La costa di Jersey

Jersey Shore just debuted in Italy; this should be fun explaining this nugget of Americana. It was the first show I have seen here that hasn't been dubbed, only subtitled. Some bilingual genius in Italy's dubbing headquarters must have realized the impossibility dubbing Jersey Shore. It is trash in pure form. Nothing can be added or subtracted or it would lose its superlative quality.

Otherwise, cranking away on papers and quenching a wintery thirst for sunlight. How could anyone say that April is the cruelest month?

Un film

Silvia and I saw É Complicato (It's Complicated) last night.  No man should ever voluntarily see a romantic comedy or convince himself that the genre can be saved by excellent actors.  A romantic comedy is like having a crazy girlfriend: it involves wasting money and being uncomfortable as someone pleads for you to adopt their pink, petal-strewn vision of a mangled reality.  However, the movie redeemed itself insofar as it was dubbed in Italian, making it in excellent lesson in listening and comprehension.  Unfortunately, I understood it all, and now I know how to say vibrator in Italian.

I'm off to the Biblioteca Oblate to read about the Anglo-American ex-pat community in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Uffizi & il corridoio di Vasari

On Monday afternoon, my cohorts and I met with Signore Natali for a private tour of the Uffizi.  The director discussed the reasoning behind the museum's display choices, the meaning of many of the pictures, and politics of running museums in Italy, which, as one would expect, are a goat rodeo.  The government dictates museum policy from Rome, essentially stripping directors of the majority of the power.  Museums can never let out certain paintings for exhibitions or other events, and the list of such works is constantly growing.  This is frustrating and a bit insulting for other museums and nations.  Moreover, Italy's major museums are swamped by tourists to the point that people cannot consider and appreciate works in a peaceful environment.  There are many works kept in museum storage that need to be restored.  Some are still untreated since the flood of 1966, and they may never be because of the expenses of time and money.  In fact, the restoration studios in Florence are no longer offering full-time contracts while letting many of their senior restorers retire without refilling these positions.  The economy is not in a position to support the arts, and a large percentage of restorations are being funded by the American organization Friends of Florence, based out of Palm Springs.  I believe that this city would be crippled without foreign dollars.

However, walking through the empty Uffizi and listening to the director speak about the works he loves dearly, especially the Leonardos, was wonderful.  Later, he opened the Vasari corridor to us, and we took it from the Uffizi to the Palazzo Pitti.  Inside are portraits and self-portraits by celebrated artists that reach back to the Renaissance.  The corridor is normally closed to the public, and it was a rare opportunity to access it.

Urbino, Piero, Laurana, e Federigo

Great weekend: Arezzo, San Sepulchro, Urbino, Monterchi, and Remini to see most of Piero della Francesco's works.  I gained a new appreciation for Piero della Francesca.  His art is far before its time: he dabbles with form and abstraction in a manner that does not emerge until the 19th century.  In my opinion, Piero explores these questions of vision and representation more subtly and beautifully than modern artists who exclusively focus on them.  Not discounting his other works, I particularly enjoyed seeing The Resurrection of Christ in San Sepulcher and The Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle in Arezzo.

In Urbino, we saw the Flagellation of Christ, likely Piero's most famous work, but the palace itself impressed me the most.  The structural archictect, Luciana Laurana, created the palazzo with such proportions that each room and hall has a great sense of space, airiness, and light.  There is also speculation that he painted the Ideal City panel, which I believe, but I doubt that he did it alone.  At any rate, the panel shows his calm, rational approach to architecture.  Outside of the palace, in the courtyards and gardens, Laurana used evening-colored sandstone (which is very similar in color to the stone at Sewanee) and white marble, which create a much stronger sense of warmth than the coolness of the pietra serena used in Florence and the travertine in Rome.

It is said that Duke Federigo hold audience with anyone and never needed bodyguards.  His citizens loved him, and he could walk through the city alone without being disturbed.  Federigo created a court composed of many of the leading intellectuals and artists of his time.  Kenneth Clark, a famous English art historian, said that in the late 15th century, Urbino was the most civilized place on Earth.  The sense still lingers in the ducal palace.

Lavorando

Not much to report.  I have spent most of the week and last weekend working on three papers: Bronzino's Descent of Christ into Limbo, Etruscan wall painting restoration technique, and the creation of the high chapel of Santa Maria Novella.  Otherwise, I have been studying Fra Angelico in San Marco and Bronzino and Brunelleschi in Santa Croce.

I went to the clubs last weekend with friends, but I have found that I do not like going out anymore.  Chalk it up to my bankrupt youth.  It's expensive, the people you meet are rarely interesting, and you end up wasting too many hours that night and sleeping late the next morning.  The upside is unlimited Lady Gaga, gaggles of drunk American girls begging for someone to pay them attention, and showing off your Euro-shiek.

A pigeon had died on the terrazza two days ago.  Silvia has been freaking out about the "zombie-pigeon" since then.  She won't go into the kitchen, fearing that it would watch her with empty eyes through the window.  I was planning to depose of the bird last night but got in late and forgot.  While I was in Santa Croce this morning, Silvia cleaned that apartment, gathering her courage, and tried to remove the pigeon.  She failed, claiming she almost threw up.  The bird hadn't begun to decompose.  I removed it this afternoon, picking it up by the wing and throwing it out in a grocery bag.  She retreated through the hall, shaking her hands, crying out in disgust, and then locking herself in her room.  Italians can be so weird.

Francesco is probably moving out this month, and we're looking for a new flatmate.  Tonight, a ragazzo who works at Gucci is coming to see the apartment, now free from any signs of pigeon death.

Amici e giardini

Two Wednesdays ago, my cohorts and I had our first presentation in Context and Audience.  None was perfect, but all in all, they went smoothly.  Caitlin and I drank heavily afterwards.

The next afternoon, as I made my way to deliver Gatorade and Lemonsoda to Caitlin,  I ran into Meredith, a friend from Columbia who was visiting her sister.  We had a long lunch and caught up before my restoration class.  That evening, the teaching assistants and Masters students gathered for Mexican food and margaritas.  Susanne, another friend from Columbia, was in town for the night, and she met us out.  I hadn't seen her since eighth grade, and we discussed the courses our lives had taken since then.  It's amazing what can happen in a decade, and it's even funnier to think back on who you once were but no longer are.  The essence of identity is one hell of a question.

After dinner, a few of us went local and drank a bottle of vodka on the stairs of Santa Croce.  By about midnight Silvia, Tom, Tom's girlfriend, Teresiana, and I were left.  We left the deserted piazza for Tom's apartment and threw a late night 80's dance party, which woke up his Tawainese neighborhoods, who joined us and began speaking Chinese with Teresiana, who, besides studying literary theory and Proust, speaks Chinese.  It was good to hang out with Tom.  We are rare beings: straight males studying art history without a political, sexual, or religious axe to grind.  We decided a Hemmingway day is in order.  Hemmingway day = one inconspicuous bottle of bourbon + walking tour of Florence and its museums.

I didn't do much the next day.  I read slowly in the morning, ate tripe for lunch, and hit some museums during the afternoon.  Museums, Mozart, and tripe can put you back on the rails after a long night.  I met an art historian for drinks that evening, and she asked me if I would be willing to help her put together a Bronzino conference over the course of the year.  We are organizing the conference in collaboration with the Bronzino show that opens this fall at Palazzo Strozzi.  Scholarship in action!

I spent that weekend hitting museums and gardens with friends and cohorts before they left for Spring Break.  I visited Herbert Horne's palazzo on Via de' Benci.  Like Davanzati, many of the items there are arranged as the would have been positioned in a 15th century Florentine home.  Some very interesting and odd objects, like a birth tray with a putti playing the bagpipes on one side and a scene of the last judgement on the other.  I wonder what were the connections between Florence and Scotland in the 15th century, and given the theory that scenes on birth trays inspire positive qualities in a gestating child, why depict the Last Judgement with the wrathfulness of Christ and the malbolgie of Hell?  Afterwards, Silvia, Caitlin, and I saw the Bardini and Boboli Gardens, and then walked through the hills south of Florence to San Minato al Monte.  That evening, we saw Alice in Wonderland in Italian, which made it no less stupid.

That Sunday, I attended church at St. Mark's, changed clothes, and then toured the gardens at Castello and La Petraia.  Much of the garden flora in this area of Italy is similar as those in South Carolina: boxwoods, hydrangea, loquats, pines, etc.  I am writing my Master's thesis about Renaissance and 19th gardens around Florence, and I love visiting them, especially with spring approaching.

Volunteering in Aquila

Before dawn on Saturday, twelve students left Piazza Savonarola to volunteer in Aquila, which was hit by an earthquake on Sunday, April 6, 2009.  This trip was the first time that Americans had volunteered through the Caritas Foundation and also the first time Syracuse had sent volunteers to Abruzzo.  When we arrived, we were broken into different groups of American and Italian volunteers.  Each group had a different task: laying foundations for temporary housing, staining wood, moving furniture between apartments, building fences, laying floors, and reading and playing with children.  We worked hard through the weekend while we sung Italian and American songs and discussed our lives.  During meals, we ate together at loud, communal tables, and at night, we slept in "containers", metal structures akin to storage units.

After lunch and saying our goodbyes on Sunday, we went to the city center to witness the effects of the earthquake.  The Italian volunteers had told that the city will never recover, and we saw why.  The earthquake damaged or destroyed the majority of the city's downtown, which is now condemned and abandoned.  The cupola of the duomo has crumbled into the transept, and the westwork towers of another church that had twisted with the earth no longer stand parallel to one another.  It would cost too much to rebuild Aquila, and there are questions as to whose responsibility rebuilding is anyway.  The scaffolding and supports that line the streets only keep structures from falling into them; no work is being to done to restore the buildings.

The state neglected both the city and those who have lost homes or jobs.  Less than 10% of people who lost their homes have moved into newly built ones in Aquila, and many dislocated people have spent the past year in hotel rooms in the resorts on Abruzzo's coast.  They do not have jobs or a city to return to.  Families are falling apart, and businesses have left.  Those whose homes were not entirely destroyed have received little to no help from the state; they remain responsible for their mortgages and costs, even if their home was severely damaged.  Aquila is a ghost town, its emptiness heartbreaking.  The earthquake destroyed many buildings, but in its neglect, the state destroyed the lives and worlds of many people who will never recover home.

Our work was directed towards building temporary housing for those with little resources and hope left, those who see their city as a cemetery.  Volunteers have made significant contributions to the rebuilding of Aquila outside of its historical center, and there is still much work to be done.  When we left on Sunday, we were sore but happy, having received more by giving back to devastated community.  There are pictures in the album "Aquila": http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2037575&id=44700526&ref=mf.