As I sit here writing this last regular update before I end my time here in Rome, I just want to take a second to reflect on the journey it has been for me to be here. I came to Rome a little nervous about living in another country on my own for over a month. I thought it would be hard to adjust to a new lifestyle but I knew it would be fun to be in a new location. Beyond seeing the main tourist sites that I did in the first week I got here, over the past month, I have been really living the Roman life. Tasks like washing clothes around the corner, going to the grocery store, receiving my Codice Fiscale (Basically social security for Italy), and getting a haircut from Rob the local barber have been some the connecting pieces of the string that have given life to my experiences here in Trastevere. Once you get the hang of it and meet some the locals, one realizes that people here are not rat racing around town to get to their job or back to their house. They live a simple life and enjoy what they have. Most of the time, they don't leave a half a mile radius and they walk to their duties unlike the highway commute we have in America. I have been having the same experience. I get up everyday, grab a coffee, and walk to campus around five minutes from my apartment. Even with some of my difficult economics classes, I feel more relaxed and everytime I step out the gates of my college building, I see the swaying trees hanging over the Tiber river and it makes me realize I am living in a place that spiritually tells me to loosen up and unwind.
Based on this, I hope you can interpret that I will be highly disappointed when I have to leave Roma! However, I hope to enjoy the last week I have here as best as I can! Let me catch you up on some the amazing experiences I have had over the last couple weeks. Classes as I mentioned last week in my cultural proof are beginning to wrap up and I have finals on Thursday and Friday this upcoming week. Totally ready to get those over with! Since I only need to get a C to get the credit I need, I don't even need to take one of the finals which is pretty exciting! I have met some local kids in the class that are pretty cool. Some classmates named Constantine (What an awesome name!) and Lodovico are pretty cool to talk to once in a while and have told me about some places around southern Italy that I will have to check out my next trip over to Italy. I also surely won't miss the accent one of my teachers has that has made trying to understand the lecture pretty difficult. Totally not her fault, but I learned to ask questions after class to get any misunderstandings made up. John Cabot is a great place to take classes and I will recommend it to anyone looking to study abroad in the future. I will also get some updates from one of my friends, Kathleen, also in the Mcbride program who is going to John Cabot in the next summer. I am curious to see what she thinks of the whole college experience over here and how she is adjusting to life in Trastevere.
I have taken Thursday nights to be my nightly walk around town. As a side note last week, I heard music coming down the street in my neighborhood just as I was about to take my walk through the city. I ran down to the area where I heard the sound to investigate and found a bunch of men dressed up in weird uniforms marching down the street with band instruments. They were blaring out some type of Italian national song and it was all in perfect unison. It was really cool to see and when one of the locals told me that it was the local firefighters, I was stunned! I guess its a tradition that happens everyweek and they go around the streets of the Trastevere playing the same song! It was a very incredible encounter. I guess Italy has very talented firefighters!
The video shows the local firefighters marching through the streets. What a sight to behold!
My walks through the city at night have included many surprising sights! I found that the view from one of the bridges overlooking the Tiber river and the Vatican was very beautiful. The sun peers out over the dome and shines onto the river illuminating the trees just to the point that you can make out their color. See this photo above! Seeing the Trevi fountain at night is also very interesting because you get a different vantage point from seeing the sculptures in the fountain lit up. I am glad I have made the journey over there to see it. Likewise, the Colosseum looks much better at night than it does during the day. The orange tinted lights that shine all over the side of the structure gives the white bricks a glow that can only be witnessed at night. I have taken time to just find a bench and stare out at the giant for long periods of time. Lastly, just wandering the streets at night is a magical experience. Seeing the antique street lights shine on the different building and the bricks below my feet while most of the time being alone is very relaxing and peaceful. This is one of the solo experiences I will miss when I leave Rome.
Last weekend, I wanted to make a trip away from Rome to place with not as many tourists as usual. I felt like Florence and Venice just had too many people wandering around the streets that at points, it got a little annoying. So I took the time to research a town that was exempt of this and found Orvieto, a special small town in the Umbria region about an hour north by train from Rome. As you approach the town's train station, a massive rock structure stands prominently in the distance and one can make out the tiny buildings sitting on top in comparison. As I disembarked from the train and walked across the street from the train station. I was greeted by another transportation station which operated with an old tram that moves up and down the side of the cliff of the rock. I felt like I was moving at a 60 degree angle up the slope until I got to the top!
The city of Orvieto is absolutely amazing. There are absolutely no crowds with tourists here and there. The church in the center of town has the best intricately decorated exterior from all the churches I have seen in Italy so far. It sits on the highest point of town. All around the city's exteriors are views sweeping over the Umbria country side marked by wineries, old farmhouses, and olive groves. The way this town was positioned on this geologic structure made it seem like it was straight out of the Game of Thrones series. Something that's also amazing here are all the underground structures that were built underneath the city and into the Tufa rock that supports it. There are many caves that the Etruscans, a group of people who lived here during the iron age, dug underneath the town to live in. There are over 1,200 caves in the town and almost every house has their own access to a cave which is usually used as wine storage. I personally got to walk through the caves and seeing all these huge hollowed out tunnels created by hand tools is pretty amazing! Rooms for praying, cooking, sleeping, and wine storage can all be seen! Some even have views out onto the countryside. Another amazing structure is a giant well on the exterior of the city called St. Patricks well. It was built in order to get constant water supply when the one of the popes fled the city of Rome to live in Orvieto. So, he ordered his workers to dig 174.4 feet to reach the spring water line. I have to say, it must have been an incredible feat of engineering at the time because, not only did they build the wide well but also dug out two staircases as well! As I entered this well and walked further and further down it, it also got colder and colder. Looking over the edge down to the bottom gave me fears of height every time! By the time I was at the bottom, it was 30 degrees and the views to the sky light were unimaginable! See one of these images above!
Video of the countryside I took while I was in Orvieto. This was such a peaceful spot!
The last highlight over the last two weeks would have to be a trip I made over to the Rome countryside yesterday and it was absolutely critical to my understanding of aqueducts. For my pre-trip research paper, I wrote about the engineering behind aqueducts. Through my research, I had many problems with visualizing what the aqueducts actually looked like and where this aqueduct park they kept talking about was located? Through this trip, these misunderstandings were answered and much much more. This park is considered the central park of Rome. It contains wide open fields of tall grass and natural flowers but is dominated by the two aqueduct structures and the five aqueducts contained on them. Seeing these aqueducts first hand is amazing and how good of condition they still are in. There are many new understandings of these that I think I will include in my final research paper, but I will wait to talk about those in more detail then. For now, I just want to say that these were some of the greatest structures of engineering I have seen in my life. The way they had to build these and the short amount of time they did it in still blows my mind! I recommend anyone to come check these out and take in the beautiful views from this park and the amazing structures that make it unique from anywhere else in the world.
To end these regular blogs, I will reflect on all my adventures here in Rome for the rest of my life. This is truly a life changing experience! Rome will hold a special place in my heart and I hope to return someday soon! I have one more post to make and it involves a cultural proof surrounding a book I picked up from one of the local libraries. Since I am finished reading it, that proof will probably be posted very soon!
Ciao Rome!