by the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century over the supposed site of the tomb of Peter, therefore literally making Peter the rock on which the church was built. After centuries of deterioration and instability in the church, Pope Julius II decided to demolish the old basilica and begin rebuilding new St. Peter's. Starting with the plan for a centralized church by Bramante, successive Popes for more than 100 years enlisted Michelangelo, Giacomo della Porta, Domenico Fontana, Carlo Maderno and Gianlorenzo Bernini to complete the church and the colonnaded piazza in front.


Knowing what talent went into building St. Peter's made the climb to the top of the dome all the better. The first glimpse we got of the vast interior was from the circular walkway ringing the dome where we were able to peer down on the the high altar and the many small people below. From there, we entered the dome and climbed between the two structural shells (not for the claustrophobic or the faint of heart) towards the top. The cupola is roughly the size of a tiny, circular church designed by Bramante to mark what was thought to be the spot of the crucifixion of St. Peter, the Tempietto, which happens to be around the corner from my apartment. (St. Peter was crucified upside down because he felt he was not worthy to be martyred in the same manner as Christ. Similarly, St. Andrew was crucified on an X-shaped cross.) From there, we were able to get an amazing 360 degree view of the city from its tallest point, and thankfully, it was an unseasonably warm, sunny, and clear day.

As I mentioned before, St. Peter's is not a cathedral, because the seat of the bishop of Rome (the Pope) is actually at St. John the Lateran on the opposite side of town. This became significant during the Middle Ages when a new pope was coronated because he would have to process through town from St. Peter's to the Lateran to complete the process. We've been talking about this papal procession route in class as a kind of armature through the city where property owners often dressed up their property not only to make the route more formalized, but to emphasize their importance in the hopes of gaining lucrative positions in the new administration. Churches along the route also dressed up their facades, added bell towers, etc. so that you get a series of visual cues that lead you along what would otherwise be just another curvy street. The procession is very visually and symbolically rich, starting at the Vatican and going past the fortress Castel Sant' Angelo, over the "Bridge of the Angels" by Bernini whose angels bear the instruments of the crucifixion, past the Bank of the Holy Spirit (the Vatican bank), up to the Capitoline Hill to the Campidoglio, down through the Roman Forum through two triumphal arches, past the Colossum, and onward south to the Lateran.

They don't do this anymore (not really sure why...), and during the 19th century, a more modern road, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, was put in that parallels and eventually connects to the old route to the Campidoglio. It is one of the few roads in central Rome that is pretty similar to a typical American city street--four lanes, wide sidewalks, 4-5 story buildings fronting it--yet for some reason, it is incredibly unpleasant to walk down. This made waiting in line for an hour and a half to get into the Palazzo Massimo on March 16th even more painful.

This palazzo is one of the more famous in Rome because it was built on the foundations of a Roman theater and therefore has a curving facade. In order to have a symmetrical facade, the oldest Massimo actually had to buy a small piece of his younger brother's property. The palazzo is open to the public for free once a year to commemorate the miraculous recovery of one of the Massimo children during the 16th century, and they were having a mass in the chapel while people were touring the house. It was a bit of a let down because you could only see certain rooms in the house, but still cool to say we've been (at least among other architecture nerds).

I hope there will be time for more updates before I head to the UK and Ireland in a couple of weeks. We've done lots of great stuff and a few more day trips, so I will do my best.

Pillar #13: Romans apparently have no concern for March Madness (Veneto/Tuscany Trip Part IV)

Finally, we come to Siena, the de facto climax of our trip due to its location on the long road back to Rome and its complexity within a seemingly simple y-shaped city. Our first order of business was to head to the Campo, the central market and governmental piazza of Siena, and one of the most remarkable public spaces in the world. The city is formed from three neighborhoods at the top of three ridges that merged at a bowl, which eventually became the Campo. It is less like a piazza and more like an outdoor theater due to its shape and orientation towards city hall, which acts as the stage. After a quick walk we got dinner at a restaurant with no menu aside from the owner who rattled off some pasta and meat in Italian, and I ended up with a great dish consisting of a local, fat spaghetti called “pici” with wild boar sauce.

The last day of our trip was finally a beautiful day with highs near 60 degrees, so I left behind several of my usual layers, gloves, and scarf and we headed out to explore the town. Claire and I covered almost the entire town before breaking for lunch in the Campo and climbing the 400 steps of the Campanile to see an amazing view of the town and miles of surrounding countryside. (Florence, you have some explaining to do…)

The best part about Siena was that it felt like a real town and not just a stop on the tour of Italy. Sure, there are the main shopping streets and Campo that attract tourists. I mentioned that the Campo tends to act like a theater, and with a large market on the upper slope plus performers on stilts, jugglers, etc. putting on a show it did just that. The subtle slope makes it very easy to sit, and many were taking advantage of the warm sun by doing just that. We also visited the Duomo at the highest point in the center of town and the three or four other large monastic churches on the edges of town that like Pisa connect physically and symbolically to the landscape. In addition to these larger, more populated areas, there are also smaller, quieter neighborhoods on the ridges where there are families, smaller churches, schools, and other essential community functions. Historically, these were easily identified by the 17 Contrada, or wards, within the city that participate in the annual Palio di Siena. This is the horse race that takes place around the upper part of the Campo which is still a point of great neighborhood pride. If you’ve seen the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, the opening chase scene ends in Siena during the Palio.

After spending most of the day in Siena, we finally departed for Rome, and were back home around 8:30 pm after the grocery stores were closed. As you can probably imagine, we had little food in the house, and oddly enough, when we went down the hill Sunday afternoon around 1:30 to get groceries, we discovered that all the grocery stores were closed. Determined to find a grocery store and encouraged by the sudden burst of beautiful spring weather (the only March Madness I’ve noticed has nothing to with basketball and everything to do with Romans being out and about in large numbers when the sun is out), we walked into town and finally found an open grocery store. It would seem that Roman Sundays are the opposite of the US, as things are open in the morning and closed afternoons. Also unlike the US, there are plenty of other things besides certain fast food restaurants that shall not be named that are closed all day.

I will get pictures up as soon as I am able, but for now, it's back to the grind...

Pillar #12: Americans appreciate spontaneous organ recitals just as much as the next Florentine (Veneto/Tuscany Trip Part III)

I wrote these posts as we drive in the car (we are back in Rome, by the way), so that’s why they’re a bit longer and more detailed than normal. Also, it’s why I may have jumped the gun a bit when I gave the Venetians credit for the near perfect shower. As it turns out, it seems that most of northern Italy has their act together when it comes to showering, and I can’t tell you how great it is since I have to take a bath everyday in Rome. (Yes, you get to sit down which is nice, but it is otherwise inconvenient.) It’s especially good coming from Bruges where the clearance in the shower was six feet, but these are the quirks you have to deal with when staying in an old retrofitted building in Europe. Sometimes the showers have a (mostly) water-tight door; sometimes it’s just a curtain and a floor drain. Sometimes you have a door of normal height; sometimes you have a six-foot tall door on which you hit your head not once or twice, but five times. For some reason, you always get a bidet. That I will never understand.

When I last posted, we were heading to Lucca, and it was incredibly slow going over the mountains. We didn’t quite beat the snow, and when we stopped for a quick bathroom break, there was already an inch and a half on the ground after only 30 minutes. We made it over the mountains eventually, and soon the only white mountains we saw were near Carrera, where most of the white marble in Italy is mined. (When Caesar Augustus transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble, he was primarily using Carrera marble.)

We arrived in Lucca with enough time to take our customary walk through town before dark and eat dinner. This stop was pretty uneventful aside from two things. First, my hotel room was covered from floor to ceiling in floral wallpaper, curtains, and bed linens. It felt like I was sleeping in someone’s grandmother’s house, or maybe Wonka Land. Second, I had fried chicken and vegetables (the house specialty) for dinner. The vegetables were tempura fried, but the chicken, aside from the lack of salt, was pretty dang close to home. I didn’t know the Luccese had it in them.

After Lucca, we headed to Pisa for a brief stop. When I visited five years ago, I was actually surprised to learn that in addition to the leaning tower, there was actually a cathedral, baptistery, cemetery, and a whole town, in fact. Since we made the long walk across town from the train station last time, I was relieved when we skipped the town and drove straight for the edge where the cathedral is located. I couldn’t quite think of the words to describe it last time—the green grass, the sparkling white marble of the buildings, the blue cloudless sky, and the location on the very edge of town in an open area overlooking the mountains beyond—but one of the benefits of going to a Catholic university is that they can give you the religious significance of everything. The Pisans were literally trying to create a City of God on the earth when they isolated the sacred precinct at the edge of the city and gave it a strong connection to nature, much in the way the Athenians did with the acropolis (although not literally elevated above the city). The Florentines may have the biggest cathedral, but in my opinion, the Pisans have the grandest in Tuscany.


Speaking of Florence, that was our next stop, and it was fortunately a longer one. Our hotel was literally in the center of town, located on the old Roman Decumanus (the primary east-west street) and about a block from the Forum, now the Piazza della Repubblica, so we were basically surrounded by all of the important buildings and spaces we visited. We were mostly left to explore on our own during the two days, so Claire and I tried to make the most out of our time, visiting the Uffizi Gallery (formerly the offices of the Medici family who ruled Florence during the Renaissance, now an art gallery), Santa Croce (uncertain) and the Pazzi Chapel (Brunelleschi), San Lorenzo (Brunelleschi) and the Lauretian Library (Michelangelo), and doing our individual sketching assignments before and after lunch.

At two, we met up with the group to drive to nearby Settignano to see the gardens of the Villa Gamberaia. This was a nice change to get off into the rural landscape where there are olive groves and vineyards and incredible countryside all within sight of the city. The view from the terrace off the front of the house had an incredible view of Florence (even more so once the sun peeked out for a moment as it was setting), and the gardens were very elaborate, with a formal garden off the side of the house, a long grass “bowling green,” as the called it, running the full length of the property, several grottos, two “boschetta,” or oak groves, and an orange/lemon grove and orangerie where the trees are moved during the winter (and as we’ve seen, yes it does snow in Tuscany, even in March).

If you’re going to spend money on food in Italy, I highly suggest doing it in small towns off the beaten path (Spello, for instance) or in Tuscany, because first, it’s already much cheaper than say Rome or Venice anyway, and second, it’s just better than anywhere else I’ve been (Neapolitan pizza aside). In Florence, I had spaghetti with tomato, cream, and butter sauce (just cover all the bases), really good grilled swordfish, jumping ahead a bit, I also had a really good fat spaghetti called pici with wild boar sauce, which, following a common theme, had tiny little bones that I had to pick out of my mouth. After dinner, Claire and I were walking around and as we approached our hotel, we heard organ music that at first was a bit unnerving, but as we rounded the corner, we realized it was coming from the church across the street. Supposedly Dante’s church (before he was given the boot from Florence) was having a free, and quite incredible for the 40 minutes we sat there listening, organ recital with donations going to restore the bell tower. Only in Italy.

The next morning it was drizzling and cold—again—so we decided to forgo paying to climb the Duomo and instead hiked to San Miniato al Monte, a church by Alberti high on the hills overlooking the city. What would have been a fantastic view was limited only to the city between us and the center of town because of the clouds, so we missed seeing the hills and surrounding landscape. Afterwards, we quickly walked by the Palazzo Pitti and Santo Spirito on the same side of the river before meeting the group to depart for San Gimignano.

One of my favorite places we visited last semester, San Gimignano is a tiny hill town south of Florence that has been nearly perfectly preserved from the Middle Ages, and it is therefore a pretty big tourist attraction now. The town has one of my favorite sequences of piazzas that we’ve visited (based on my memory from last time), but unfortunately we had several factors working against us—the cold (nothing new), the rain that prevented us from seeing stuff, like the famous towers, above us (nothing new), and the market stalls and tents that were temporarily set up in all of the piazzas. It was more or less productive, but very difficult to get a sense of space when there are tents in your way.

To be continued in Part IV...

Pillar #11: Six is greater than four (Veneto Part II)

Following quite a long walk from our hotel to the bus station to meet Angelo, we bid farewell to Venice and headed to Padua, or Padova as the Italians know it. Padua is very evidently a town of Roman origin as you can see the original castrum, or colony, outlined by a moat and partial remains of the city wall. Because we were staying on the edge of the city, we drove in Sunday night for dinner and a quick walk. We also met up with John and Jen, the married couple in our class, who were sick and had to miss the first part of the trip. (The other four of us had far too much room in the back of the van anyway. We don't want to get spoiled.) Monday morning, we took another early walk through different parts of the town and saw a few churches, and one, San Antonio, was an entire complex comprised of a basilica, chapels, four cortiles, museums, and other church functions. St. Anthony of Padua is a patron saint of traveler (so I’m told), so that was probably a good stop for us to make as we departed for Vicenza.


Vicenza is the home of Andrea Palladio, who designed many buildings in Vicenza and around northern Italy. He also published a book called I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, or Four Books of Architecture, the name of which comes from a long tradition of architectural treatises regarding siting of cities and buildings, design, the Classical orders/columns, proportioning, materials, etc. dating back to Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria or Ten Books of Architecture, the first treatise of the Renaissance which followed Vitruvius’s De Architectura (Ten Books of Architecture) from antiquity, the oldest surviving treatise. Palladio’s book was circulated widely throughout Europe, and it was through his book and other similar books that the Renaissance spread to northern Europe through varying interpretations.Our first stop on Palladio road was another roadside stop at Villa Capra, also known as La Rotunda or Villa Rotunda, one of his most famous villas. Similar to Villa Malcontenta, this villa was set in a picturesque landscape on a canal at the outskirts of a small village near Vicenza. It was a beautiful, cloudless day (still cold), so it made for some great photographs. We stopped at a couple of other villas as well before going into the city, the Villa Valmarana and Villa Thiene. Villas Capra and Valmarana are both privately owned and only open for tours on certain days, but Villa Thiene is located on the edge of a small village and actually functions as its town hall today.


In Vicenza, we were looking forward to seeing some of Palladio’s many buildings, but quickly realized that most of them were closed on Monday. Disappointed, but with many possibilities to see facades and interior courts, we headed into town towards the Basilica, which in this case refers to a row of three buildings that Palladio re-faced and combined to form the town hall for the city, complete with shops on the main level under the arcade and government functions above. Rather than an arcade with single columns (as we saw in Bologna, etc.), he used an ingenious device known as a Serliana, also known as the Palladian motif because of his frequent usage. You’ve probably all seen the pattern in houses everywhere, combining an arch with a column on either side, and then a beam on each side of the arch connecting to another column. The ingenious thing about it is that the outside columns can be shifted farther out and the beam can be lengthened, while the columns supporting the arch remain the same distance apart thereby keeping the arch the same size when using multiple bays of different widths. At the Basilica, for instance, the bays on the sides are about six feet shorter than the center bays, so the two columns on either side of the arch are much closer together. It is barely noticeable unless you look closely because all of the arches are the same height and width. There’s your architectural lesson for the day.


It was interesting to see how effectively good architects can improve the quality of nearly everything else built in the town, not only because of better design but improving construction methods and materials. (This is not necessarily true today because construction materials and methods for modernist buildings are often too complicated and unaffordable for the average client, especially those outside of large cities. In Palladio’s day for instance, everyone used masonry, so everyone benefited from improved quality regardless of whether they were using heavy stone or brick or a Classical or vernacular style.) The palazzo type (Italian urban mansions) that Palladio designed throughout Vicenza is essentially the form of 19th or early 20th century urban buildings with retail on the ground floor fronting the street and residential or commercial uses above (think of the Fred Building in Downtown Athens or the C&S National Bank (Bank of America/Georgia State) Building in Downtown Atlanta). The Palladian palazzo model creates an interesting problem though once the wealthy families move out because the ground floor of his buildings and those he inspired are usually solid masonry with only a wide central door and a passage that connects to a central cortile where the carriages would park. This is pretty anti-urban to have many of these around town because it is essentially a blank wall at the sidewalk, but in Vicenza, they have solved this by putting the shop fronts on either side of the passage leading to the cortile with parking in the cortile itself. Others have created an L-shaped galleria (much smaller version of what we saw in Brussels) that goes through the block from one palazzo door to another. There are somewhat messier versions in Rome where they actually cut a low doorway into the stone base under a window sill and used the entire height of the ground floor plus piano nobile (second, and main floor where the family lived) for the shop. More good lessons learned.

From Vicenza we headed to Verona, where we saw some more great streets, urban spaces, and lots of Juliet balconies, although at times it did feel as though we were going to be blown away by a tempest. Unfortunately, we were not to be in Mantua or the other stops because we had to race over the mountains to Lucca to avoid…you guessed it…a snowstorm. The trip is beginning to feel a bit like a comedy of errors.

Next time, we fast forward to Tuscany.

Pillar #10: Venetians know how to shower. Almost. (Veneto Part I)

We began our trip to the Veneto with our usual 6 am departure. (I suppose those are getting easier.) We’re traveling with our studio professor again who likes to see as many cities as possible (see posts about Umbria and Campania in 6 days total vs Belgium in 8 days) and only knew where we’d be staying each night, so we knew we’d eventually make it to Bologna. We knew it wouldn’t be as simple as just driving straight to Bologna, of course, and we were not disappointed when we stopped in Arezzo after a couple hours on the road, a larger town with a sloping piazza that we studied, followed by two small villages Poppi and Stia before arriving in Bologna just before night fall. I am determined this trip to sketch more 3-D views of buildings rather than just focusing on plans of urban spaces, and so far I’ve been able to do that. (Although, I have to say my sketch from Poppi was a little sloppy.)

Seeing Bologna at night was a bit easier than Naples. It has wider streets, lower buildings, larger piazzas, and much better lighting. Also, it has one of the most unusual features of a city I’ve seen (which we saw in Poppi on a much smaller scale), which is miles of covered loggias lining most of the major streets. I’m not sure of the history, but somehow, everyone started building loggias at the base of their buildings. I suppose that early builders were enticed because they could build into the public right-of-way while allowing the sidewalk to pass below. I was actually kind of hoping for rain for once, because we could have stayed pretty dry walking through town (aside from crossing the streets). For dinner, we were hoping to have some of the famously good Bolognese food (like the Bolognese sauce, similar to what is most common in the US- spaghetti and hamburger meat sauce), and so we used our driver Angelo to use his Italian fluency to lead us to a good, and cheap spot. Unfortunately, we were led not to a Bolognese restaurant, but to a Neapolitan restaurant, so technically we still got a lot of tomato sauce and a pretty good meal, but no Bolognese sauce.

The rain that we missed in Bologna apparently went to Ferrara by mistake, because when we arrived there after leaving Bologna that morning, it felt like we were back in Belgium with cold wind and rainy conditions. We stayed long enough to walk around the Duke’s castle (with a moat!), check out the cathedral and the market in the square next door, and a few other plazas and squares (one that we saw mostly from a coffee shop because it was so cold).
From Ferrara, we continued our trek northward to Venice. The original plan was to take a ferry in so we could approach Venice from the water, just as wealthy Venetians would have done coming from their summer villas in the “suburbs.” We stopped to take pictures in front of the most famous of these near Venice, the Villa Malcontenta by Andrea Palladio, one of the most important architects of the Renaissance. (Unfortunately, we missed the ferry, so we ended up driving into Venice anyway. We did take the vaparetto, or the bus-boat, close to the hotel, so we saw the Grand Canal and the Ponte Rialto (bridge) on the way.)

One of the challenging things about Venice is that it is impossible to get vehicles into the center city because of all the canals and stepped bridges, so we still had to walk and carry bags over stairs a bit. It also makes the service functions of the city much more challenging, and it’s one of the reasons it’s so expensive to do pretty much everything in Venice. Basically, goods have to be brought in by boat, unloaded, and carted to the various stores and restaurants. We even saw people dumping trash into a garbage barge that was stopped in one of the canals. It’s pretty interesting stuff that we really take for granted because it’s something that has been prioritized in modern planning (to the detriment of other functions. Often, service access is planned while public areas are the left over stuff).

I hate to be negative, but I really don’t get all the fuss about Venice. Yeah, they have canals. So does Bruges, which also has trees and doesn’t smell bad. Yeah, they have the guys in funny hats who will row you around the canals, but it’s like 70-80 euros (and did I mention it smells bad?). Frankly, they’ve done a pretty good job at building the city up as this really romantic tourist destination, which is unfortunately all they have as far as industry. This is basically the same impression I got during my last visit as well. Fortunately, they did have the best shower I've come across in my travels so far, and compared to the no shower I have at my apartment, I'm pretty grateful.

Venice does have some really cool public spaces and architecture, which was really the point of the visit anyway. Our first stop was Piazza di San Marco, which is one of the greatest public spaces in the world according to most people you ask. It is one of the largest we’ve been to thus far, and it has one of the most ornate and unique Medieval churches we’ve seen. Venice was basically the only power in Italy for centuries prior to the church growing in Rome and the Renaissance because it reinvigorated European trade after the fall of the Roman empire, and it was heavily influenced by the Eastern Roman empire and later the Byzantine empire, whose capital was in Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey). That is why you get such interesting architectural forms, such as onion domes on top, and also why the church is Romanesque (with round arches), rather than Gothic (pointed arches) like most Medieval churches. The whole interior of the church is covered in incredible gold mosaics, which was common in Byzantine churches and is very well done for the time period.

We went to the top of the Campanile (bell tower) in the piazza and got the full panorama of the city, and afterwards we wandered around for a while looking for food. We basically did the same thing on Saturday, and in addition to finding our hotel from last time, I found the piazza where we had our spontaneous late night art show. We also went to a beautiful mass at San Marco (although again in Italian), and it was really nice because they had all the lights on so you could see the mosaics really clearly.

Sunday was spent with more walks, but this time through areas I did not make it to last time. The coolest was a piazza off the beaten path that is the center of a real Venetian neighborhood. The space itself was great—it was a large, u-shaped piazza with a smaller church in the center, but the coolest part was what was happening inside the church. Around noon, people began slowly streaming out, and we decided to go inside and take a look. About 20 minutes after the service there was a familiar scene—many members of the congregation still in the aisle talking with each other, chatting with the preacher, and tidying up the sanctuary. I can only assume that these families left to go home, eat, and spend their Sunday afternoon together. Some things, it would seem, are universal (appropriate, being that catholic in the general sense means universal). Though we have different church traditions, cities, cultures, and lifestyles, some things are the same even halfway around the globe. In traditional cities, religion tends to become a central focus of the civic life of the community, as is evident in the architectural hierarchy of neighborhoods and towns. In this particular neighborhood, the church is clearly the most important structure (since it is in the middle of the piazza with rounded elements and a tall bell tower), just as in Watkinsville, the Ashford brothers perched their church on a hill, gave it a powerful façade and a tall steeple.

Religion tends to provide a common value system within a community, but as our societies change, however, the architectural framework changes with it. In most Italian cities, church towers remain as the highest structures in town, and the same goes for many small towns in America. However, if you were to put one of these small town churches into the parking lot of a large shopping center, it would be totally lost in the expanse of openness and would really lose its significance among the other mundane elements around it. The sad part is, most suburban churches are doing this exact thing by putting their churches (now jumbo-sized) in the middle of a parking lot, and even making them look like vastly scaled up suburban houses (the large Presbyterian church which is dwarfed by the larger OCHS comes to mind). There is no longer anything special or significant about it because it simply blends in with the rest of the suburban landscape of parking lots and generic buildings. If you compare the two models, the suburban church is essentially a community, but only on Sunday and special events because it is isolated from where parishioners live and work. The church in Venice, on the other hand, is literally the center of the community all week long because the congregation mostly lives, works, and worships together. If you think about larger towns though, like Athens, Atlanta, Chicago, etc., the situation becomes even worse because church towers are literally overshadowed by tall residential and commercial towers, therefore totally upending the traditional hierarchy of cities. So the question that comes to my mind is this: If the character and structure our cities are a reflection of our societal values, what does this say about our priorities?

That’s pretty much Part I of our trip in a rather large nutshell. In Part II – Padua and Palladio, Vicenza and Verona, Mantua and mountain towns.

Pillar #9: Traditional cities actually are fairly easy to navigate

The final stop in our trip to Belgium was a 3-hour layover in Brussels on Monday afternoon en route from Bruges to the Charleroi airport south of Brussels. Four of us decided that we would venture in to the city without any prior knowledge of where we would be surfacing after leaving the train station, but we were mostly just excited that it was warmer and not raining. We consulted the less than informative subway map, and decided that we would try to find the market square, cathedral, and galleria that our professor suggested we see before leaving. After venturing forward only a few blocks, we spotted the side of what appeared to be a significant church and headed towards it. Sure enough, it was the cathedral, perched upon a hill overlooking the historic center. After quickly going inside, we came out of the front doors to see a spire and suspecting it was the market tower, we naturally headed towards it. Before too long we reached another plaza, and came face to face with the entrance to the galleria as we rounded the corner. Most of you probably read "galleria" and think shopping mall, and that would actually be pretty accurate. The only difference is, this galleria, or passage (like massage) according to my professor's urban spatial types (see post 8), is basically one normal street with a roof over it. It was really neat because another open street crossed it towards the middle, and basically passed through the colonnade and continued on. We passed through the galleria and followed the crossing street, only to be presented with a head-on view of the market tower framed by buildings leading into the plaza. Our walk continued on like this, leading us to several other churches, lunch, and eventually back to the train station (with a little help from an occasional street sign). Even if we didn't have signs helping us, chances are pretty good we still would have run into something interesting because that's how traditional cities work.

Quite the opposite was true the time I flew into Orlando for my friend Carol's wedding and was left to the mercy of the public transit system (being too cheap to pay for a cab from the airport out towards Universal Studios). I got off the bus in a pretty touristy area where I thought I could walk 20 minutes to my hotel. Four hours of wandering later including a bit of off-roading with my rolling suitcase, I was still no closer to the hotel, having been blocked by an interstate highway, an overpass with no sidewalks, dead-end streets, and an outlet mall. Finally, I came across a tourist trolley that took me back to the same spot I got off the city bus just in time to catch the last trolley of the evening across the interstate to my hotel. This was with plenty of street signs and maps available, and it still took more than four hours to get a mile and a half. And I can read maps. I figured out the DC metro when I was 10. It just goes to show you how the modern system of planning is just ok for cars (assuming there is no traffic or wrecks or construction), but pretty miserable for everyone else. (By the way, Carol and others may be reading this, so I should add that I had a great time in Orlando other than that!)

That aside, Brussels was pretty neat despite the speed with which we saw it. The sun even came out for the last hour we were there, which was probably the longest we saw it while in Belgium. It was different than Bruges because it was mostly French speaking, where Bruges was predominantly Dutch (which, consequently, is very much like English if you were to speak with your mouth full, or if you were to type quickly without the spell check. Some of my favorite signs from the Antwerp train station were Centraal Station, telefoon, and telegraaf, for example.)

I have finally caught up with my photo uploads to Picasa (now that I am on the next trip to the Veneto and Tuscany!), and I realized I was even farther behind than I though. SO...
Umbria: http://picasaweb.google.com/rsmith31/Umbria
Campania: http://picasaweb.google.com/rsmith31/Campania
Belgium: http://picasaweb.google.com/rsmith31/Belgium

I hope that will keep y'all busy until we're back from Tuscany in a week or so.

Pillar #8: Belgians have a strict no-return policy on umbrellas

I hate to keep harping on food, but it really is one of the best parts of Belgium. Two evenings, our professor took us out on the school and gave us a very generous allowance for food. When you're spending other people's money (or I suppose, indirectly spending my own money), it's easier to take risks and order things you might not otherwise order. The first night, I tried frog legs for the first time (they literally do taste like chicken) in addition to a delicious halibut and pasta dish. The second night, we ventured to De Vlaamsche Pot (The Flemish Pot), a restaurant that our professor had really built up over the week. Their specialty is a Flemish dish called carbonnade, essentially beef stew over frites. We also shared some appetizers, so I got to try some mussels and shrimp cocktail (with tiny, tiny North Sea shrimp). Then with a big house beer, I decided to buck the trend of the rest of my group and try the rabbit carbonnade, and I was certainly not disappointed. Though I spent most of the meal quietly picking tiny bones out of my mouth, it was really great. After that, as if I hadn't eaten enough, I got another Flemish/French specialty, a Dame Blanche (white lady, basically a chocolate sundae with a waffle cookie), for dessert. Commence food coma...

The good news is that we've (still) been walking and getting plenty of exercise. On Thursday, we took a bike ride along one of the main canals to Damme (pronounced Dah-ma), which is a small village about five kilometers from the northeast gate of Bruges. It never actually grew to the full limits of its seven-pointed star shaped walls (now removed leaving a narrow tree-lined canal in its place), so we were able to cover most of the city in about 30 minutes. For comparison, I would guess that if you took downtown Watkinsville, made it more dense, and put it on a river, you'd have something similar. After lunch, we decided to ride farther north to where the canal from Bruges linked up with the main canal leading to the North Sea. Today, these canals are no longer used and have been replaced by a much wider canal running due north from Bruges to a newer port city called Zeebrugge (Sea Bruges), but it's interesting to think that for a time in history, farmers and town people were able to watch the merchant ships from all over the world sailing down the canal past their small town.

The point of our trip was to document what my professor has called “Urban Spatial Types”—essentially streets, avenues, boulevards, squares, plazas, etc. that are found in traditional cities—so we spent Friday doing just that. These are the pieces that also make up historic American cities and towns, such as main streets and courthouse and church squares. In modern planning practice, these are unfortunately reduced to words like “arterial” and “collector” and “highway” that refer simply to automobile traffic patterns rather than the good stuff found in towns and cities, and “space” refers to the area surrounding buildings rather than the area contained by buildings. Savannah is one of the best examples locally that has many of these types. There are several boulevards with planted medians, such as Oglethorpe Avenue, and Bay and Broughton Street would be main avenues, to give two examples (obviously, the given names don't always correspond with my professor's categories). The majority of the smaller roads are either streets or alleys. Each ward has its own square as well. The key to all of this is that there are buildings surrounding all of these spaces, creating the sense that you’re in an outdoor room, and probably one that you’d enjoy being in (at least in Savannah and the other traditional cities I’ve been to). On the other hand, if you’re in the parking lot at the Publix at Butler’s Crossing--the area around the shopping center building between the McDonalds and the Rite Aid--would you want to stay there any longer than necessary? The answer is probably no (unless you’re 17 and it’s a Friday night).

Our last few days were spent in Ghent and Antwerp. The weather was miserable both days (high in 30s/40s and pretty constant drizzle/rain), so we weren't able to do nearly as much as anticipated in either city. Not only that, but Belgium is a pretty windy place in general, so it is rather difficult to keep an umbrella functioning properly. My cheap Martin's umbrella I got in South Bend was already in bad shape, but I had to throw it out after a few days in Bruges because I was down to only 3 of the 6 or 7 metal arms holding the umbrella open. I bought another one at a souvenir-type store which lasted less than 24 hours before inverted became its default position. I finally splurged and got a better one at a department store, though I nearly lost it to the canals during a few gusts. I don't know how the Belgians do it.

In Ghent, our main purpose was to see the Ghent Altarpiece, or The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, in the cathedral. It is an incredible work by brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck, who were part of the group of artists known as the Flemish Primitives because it was prior to the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy. While this is technically true, the 10-panel altarpiece shows a mastery of perspective (although perhaps not as scientific as Brunelleschi and other Italians) and very realistic imagery that represents the pinnacle of Medieval painting. The picture doesn't do it justice really--in reality it's maybe 15 feet wide by 10 feet tall. The altarpiece's history is interesting as well, involving various instances of being saved from fire and Protestants, having pieces sold off and stolen, and being confiscated by the Germans and returned in the Treaty of Versailles. Afterward, we walked around the city a bit, but several of the main squares were a muddy mess because of construction (we got the authentic Medieval experience speed walking through the mud to get to the cathedral in time), so the effort was a bit futile. The trip to Antwerp was a similar story. We just walked around, saw the main market and city hall plaza, went to mass in the cathedral, and decided to head indoors to the Peter Paul Rubens House and Studio Museum. Rubens was one of the great Flemish Baroque artists who painted the altarpieces at the cathedral in Antwerp in addition to a good deal of other well known paintings. Rubens also had the benefit of being successful and appreciated in his lifetime, so his house was rather large and elaborate.

Belgium Part III to come...

Pillar #7: Rome : Wine, pasta, gelato, cappucino :: Bruges : Beer, fries, chocolate, ???

Belgium is great.

Don't get me wrong. I love Rome and Italy in general. But there's something about Bruges that reminds me of home. (I've never been to the motherland aside from my brief weather-related diversion at the beginning of the trip, so stay tuned until May for more on that.) It could be that the food is really, really good, and typically much heartier than Italian food. It's an interesting combination of French and Flemish/German food resulting from their history of being basically a kind of independent Flemish mercantile city-state and later being controlled by the court of Burgundy (Frenchies), so you get a lot more meat-and-potatoes dishes. They call the flat area consisting of northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands the "Low Country," and with it's proximity to the North Sea and connection by canals, there is a lot of seafood in their diet also. Of course, there are Belgian waffles and chocolate abundant on nearly every street, and "frites" or fries available at most restaurants and in the main market square (with many toppings to chose from, including ketchup, mustard, beef stew, and my favorite, mayonnaise).

And there's the famous Belgian beer, which is so pervasive because they drank it as a safer, cleaner alternative to water during the Middle Ages. Yesterday, we took a really fascinating tour of the only remaining brewery in Bruges, the Half Moon Brewery, which makes the Bruges Zot beer (Bruges Joker), and we learned all about the history of brewing in Belgium. There were evidently over 1,000 breweries at one point, and now there are only 125, mostly located outside of cities to have more room. (Don't worry. They still make about 8,000 different beers.) In fact, our tour guide said that even their brewery wasn't large enough to bottle the beer or do some of the other steps, so they relied on outside breweries for help. After 6 weeks in wine country, it has been a great change of pace.

My only complaint so far is the coffee, which is neither that good nor cheap. In Rome, a 1 euro cappucino is standard, and they really have the blend of coffee to milk down. In Belgium though they get a little too 'froo-froo' with their coffee, like putting whipped cream on top, giving you a little cookie or chocolate, serving it on a small wooden tray, and bumping the price up to 2.50 euro, and it's really not all that great. I suppose that is the French influence in an otherwise practical town. (I'm told that many Bruggers don't really care for the French anyway.)

I suspect that practicality is why I have enjoyed Bruges so much. The reason we have come here is because Bruges, unlike most Italian cities, is not built on ancient foundations, nor evolved from heavily religious roots, but it was started as a mercantile port city that eventually grew to be the largest city in Europe for several centuries during the Middle Ages. It serves as a really fascinating link between the Italian Medieval cities we've been studying and American cities. Although it doesn't have main armatures that are as immediately apparent (see earlier posts), it does have many of the same patterns as most of the cities we've seen in Italy--a major market square, a major civic/religious square, multiple churches, winding streets with public spaces interspersed, and a wide mix of uses. One of my favorite differences is the scale of the city (roughly 30,000-40,000 people at its peak), which translates into a much lower city (3-4 stories in the densest parts, 5 stories in the large market square and of course taller for important civic buildings) with wider streets. I haven't confirmed this, but I'm thinking this is due to the fact that these northern European cities don't get as much natural light as southern cities (which has been painfully evident during this rainy, cold trip), so they couldn't put the buildings as close together. So basically you get a city with an overall scale and founding conditions (America being a largely practical mercantile society as well) that is much closer to early American cities. And so, the first trusses in the bridge back to U.S. urbanism are in place.

Pillar #6: Romans will suffer lines, but only at the airport

Last weekend's trip to Campania seems like the distant past after last week's mad rush to complete my first studio project in Rome. What is actually maybe only 4 or 5 days seems to double when you're spending most of your time at a desk while not sleeping regularly, meeting several times with an official from the architectural accreditation board, and being verbally held hostage by various professors before, during, and after the presentation. As it turns out, the fact that my tuition is paying for my housing, transportation, field trips, some living expenses, etc. is less of a perk and more of a way of buying ownership of our lives for the three and a half months. Frankly though, I can't complain too much, because I am learning a tremendous amount and visiting some incredible places along the way.

This is the first of two semesters in my urban design concentration, and our first project was to design our "ideal" city, or more appropriately titled, the city of our imaginations based on Roman and general Medieval European precedent. It has been a fascinating exercise and has opened the door to many new possibilities for urban planning. We applied the lessons I mentioned in my second post and created our own armatures within an imagined landscape, and then filled the city with various other streets, piazzas, squares, civic and religious institutions, housing, etc. While not necessarily my ideal city (I think it's far too early in my learning for me to be making judgments about this), I did learn a great deal and was able to apply various lessons from classes and travel to the project.


Which brings me to Campania, as I'm sure that's why you're actually reading this post. This is the region south of Rome (although sadly not much warmer than Rome) where you can find Naples, and the ruins of Pompei, Herculaneum, Paestum--all places I went during my first study abroad in Rome. This time, however, our trip was a bit more limited and VERY quick. We started Saturday morning with our usual 6 am departure and by 7:30 am, we were climbing a tremendous amount of steps (let's not forget I already climb 125 at least once a day already) to the top of the hill town of Palestrina, a Roman settlement with a large theater complex nestled in the side of the mountain overlooking a valley and another ridge of mountains. (Still in Lazio, and as you can see, in some places the snow stuck around longer.) Later, the Barberini family built a palazzo on top of the theater, creating a curving facade that acts like a set piece unto itself. You can see here the seats of the Roman theater with Palazzo Barberini on top.


After Palestrina it was full speed ahead to Pompei with Angelo, our driver from the Umbria trip, and TomTom leading the way. Pompei is, of course, the ruins of a formerly great Roman port city with Greek foundations destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, and you can see that it still looms ominously over the city.


After Pompei we went to Naples for dinner and a night walk with basically the whole faculty of the Rome program. The undergraduates were there also visiting some of the same places, so we took advantage of some additional professorial perspectives for a few hours. We also got to mingle only briefly with some of the undergrads, but we still only know maybe 3 or 4 by name. The next day we spent a rainy Valentine's Day on the Amalfi Coast, which is across the Bay of Naples and has some of the most incredible landscape I've ever seen. Unfortunately, we missed going to Capri because we missed the earlier boat and would have only had a few hours to explore the island otherwise. We started with half a day in Sorrento, and from there drove southeast and stopped in Amalfi and Ravello, which was higher up in the mountains. The picture is just one of the small towns we saw during the 3 hour drive.


Which brings me to Bruges, where I currently find myself for the first 8 days of my "spring break." One of my professors from the South Bend campus flew over to take us to Belgium for what he refers to as the first week of our fall semester. After a riding in a car, a plane, a bus, and a train (all planned this time, thankfully), we finally made it to Bruges. We flew RyanAir, which is a cheap European airline that gives you the absolute minimum (ie, a seat on the plane with a small carry-on bag) and charges you for anything extra (ie, checking a bag, checking in at the airport, food and beverages on the plane, etc.) There are no assigned seats, so people began lining up about an hour before take off in order to get "good" seats, as if there were actually seats that were different from the usual small, cramped coach seats. This is apparently quite different from normal Roman behavior where, as my professor pointed out, they normally do anything they can to avoid a wait, like when ordering at a cafe or bar, getting on the tram, or taking communion. (The first two I have witnessed. The latter I have not noticed, but it seemed to be the general consensus of the group.) At any rate, we took a bus into Brussels and then hopped on a train to Bruges in time to check into the house we're staying in and take the last bus tour around town. Aside from the cold and rainy weather, I am really loving it so far, and we are moving slowly and really taking in the city. Ahead on the week's agenda: museums, walking around town, day trips to Damme, Ghent, and Antwerp, and of course, a brewery tour.

Pillar #5: Romans find snow even more foreign than Georgians

Before leaving for Rome, people who knew better assured me that it NEVER snows in Rome, that it will be much more moderate than a South Bend winter, etc. etc. So it never crossed my mind that I would be writing a post about snow in Rome until it actually happened last Friday. It was one of the coolest things I have seen in my life.

According to our original schedule, we were not even supposed to be in Rome because we were supposed to leave Thursday for a weekend in Naples and surroundings. The trip had to be shortened because we were supposed to deal with the Italian bureaucracy Friday in order to get permission to stay in and re-enter the country during the time our student visa is valid. Thankfully, that appointment was canceled due to the snow. More to come on Naples in a few days.

As I've mentioned before, I live on top of the Janiculum Hill, so it was snowing pretty hard when we were leaving the apartment to head to our appointment. By the time we made it down the hill it had let up, and by the time we were to school it had stopped. I sat down to work at my desk, and after a while I looked out the balcony doors and noticed that it was snowing just as hard as before, and my first thought was "Pantheon," which, if you don't know, is an ancient Roman temple converted to a Catholic church with a giant hole (or oculus) in the center of the dome. It's been pretty cool to see it raining in there a few times before, but there is nothing like seeing snow flakes swirling around in the sky above the dome and then slowly falling the 142 feet to the ground. There was already a decent crowd by the time we got there, but after a while the whole piazza was suddenly filled with curious Romans watching the snow fall for at least 45 minutes. Then as quickly as it came the snow was gone, and by lunch time it was mostly melted from the streets and rooftops.


According to our office manager, the last time that it snowed in Rome was 1986. Interestingly enough, Huaxia, the Chinese member of our group, pointed out that 1986 was the year of the Tiger (and her zodiac year), as is 2010. (Side notes: according to Chinese legend, the animals in the Chinese zodiac raced across a river to see what order they would be listed. The tiger was third, and the rat--my Chinese zodiac animal--was first because he rode across the river on the ox's back. There's no year of the cat because the rat knocked him off on the way over, possibly explaining my aversion to cats. And, if you know the book, the the Year of the Boar is when Jackie Robinson first played baseball for Brooklyn.) We also have a Korean girl in our group, JiYeon, who mentioned that snow in Asian cultures traditionally means a plentiful harvest and good luck in general. I guess we will all be very lucky this year (or at the very least, have excellent tomatoes and peaches this summer when I'm back in Georgia).

Pillar #4: Romans like things that are miniature

It's been a pretty calm week after a busy few days last weekend, which has left me focused mainly on school work and other day to day things, like going to the store, doing laundry, etc. These nearly daily tasks have taken some adjustment, not because things are all that different here, but because things are so much smaller. The washer/dryer combo holds on average 6 shirts or 2 pairs of jeans with some small stuff, so we do laundry basically every other day. The dryer doesn't really dry, so we hang up everything. (At least I'm not having to hand wash things in the sink like my last visit.) It's somewhat logical to have smaller appliances because apartments are typically smaller in general. (Four of us are living in an apartment that is maybe 1000-1100 square feet, and I'm told that is big by Roman standards.) I've also been surprised to learn that I would wear shirts that are XL or XXL over here.

We obviously can't drive anywhere (and those that do drive much smaller cars or mopeds), so running daily errands is interesting as well. The nearly every other day process of grocery shopping has become especially annoying. On the one hand, it's nice because everything is fresher, and we can go to the outdoor markets to get better and cheaper produce. On the other hand, walking this much causes me to eat even more than ever, so it's hard to keep a stocked pantry when, for example, a loaf of bread is half the length, and a slice is two-thirds the size of your typical American loaf. If you know me you know I like to drink a lot of milk, so a liter doesn't last very long either. (No gallons here.) Pretty much everything you can think of (produce and meat aside) is slightly smaller than we're used to in the U.S. Hotdogs come in packs of 3 (yes, they sell hotdogs). Yogurt comes in tiny cups. Juice is a liter. Beer comes in 3-packs or individually. Paper towel rolls are an inch or two shorter. Everything just seems much smaller.

Everything, that is, except for bottles of vino. Those are still standard size (or larger, in some cases).

This is interesting to think about because it really shows that Roman society is geared towards people who walk to and from the store, typically, as we do, on the way home from school or work (as long as we can make it before 8:30 when they all close. Where is the 24-hour Kroger or Super Walmart?) rather than people who drive.


The preference for the miniature ends when it comes to churches, however, as you can see in the picture I took today at Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, or the Church of Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, the oldest of the four main papal basilicas in Rome (the others being St. Peter's, Santa Maria Maggiore..."big Mary," and St. Paul Outside the Walls). The Lateran has ancient Roman connections, and it is a Cathedral because it is the seat of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. Although it is on the opposite side of the city from the Vatican, there is still a strong connection between the two churches.

Pillar #3: Romans are somewhat skeptical of technology

This may be too broad a claim to make at this point. I mean, I've yet to see a Roman texting on an iPhone (most all have normal cell phones), or working on a laptop on the tram, and generally speaking they don't seem to be as gadget crazy as we are. Our school has 4 Macs that are shared between 50 students. It could be that the extremely high cost of electricity in Italy is a factor, which is almost double that of the United States. (Not to mention gas prices, which equate to somewhere around $10 per gallon, give or take.)

The only real basis for my most recent observation is my return from a whirlwind weekend tour of Umbria, where we were directionally assisted--sort of--by our driver's TomTom GPS device. Alternate titles for this blog post I considered were, in no particular order: "Italian road maintenance is low on the priority list"; "Italians are horrible drivers (yet manage to avoid accidents)"; or "Romans trust TomTom like Julius Caesar trusted Brutus." As it turns out, GPS technology is not quite as advanced in Italy as it is in the U.S., and combined with a far more complicated road system, it made for an interesting trip. Let's just say round-abouts and weird intersections really confused TomTom and our driver, and there are a LOTS of those between Rome and Umbria.

GPS issues aside, however, it was a truly fantastic trip. Umbria is a very mountainous region of Italy north of Rome between Lazio (Rome's region) and Tuscany (Florence, Siena, etc.), and from what I gleaned from my professor, Umbria is famous for "woody" wine, truffles, pigs (who dig up truffles), and hill towns. Between Friday morning at 6 am and Sunday evening at 8 pm, we quickly visited the towns of Orvieto, Todi, Perugia, Assisi, Spello, Spoleto, and Civita Castellana, which was literally a last minute addition "on the way back to Rome" and proved to be not very fruitful. I'd never been to any of these cities before or to Umbria for that matter, and our objective was to study the armatures and public spaces of these hill towns (see post #2 for an explanation of armatures) in addition to any cool churches, frescoes, mosaics, paving patterns, doors, windows, lights, etc., etc. Needless to say, it was a lot of incredible information to take in during only a few days.

The common link between all these cities is their mostly Roman origins and the fact that they later were all jockeying for power within the Catholic church and control of the Papacy before it settled in Rome. Each had a "Duomo," or cathedral, of various (usually large) size and elaboration, among other churches and religious functions. Not to bore you too much with the details, but it's worth mentioning a bit about each city. Orvieto was great because we arrived at 7:30 am Friday morning and got to see the city waking up. It was surprisingly clean for a Medieval city, and one of the coolest things was the way the various towers and churches were "framed" by the buildings while walking up and down streets. Todi is famous for its large central piazza (with the Duomo) that is L-shaped and has a great view of the valley and surrounding mountains. Perugia is the capital of Umbria (they won out eventually) and has the widest main street of any of the cities we visited (keeping in mind that the narrowest streets can be around five feet wide and the widest are typically 20-25 feet building to building. VERY dense). It runs along the main ridge of the mountain, and the surrounding neighborhoods, or borgs (from which we get bourgeoisie), ring the top of the hill and have steep sloping roads.

After a rainy and foggy Saturday morning in Perugia, we went to Assisi, "a mythical land like Narnia," that had mostly sunny skies just 30 mins south. It was probably my favorite, and as we drove up you could see it white and gleaming on the side of the mountain. It has two separate Catholic orders, the Franciscans after St. Francis of Assisi and the "Poor Clares," founded by St. Chiara (Clare). The two churches/monasteries were on opposite sides of town and linked by the main street that ran through the original Roman forum, where a church had been built behind the some of the surviving columns. The complexity of the plan and the way it climbed the mountain was, to me, the most fascinating part, although it was tiring climbing up and down through all the levels.

In Spello and Spoleto we experienced more of the same types of spaces, but Spoleto in particular was great because we walked to the top of the town behind the fortress to a 13th century stone bridge that crossed a huge ravine and into the woods. A hike in the woods was the last thing I expected to do this semester, but it was really nice to be out in the wilderness for a bit before we returned to Rome.

I will post some pictures once I go through them all, but I will leave you with this from Spoleto.

Pillar #2: Romans are never in a hurry

I don't know if it's my long legs, fast stride, or my frequent inability to be on time, but I have quickly found that if you are in a hurry to get somewhere, Romans will inadvertently do everything possible to slow you down. Many, many people walk in Rome because people live in such close proximity to the things they need to do, and consequently, the sidewalks (or roads in the central city where there are no sidewalks) are typically packed with groups of old women with shopping buggies, families strolling along with their children, people browsing at sidewalk tents and shop windows, etc. Also, there isn't really designated parking per se in most of central Rome, so people get very creative while parking their cars and mopeds. It's usually less like a casual walk and more like a daily obstacle course. Somehow, it all still works though despite the seeming lack of order.

In my urban design studio, we've been studying what my professor calls urban "armatures," or main arteries that link major buildings and public spaces together within a city. It's fascinating because central Rome is typical of most medieval cities in that it appears to be unplanned and simply grew as needed because of all the winding streets, strange jogs, and irregularly shaped piazzas. Once you really get into it though, you realize that many of these seemingly random roads were usually important processional routes or commercial streets, open spaces usually facilitated church going or markets of all kinds, and that the strange conglomeration of buildings were actually arranged in such a way to make it interesting to walk from place to place. Curving and well defined streets allow buildings to slowly reveal themselves as you approach them, and the view down streets are usually ended at least with a doorway or window bay or at best a church facade. Within all this, you can walk a mile and barely even realize how far you've gone.

An interesting comparison would be to a modern American subdivision, which usually has curving streets because straight streets are too "boring." (They certainly can be, yes.) So we have "exciting" streets, but if the subdivision is filled with the same kind of house, or the same 4 house plans flipped 50 different ways, are you really going to think it's interesting enough to walk through it everyday or even to slow down enough in a car to enjoy it? I think this above all else is why Romans tend to move at a slower pace--there is so much enjoyment to be found in just walking around.

Here are some pictures I took while walking and studying my selected neighborhood armature near the Campo de Fiori (meaning "field of flowers" in Italian), one of the early markets of Rome. (some of you probably remember this being used for different purposes during our last trip to Rome)

Pillar #1: Romans don't clean up after their dogs.

With all the incredible stuff there is here in Rome, you'd think I'd constantly be looking around at all the people, buildings, and ruins spread around throughout the city. Right? Wrong. I've begun to realize that as a resident of greater Trastevere, you have to keep your eyes to the ground to avoid any unexpected...surprises. But I digress.

Yes, this is supposed to be a blog about my architectural studies and travels. So why am I talking about poo? When you live in a place like Rome--I've been told to consider myself a 3 1/2 month "visitor" rather than a tourist. It sits better with the locals--you really gain a totally new perspective that is much different than a "tourist" would get. Last time I was here (In 2004? Was it really that long ago?), I stayed in a hotel, ate out most every meal, traveled in a tour group of 30 every day, and had everything planned out for me. This time around I basically have a normal semester, but it just happens to be in Rome. That means apartment living, cooking, laundry, walking to class, walking around the city, walking to the grocery store, walking to dinner, walking up 125 stairs to my apartment at least once a day, walking, walking, walking... So you can probably imagine, with as much walking as I've been doing in just over a week, why dog poo left on the sidewalk can be problematic.

I live on the Janiculum Hill (Gianicolo to the Italians), which is west of the city and south of the Vatican, and it's a 25-30 minute walk to our school building in the center of town near the Pantheon. At the bottom of the hill is the neighborhood called Trastevere, which is still pretty authentically Roman (fewer tourists here). The best part about it is the view from the top.


The worst part, as I alluded to earlier...Did I mention that we live on a mountain? There are only a couple of direct paths up, and all involve stairs. The grocery stores and open air market, by the way, are about a half mile from the bottom of the stairs.


Despite arriving a day later than planned following what would have been a scenic detour to Newcastle, England had it not been snowing and foggy (for more on this adventure: http://clairescheesegrits.blogspot.com/2010/01/planes-trains-and-automobiles.html), we have already managed to see many of the sites, and are adjusting to our surroundings pretty well.

I will try to keep my pictures updated both on Facebook and here: http://picasaweb.google.com/rsmith31. Until next time...arrivederci!