Hello!
This weekend I am currently in Florence exploring the city and checking out the local sights. In my blog next week I will continue my two-week update and include what I did over this weekend. For now, here is a cultural proof I have conducted since I arrived here.
For one of my proofs, I have decided to browse local translated newspapers and “attempt” to try to understand the local news broadcasts about different shocking current events occurring around Rome and the EU. One of the best websites I was able to successfully accomplish this through was thelocal.it. Every morning I would hop on to the web and browse the news for the day to find something interesting. Over the course of this time, I have learned that there is a big importance of the European Union. Even though Italy is its own country, it's more like a state in the 28-member body of the EU. A lot of the events that happen politically or economically in one member will affect the other. On a lot of the headlines over the first week showed Theresa May stepping down as Prime Minister in the U.K due to her failure in Brexit and far-right ideologies. These headlines seemed to bring a certain topic to the forefront of Italian News. I asked my landlord, Lara, about this as she was actually on her way to vote and she said in Italy, the reason the topic is so at large is there is a rise in a far-right movement in the country. “Many people are pushing secured borders, acting defiant toward the EU due to our local finances, and are really making nationalism of our country known,” Lara told me. She said the defeat of May in regard stepping down as a key leader in the European Union might anger some of the right winged citizens and might cause them to rise up and make their voices heard. In my opinion, I don’t think these headlines will go away anytime soon and I wonder if anything will heat up in the city in regard to nationalist protests.
Another big event regarding the European Union is the current protests relating to the pre-vote climate change. Hundreds of thousands of children and youth took to the streets in major cities around the EU last week to raise awareness and voice their anxiety about inheriting a warming planet with melting ice caps and flooding cities. I initially didn’t see this story in the news at first but started off with a conversation about it with my Orientation guide at JCU. Chiara was telling me that she had to reroute our navigation tour away from the Colosseum because of all the climate change protests happening around the structure created by local students. Chiara said kids have actively been involved in this issue in Europe and on their own terms, use different methods to unload their messages about their futures in a world devastated by climate change to the public. This event actually impacting my day made this conversation about a local story more personally important and not just something I read about or saw on the news.
Finally, I saw a news story on TV while I was washing my clothes at the cleaners around the corner from my apartment about a person who was deliberately run over by a bus driver in Rome that same day. I couldn’t understand what they were talking about on the news channel, but they showed a shocking video of the incident that I will attach to this blog. I went online immediately on my phone and read about it on a local translated news channel and found out an argument started with the man not being allowed to bring his two dogs onto the bus with him and the bus driver lost his temper after they had the argument and he decided that the best option in how to respond in the situation was to use the bus as a battering ram on the man. I guess it really is the Wild Wild West in Rome. A man sitting next to me named Lodovico who turned out to live in the building opposite from me saw the story on the TV as well and began talking to me about how the buses in the city have also been catching on fire because of the low maintenance on them over the years. He said he doesn’t trust the public transportation around town so he either takes his bike or walks to his destinations. After listening to that insight and reading into the news, I don’t really know if I will take the bus around Rome anymore as well.
The video above was the footage I saw on TV.