A rooftop terrace and night at the Piazza

If possible, I love Siena more and more everyday. There's always some new street to wander down or different flavor of gelato to try (current favorite - strawberry and white chocolate!)

On Wednesday, I had my first full day of classes. My day is broken in half with a short, round woman named Sandra teaching us grammar and language for 2 hours in the morning and a very funny man named Marco leading thematics discussions in the afternoon. The grammar has definitely been a challenge - we're covering some very tricky verb tenses right now. I feel like with some effort, it shouldn't be too hard for me to keep up with everything, and I'll definitely get a lot out of it. As far as our afternoon lessons go, every week or so we have a different thematics topic. Right now, we're studying and discussing the history and architecture of Roma - Marco's hometown. The thematics portion of my day is definitely the best part - it's been extremely interesting and informative so far. I also like the way Marco teaches better than the way Sandra does. She's very kind and friendly, but speaks very quickly without repeating herself or using the board. Marco, on the other hand, is great at explaining strange vocabulary or going over tricky passages.

We have optional culture classes in the evenings that we can attend as well. So far, I've only been to one - a class on the Palio, Siena's world famous horse race. There are a few culture classes at the end of the month on cinema and definitely want to check those out!

Outside of class, I have spent my afternoons walking throughout the center of town, taking in the architecture and atmosphere. Yesterday, I went with Maja, Camila, and Marie to a small restaurant in the wine valley that lies just south of the city center. The nature was gorgeous and the prosciutto panino that I had was quite tasty. Then, later last night, after I had made dinner and worked on homework (yes, I have homework!) at the Villa, I went back down to the center with a group of girls to meet up with friends from Ohio State who are participating in a different program in Siena. We had wine in the piazza and told stories about our adventures thus far - the other OSU students have been here for almost a month, so they had lots of great advice on restaurants and places to visit. After spending a few hours in the piazza, we moved to Jennifer's apartment - she's an adorable girl from Canada who's in Annie's language class. Unbelievably, she had a rooftop terrace that overlooked the entire city! We plugged an I-pod into her apartment's speaker system and had a blast dancing to the music :-)

Tonight, I'm going the center with Annie and a few other girls from the Villa to meet Giancarlo and Giacomo - two of guys from OSU for dinner. Then, tomorrow we're off to Milan for the weekend! I can't wait to go to the world's first indoor mall!

Side note - I learned something really interesting in class the other day that I thought I'd share. I'm sure you are all familiar with the English word grotesque. But I bet you don't know where it comes from. The origin is an Italian word - grottesco. Moreover, the root of grottesco is grotto - another Italian word that we now use meaning cave or cavern. Apparently, at some point during the Reinassance, an old palace of Nero's was discovered. For the most part, the building was underground and seemed like a huge cave or grotto. When the artists of the time went down to explore the area, they found tons of paintings of people that were disfigured or had animal body parts. Rafael was obsessed with the paintings and decided to duplicate them, calling them arte grottesche simply because they were in the same style. Eventually, the term evolved meaning and became associated with the creepy people in the paintings instead of the underground palace. Then, it morphed into the word we use today. (I know this had very little to do with my life in Italy - but hopefully you feel a little bit wiser!)

I miss everyone lots! Please leave comments or email me :-)

Brittany

PS - I tried to put pictures up, but the internet is not cooperating - I'll do a separate post of some pics later tonight if possible!