Update on Siena

Last Saturday, we went to Siena for the day, we being most of us Middkids in Ferrara, a handful of those in Florence, and the graduate students in Midd’s School in Italy. The trip was organized and sponsered by Middlebury, which on one hand is nice because it means being reimbursed and going somewhere I might not have otherwise. (It was a neat city, which I’ll get to in a minute. I need to gripe a little first…)

Warning: Complaining ahead.
On the other hand, the trip was actually a field trip for the grad students’ art history class, onto which we were just tagged without any consideration for the difficulty of getting there from Ferrara on their schedule (leaving very early and getting back very late), or for our level of interest in the professor who was giving the tour. I’m an art history major, as most of you already know, but I was very bored with the tour guide, regardless of it being “related” to my major. The trip had been advertised to us as a tour around the whole city, focusing on the history and a wide variety of places around said city. That would have probably been really cool, since Siena seemed like a pretty place with quite a lot of history.

False advertising it was – we spent the day in the Duomo (cathedral) and the Pinacoteca (national museum), being told either waaay too much detail to be interesting to most of us or being told what was quality and what wasn’t, instead of “letting” us have our own thoughts. Almost no history or context, mainly just judgements and repeated phrases, barely an intelligent observation – he kept telling us, this is notable, this is realistic and is therefore beautiful, this is abstract and therefore not worth looking at, this has good “light play”, this is good quality, this is medieval and therefore bad quality – NOT A WAY TO LEAD A TOUR. I’m not an expert in tour giving by any means and have only given a few museum tours (although I volunteered with a program at the college museum last year whose purpose is education and tours in museums, so I’ve thought about the process quite a bit). But I do think I have enough of a brain and teaching/tour-giving experience to appreciate when a guide engages the listeners (there are a number of ways to do so, of course) and be disappointed when they don’t. I was generally annoyed at the guide’s teaching methods and kept wandering away to look at things I prefered before being ushered into the next room to spend another 10 minutes with him babbling at us about a single image and saying nothing. I think he noticed my disdain, but whatever- he didn’t deserve my time and attention. Grrr.

In other words, it kept feeling like the Midd School in Italy (which is run by Italians, of course) was being cheap and lazy instead of giving us our own trip fitted to our level, interests and locations, and I don’t think they’re doing any other trips for us, unlike the several, more organized-sounding trips I’ve heard about from Middkids in other countries abroad. *cue minor jealousy* O well, that’s just the way it is!

More positive snapshots of Siena and Thoughts on Landscape
We got a little bit of time over lunch to do our own thing, luckily, and Leah and I went wandering around the city. (I’ve decided that wandering and exploring is one of my favorite hobbies, especially with so much new to see while here!) The city sits on a handful of tightly packed hills amidst the rolling Tuscan landscape. This gives it the feeling of being stacked, layered, pieced together like a 3d puzzle, or at least it does when you chance upon a view down a valley-side street or over the roofs. I love the visual and physical character of towns like that (I remember Edinburgh had a few cool views like that, since it is also on a series of hills, but because it’s more built up, I don’t think they were quite as clear.) This was definitely my favorite part of the city.

The open flats of the Pianura Padana floodplain I’m in here in Ferrara have mainly stopped feeling disconcerting; I’ve always loved wide horizons and the chance to see the sky, although because when I’m out on the pianura I’m generally in a train or I’m in a city with the horizon blocked by buildings, I haven’t had a chance to take much advantage of that for cloud watching, and have seen maybe 10 stars total since coming to Italy, none of which I saw from Ferrara (sadness!) However, traveling to regions of hills, forests, mountains, any variety in the landscape is inexpressibly comforting to me, whether it be in Tuscany or Friuli-Venezia-Giulia or the Veneto. I most miss the hills and forests (and mountains!) of Vermont and North Jersey, I miss our lake in my hometown, I miss the shores and ocean and salty smells of South Jersey, and I never would have thought I’d say this as it’s weird and surprising, but I kind of miss highways, or at least being in a car on long roads that you know are well maintained and can take you where you want to go. That last one I realized when I went to visit Will in Mainz and had to spend time on buses between cities. The lack of hills and forests has been weirding me out for the last 2 and a half months, frankly, even if I’m much more used to it by now. In short, I might have trouble living comfortably in most states of the US. It’s amazing how much landscape can get imbedded in your sense of a comforting world, of what so deeply feels right or unsettling.

Back to Siena: It seems that the architecture of every town I’ve been to has its own details differentiating it from the others (pictures are better for that than words, so I leave you to my flickr), along with different personalities that I pick up on (whether accurately or not I will never know) from the stores, the amount and friendliness of people interacting in the streets or just hanging out or completely ignoring everyone and everything, the level of bustle of the town. It’s very fun to observe these differences everywhere I go, although I haven’t spent enough time in any city but Ferrara to get much conclusion out of it. There were a lot of people just hanging out in the larger piazzas in Siena, even during the “pausa” – the Italian version of the well-known Spanish siesta, where shops shut down and everyone goes to eat and sleep for a few hours in the middle of the afternoon. It was certainly quieter than Florence and busier than Ferrara, though that’s not very hard to do on either account. A lot of ceramic tchotchke shops and stores selling wines, breads, meats, and of course gelato, etc. Winding streets and palm trees. Striped (zebrato – yes, like a zebra!) buildings. Many statues of baby Romulus and Remus with their mother wolf, apparently a mascot of not just Rome but Siena and several other nearby cities. Medieval icons, a Renaissance master named Duccio and Baroque extravagant interiors. Hills. Chianti Classico wine. Siena. Cool town, not the best day trip, but cool town. I think I’m glad I went.

And because I like lists and this blog has a lot to do with traveling anyway:
Places I’ve been up till now: Ferrara, Comacchio, Venezia, Firenze, Sacile, Aviano, the Dolomite foothills, Gargazo (the last 4 are in my cousin Gina’s area), Siena and Padova in Italy, and Mainz in Germany.

Places to visit in mainland Italy: Ravenna, Bologna, Rome, maybe Codigoro and Trieste/Duino (where Remy is at the UWC), skiing - hopefully in the Alps - with my family.

Ideas for places to visit in Sicily: Palermo, Siracusa, Leonforte, Mt. Etna.

Elsewhere in Europe: Scotland (in less than two weeks!), and maybe a few other places if I have time and money, but going to Sicily is a higher priority at the moment, so any other trips are on the backburner of merely brainstorming and might end up staying there. I’ve been recommended Vienna, Prague, Switzerland, among a few other places. But we’ll see. I’m just glad that traveling from Ferrara is pretty easy and economical in general! Also, I don’t know how we’ll be doing this, but Hannah R. and I will find some way to meet up during January, whether in Ireland or in Italy or elsewhere, I don’t know, but as I don’t want to go a full year without my dear friend Hannah, I’ll be eager to see her again.

I’ve begun planning my trip to Sicily, which has made me super excited. I’m thinking of going during the first week of January, visit the chapel on which I’m thinking of basing my senior thesis, visit our relatives in Leonforte, see the ruins in Siracusa and ancient amphitheater and climb Mt. Etna (volcano!) at the very least. I don’t know if I’ll have time/money to make it anywhere else while down there, but I could be satisfied with this beginning. I need to find safe but economical places to stay, and have found some useful-looking leads on convents that rent out rooms, which would be both a distinctly interesting Italian experience and a safe way to avoid dangerous hotels or way-too-expensive resorts.

I really like traveling and being someplace new. I like learning about this culture with which I’ve grown up but not really, as my Italian great-grandparents didn’t speak Italian to my grandmother and wanted to be as American as possible, but left behind for our family a pride in being Italian-American that my experiences here have challenged and highlighted in unexpectable ways. I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot of aspects of what it could be like to live in Italy, even what it could be like living with students here in Ferrara – but there’s only so much I can do in 5 months, and I do feel like I’m getting a lot out of my time here and learning a lot about myself. And even if there are problems with Italy and many frustrations along the way, all in all life is good.
Now, time to go to my last class period of Emilia Romagna art history! Comments about Padova and general life will be written up sometime later. Have a good afternoon all!