parla come mangi: Guardate a Roma!

There's a lot that I want to cover because everything about this city is so breathtaking. I've been spending my days walking in unbelievable heat up and down the streets of Rome, visiting the tomb of Augustus, the temple of the Vestal Virgins, the Lion's Mouth that was in Roman Holiday, eating artichokes in the Jewish ghetto. Today I played soccer for the first time in about twelve years, so tomorrow when we tour the Colosseum, I'm going to feel like my body is falling apart. I'm learning Italian as I walk through the streets, writing down words and the definitions they present - on menus: colazione, pranzo, centa, contorni, carciofi, nocciola (my favorite flavor of gelato); at the supermarket, balsamo (for conditioner, which they sell in the supermarcato), asparagi, basilico, pomodori, arancia, pera, uve...And I'm teaching myself Italian. Yesterday I memorized the conjugations for regular verbs that end in -are. I took Italian the summer after freshman year, and it comes back fairly easily. I know that this is a language I one day want to speak fluently, because the official version of Italian, at least, was derived from literature; Dante, in particular. I wish all languages were derived from literature. It would be like the entire English language was based off of the work of Shakespeare, or so my professor said.

Mostly I spend my time sitting by fountains with my feet in the water and the sun on my back. There is a perfect breeze in the piazzas, you can feel it if you sit still enough, it is as if the statues of deities beckon the wind to them. Even surrounded by people in the Piazza Navona, I felt quiet and at ease and close to things so old and yet so solid and perfectly formed. I can't believe I'm here.

I did a better job of describing all this in my journal, so I'll post that up later. I also have a lot of research to do. In the meantime, however, here are some of the things among which I now live: