Old Things Are Cool

So after a week and a half of seeing unimpressive apartments, I visited several on Wednesday and saw two in one day that I would gladly take.  I decided one one right around the corner from the hotel and BCSP offices where I'll be living with two Italian boys, both students, who as far as I can tell don't speak any English at all.  It's a bit small (I can't have the bed until the old tenant moves out on Tuesday, and will be sleeping in a cot in the kitchen until then), but they're really nice and the location is ideal.  I visited way too many places that were too far away for my liking, and am really happy that I get to stay in this neighborhood.

All of the other Cornell students and I made it into the advanced Italian pre-session course.  The classwork isn't anything different from any other Italian course I've had.  One Wednesdays, we do cultural tours with a local museum official:

As I learned in my history of Florence class last spring, towers were basically the HDTVs of medieval Italy.  Any family who could afford it had to have the tallest, greatest tower in the area to prove that they meant business.  They allowed for defense of the city, and provided a place to hide when the lower classes demanded silly things like political representation and living wages.  With all the bigshots in town trying to out-phallus each other, the city in that era looked like this:

That diorama comes from a museum at the Piazza Maggiore we visited, which was once home to the archbishop of Bologna.  It was full of artifacts from all parts of the world, mostly Europe, and various eras of history.  Little old ladies stood in every doorway to tell you to watch your step and to turn off your camera flash.  Here are a few more shots:

 

The man to the left here is the historian.  Down two treacherous "stairwells," which were really just steep ramps with the added peril of bumps to trip on, there was this painting of Irnerius, the apocryphal figure who supposedly wrote the books of Roman law initially studied at the University.

 In the southeast area of the central city there are three interconnected buildings at the church of Santo Stefano.  I couldn't take pictures inside, but it was really neat to walk around what felt like a dimly-lit crypt. 

That was Wednesday's adventure.  We took a culinary tour today (yes, a culinary tour), and I'll talk about that next entry because this is getting long.  Last night we all went out for a birthday dinner, so an unfortunate trattoria had to accommodate 24 of us (we had reservations).  Very good times.  I'll leave off with this shot I took from the museum window; it's looking out from Piazza Maggiore down via Independenza, and is very representative of my central city neighborhood and the city as a whole.