Benvenuti in Italia! First Stop, Roma

One of the major perks of the Wells in Florence program was the four-day orientation to Italy in Rome. Upon our first night, we were introduced to the stunning Trevi Fountain, which was just a five minute walk from our hotel. The walking tour was supposed to go on for a few hours, but in the midst of taking pictures and trying to keep track of all of our roommates, three of us got separated from the group and after a fair amount of walking ignorantly around the same two blocks, we found the hotel again and met the rest of the group at dinner. I was so excited for my first meal in Italy! I had heard nothing but amazing things about true Italian cuisine, and assumed that anything I tasted in Italy, whether it be a two-euro panini in a cafe, or spaghetti bolognese at the chic restaurant down the street, would not just be eating, but rather, a life-changing food experience. Not so. The first dinner was fine. Actually, all of the food in Rome was fine. It was included in the program, and cooked in mass for our whole group, so we didn't get to taste the raved-about authentic Italian cuisine until Firenze. Anyway, I was happy just to finally be sitting down in a warm-lit restaurant with a glass of wine, a bowl of nothing-special pasta, and easy conversation with my new roommates.

The next day we were split into touring groups and I was assigned to tour guide Federico, the best tour guide I've ever encountered in my entire life. Federico showed us the Colusseum, the Trajan Market, the Arch of Constantine, and the ruins of the Roman Forum. He spoke about Julius Caesar as if he had known him well, and experienced the tragedy of one of the senators who had had no choice but to assassinate the man who created democracy in Rome in order to save any chance of future democracy. While that first full day in Rome was cold and rainy, Federico held my attention the entire time.

That night, after warming up in our cramped hotel room and convening with our program at the restaurant from the night before, a group of us headed into the city to find something fun to do. We clicked around the cobblestone, taking sporadic turns and crossing random streets, and giggling at some of the inappropriate terms I found flipping through my new bible, my Italian phrase book. (Calma!=Easy tiger!) After a while, we stumbled upon a gargantuan stone, cylindrical structure. Approaching the structure, I got the same feeling in my stomach I did watching "Cast Away," when all of a sudden a gray whale swims slowly by Tom Hanks on his raft. This has got to be something important, I thought. "The Pantheon! Oh my gosh we just walked up to the Pantheon!" I was in absolute awe. After a few minutes of staring, we decided to keep trekking to find a cute place to sip on some vino. We turned the corner onto what I thought then was a narrow street, but looking back, was an eight-lane highway compared to some of the streets in Florence. We found the perfect wine bar and ordered bottle after bottle and laughed and gabbed and took pictures for hours until our waiter made it obvious to us that he was ready to clean up and go to bed. He was very friendly though and left us with a big block of dark chocolate to chip away at before we left. We returned two nights later, but our fave waiter wasn't there, so it wasn't quite as magical as the first night.

The next day kind of put a damper on orientation and made everyone antsy to get to Florence and settle in our homes for the next four months. This was the day we took a three hour bus ride to Pompeii, an ancient city that was completely buried after the eruption of the volcano, Mount Vesuvius. Marco was our tour guide in Pompeii and like Federico, was truly passionate about the contents of his tour. The issue was, no one had eaten anything since seven in the morning before we boarded the buses, and the tour was way too long. So everyone was hungry and tired and became uninterested after a couple hours. To make matters worse, we were trapped walking around in a group with the "coasties." I hate to generalize, but there are a bunch of seriously nails-on-a-chalkboard-annoying girls on Wells who all happen to be from a certain area of the United States. So we finally ended the tour, finished yet another good but nothing special meal, and headed back onto the tour buses. The buses drove along part of the coast, which was super cool and beautiful but gave us an achy-necked six hour bus ride back to Rome. It ended up being kind of awful. Pompeii was very interesting, but seeing it wasn't worth the perpetual bus ride with obnoxious coasties.

Our last full day in Rome made up for the Pompeii setback. Well, we were not technically in Rome. The Vatican is actually its own city-state, ruled by the Pope. The neighborhoods surrounding the Vatican are more charming than the area we'd yet conquered (as Federico would say), and the sun finally decided to come out. Everything is better in nice weather. The tour started outside the Vatican museums, in front of posts that pictured the Sistine Chapel. Photographs in the Sistine Chapel are not permitted, nor is talking, so Fedi explained Michelangelo's revolutionary work from outside. Wow. I don't think I'll go into the details of Michelangelo's process in this blog, but it's literally unbelievable. Once again, Federico's passion for everything he explained to us almost brought me to tears. (And almost brought him to tears if you ask me!) We started into the museums. We conquered rooms covered by paintings and tapestries and filled with statues that transformed the use of light and dark, of perspective, of color; art that depicted the history of Catholicism and of the Greek gods; and art that became the foundation of everything we see in today's museums, and in architecture all over the world. We entered the School of Athens room. That was definitely one of my favorites. The colors are bright and whimsical and the characters have so much personality. On the lower left corner of Raphael's wall-sized painting one student studies, while his slacker friend comically looks over his shoulder to copy his notes. The blue sky behind Grecian columns sets the mood for the Renaissance painting. Ugh, love.

Our last room of the tour was none other than the Sistine Chapel. It is a magical room. Relatively silent aside from the clicking of Italian boots and murmur of whispers, the biblical figures sitting on the tops of sky-high walls and coming out of the ceiling, investigating which wall moldings were part of the architecture and which were painted on, and figuring out the iconography of the chronological pictures that line the wall could have kept me in the sanctuary for hours, even days. (Woah, run on. Tried to edit some of it out...couldn't. Mi scuzzi.) On a high from our tour, my roommates and I stayed with Federico for the optional explanation of St. Peter's Basilica and then took the rest of our time in the Vatican slowly gliding through the Basilica, which I loved even more than the Sistine Chapel and got to take pictures of!

Leaving Rome was bittersweet. I couldn't wait to get to Florence and actually live in Italy, instead of living out of a suitcase and traveling everywhere with a guide and a tour bus. But I would most likely not be coming back to Rome, the city my sister fell so deeply in love with, and a city whose history and life I had hardly dipped my feet into. Overall, it was a great orientation to Italy and made me excited to keep learning about history where it happened and art where it was created, and to finally have a food experience, and to become immersed into the Italian culture for the next four months of my life.