Firenze + Abetone + Cortona + Orvieto = AWESOME

I have been a bit of a staple on the trains around here recently. So far, Paris has been the only time that I have left Italy... so that means I've been taking a lot of trains around Italy itself! I'll try to give a bit of an overview.

Firenze

We go to Florence A LOT. Not only is it just insanely close to Arezzo, but it has a ridiculous amount of amazing art to see. Because of this, we take 4 trips there with my Art History class to hear lectures about the Renaissance art that Firenze has to offer. After today's trip to the Uffizi Museum, we are halfway done. Two weeks ago, we went to two different churches: Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella. We learned about their architecture, facades, frescoes, and paintings inside of them. Both places are beautiful, and it was interesting to learn about the differences between the Franciscan church of Santa Croce and the Dominican Santa Maria Novella. The impact that the different preaching orders has had on the art is really cool. Fun fact about Santa Croce: it's known for being the burial site for many illustrious Italians, including Galileo, Machiavelli and Michelangelo! Here are some of my favorites of what we saw.

Santa Croce, with my friend Will's head creeping in

Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce, with awesome frescoes by Giotto

Santa Maria Novella

Altar of Santa Maria Novella, surrounded by beautiful frescoes

A sad but understandable fact about museums: some places don't let you take pictures. The Uffizi is one of those places. So, I unfortunately don't have any pictures from today's trip. But I can tell you that my favorites from today were probably Michelangelo's "Holy Family"and Gentile da Fabriano's "Adoration of the Magi". Google them, they're legit. Because "Holy Family" is the only panel painting by Michelangelo in existence, my professor Kirk guessed that (even though it really is priceless) it's probably worth about 500 million dollars. It's not every day that you see something that epic.


Abetone

Now this was one of the most crazy-awesome weekends that I've had so far. A group of us really wanted to go skiing while we were here in Europe, so we planned a trip to a little mountain town in the Apennines called Abetone. It's actually not too far of a trip from Arezzo, and we had heard from my friend Katie's brother who is stationed with the Army here in Italy that the prices there are pretty cheap. So, we booked an apartment for the weekend and headed on up into the mountains. Katie, her brother David, and I left earlier on Thursday than the other half of our group because we were done with class sooner and we needed to go meet with the man who was renting us the apartment to get the keys and whatnot. We made it to Abetone about mid-day and -- after the extremely fun but somewhat stressful experience of having to communicate with our good buddy Raphaele who spoke very little English while the 3 of us spoke very little Italian -- moved into the apartment and scoped out the town a little bit. The rest of the crew (Amanda, Jordan, Will, and Paris) made it by train to Pistoia where you then have to catch a bus up to Abetone. Unfortunately, it had been snowing all day and they stopped the buses earlier than normal... so they got there too late to catch the last bus. This meant that they had to turn around and head back to Florence to sleep there until they could catch a super early train/bus to make it to Abetone by a decent time on Friday morning. Luckily, Will's girlfriend, Paris, is studying abroad in Florence so they were able to crash at her place. Bleary-eyed but ready to hit the slopes, they met us for breakfast and then we all went to get our rentals and make our way onto the mountain.

We had a blast! It literally snowed the entire time that we were there, so the powder was EPIC. The runs themselves actually reminded me a little bit of Colorado -- it wasn't the Alps, so they weren't the crazy-long runs that I've heard about (which was probably a good thing because it had been about 4 years since I last skied . I fell back into a rhythm pretty soon though, and only had a few yard-sale wipeouts to keep me young. Overall, it was an awesome weekend. We hit up the discoteca at night, and ate some good food. Great friends, great snow, great food... not much more you can ask for!

One of my last runs -- I went solo for most of the last half-day, so a selfie was in order!

View from our apartment balcony

Cortona

This past weekend we had our Getting to Know Arezzo class on Friday, so there wasn't really time to take a major overnight trip. Did that mean that I was just going to hang around Arezzo?? No way!! Saturday morning, I woke up and walked around the monthly Antique Fair in Arezzo for an hour or so before I caught a train to visit Cortona for the half day. Most of my friends wanted to check out the Antique Fair for longer and stay in Arezzo, so I decided to take my first solo day trip. It was actually a great time! I love traveling with my friends, but there is something really freeing about traveling by yourself... I got to be on my own time and do exactly what I wanted.

Anyway, Cortona is really close to Arezzo, so the train to Camucia and then bus up to Cortona only took me about an hour. I was in Cortona by 1 pm, and I ended up staying there until about 4. That sounds like a really short time, but it is a pretty small town and I actually fit pretty much everything that I had wanted to see into those 3 hours! I walked the very steep streets. I saw the Duomo and the Chiesa di San Francesco which has a piece of the True Cross and 3 relics from St. Francis of Assisi. I got gelato. I walked the Via Crucis all the way up to the very top of Cortona to see the Fortezza and the Basilica di Santa Margherita. I saw glorious views of the Tuscan countryside. I came back home and watched Under the Tuscan Sun (filmed in Cortona) and realized what a horrible movie that was (but I did recognize the places I had been earlier). In general, it was a fantastic way to spend my Saturday afternoon!

Relics of St. Francis (tunic, pillow, New Testament)

Typical alleyway in Cortona

Reliquary with the piece of the True Cross

Beautiful view of Toscana

Via Crucis

Man I'm so artsy.

Orvieto

Sunday. My good friends Amanda and Dom came along with me on a day trip to Orvieto, a town a little over an hour by train south of Arezzo, in Umbria. After the slight hiccup of Amanda oversleeping through the earlier train that Dom and I took (nice going, Mandy Moore :P), we made it. Luckily, there was a fast train right behind us so Amanda just got there about a half hour after Dom and me. We were all pretty hungry, so we walked for a while until we found a restaurant that looked good and stopped in for lunch. Maybe it was because I was really hungry or maybe it had just been too long since I'd had truffle pasta... but it was amazing. I got the local, hand-made pasta with a black truffle and sausage sauce and was just completely in heaven, especially once we added in the Orvieto Classico white wine. I could easily name that in the top 5 meals I've had here so far.

AH-MAH-ZING

Amanda posing in front of our lunch destination

After lunch, we just kinda wandered until we found the Duomo. It was still on the mid-day break, so we had to wait about 45 minutes or so until we could go see the inside. What else could we do but go get some gelato? So we did that, and walked around and saw some of the amazing ceramics shops (another thing that Orvieto is known for) and one of the smaller churches. Then we made our way back to the Duomo and checked it out. Unfortunately, it is another one of those places that doesn't allow photography inside... so I don't have any photos of the AMAZING frescoes that were in there. But just let me tell you -- they were unbelievable. The chapel off to the right side of the Duomo was literally covered entirely in frescoes with beautiful colors and active scenes... it was great. Definitely worth the 3 euro or so that we had to pay to get inside.

Then, we killed some time before we went to go take a tour of the underground caves of Orvieto. Apparently, Orvieto has over 1200 caves underneath it... many of which were carved out by the Etruscans. The tour didn't exactly blow my mind, but it was still very interesting. The coolest part was seeing one of the sections of the second of the two caves that we saw that was used as a shelter during World War II.

Random picture from inside one of the sections of one of the caves

The last thing on our list was to climb down into "il Pozzo di San Patrizio" or St. Patrick's Well. It's an impressive architectural feat of a pretty deep well (about 180 feet) that has 2 spiral staircases in a double helix formation that allows a different path of ascension than descension -- something important for the functionality of the well. It was built in the mid 1500s and it still blows my mind that they could construct such impressive structures so long ago. Anyway, it was fun to walk/run down the steps to the bottom to throw a coin in the well and then not quite as fun to make our way back up.

I brought home two bottles of Orvieto Classico, some great pictures, and many fun memories... so it was a very good day.

That's about all I've got for now! I'm getting ready to leave tomorrow to head to Genoa for a few days, so I should have an update when I get back. We are going to a Serie A "partita di calcio"aka soccer game to see AC Milan play Genoa, so that's going to be epic. I'm also hoping to see some of the cool port city stuff, including where Columbus used to live!

Anyway, I miss you all!! I still can't believe how blessed I am to have this opportunity. God is Good!

Life in Arezzo

So about that update on how things have been in Arezzo....

Yeah that clearly didn't happen. Well, I'll give it a go now.

We have now been living in Arezzo for about a month and a half. That blows my mind! It seems like just yesterday that we had move-in. Then again, I feel like I've known all of my friends here for much longer than that. It's been an amazing time with fantastic people. 

Here are some highlights of what it's been like here in la mia città:

I've been to mass in the Duomo (gorgeous) and in a little church right down the Corso from my apartment, La Chiesa di San Michele. Going to mass at San Michele is an extremely cool experience. It's actually not even a parish: it's the youth center for Arezzo. So, mass is at 9 pm on Sunday nights and most of the people that go are probably from their early 20s to mid/early 30s. For those of you that may think that's not exactly "youth", that's still very young for Italians. They don't usually get married until their mid 30s. Anyway, the first time I went it was kind of nerve-wracking because I didn't know anyone and didn't really speak much Italian. It's a very small group that goes there at 9 pm... maybe around 20 people or so. It ended up being an awesome night the first time I went, though, because the priest (who knew that I was American from when I met him earlier that night at a praise & worship/adoration service -- which by the way was an AMAZING thing where they had adoration and people playing guitar and singing P&W songs in Italian) came up and talked to me in English a little bit and then introduced me to some of the people. Mass itself was pretty standard, except for the small detail that I couldn't really understand much of it, but then afterwards I talked to one of the girls I met who spoke English pretty well. She and some of the other Italians -- including the priest -- were going over to someone's apartment to have tea and hang out, and they invited me! I figured it would be interesting to say the least, since she was the only one who really spoke English, and I just couldn't pass up the chance to see how Italians really are in their own homes. Needless to say, it was a little intimidating but extremely cool. I didn't always know what was going on, but we were able to have enough of a conversation that I had a great time and made some new friends! They called me "Saretta" since I was much younger than most of them because, other than the 25 year old English speaker, they were all in their mid 30s. It sounds like a good way to start a joke: the American 21 year old, the Italians in their 30s, and an Italian priest... haha. I've seen some of them on the street since then, and it's so fun to be able to talk to them a little bit and do their fun little double-cheek kiss routine, haha :)

So that's the story about some of "i miei amici Aretini"---

I have many more stories about walking around and discovering fun stuff about Arezzo, but they honestly aren't really that exciting to tell. It's enough to say that I have completely fallen in love with Arezzo -- the town and the people. It's small enough to be cozy, but large enough to have cool things to see and do. There are famous frescoes, beautiful views, a discoteca to party at, and much more. I think America is going to have a hard time measuring up!

Crucifixion painting by the famous artist Cimabue. It just hangs out in one of the small churches here. No big deal.

Other than checking out the town, I spend my time hanging out with friends, doing homework, grocery shopping (I've been cooking quite a bit... be proud, Mom!), laundry (which is pretty annoying since they don't use dryers in Italy), catching up on TV shows, drinking wine, and planning trips! It's a pretty amazing life. I still can't believe I've been so blessed with this experience.

I figured out how to make my own "Italian version" of eggs and bacon because bacon is hard to find here. I just cooked up some cubed pancetta in some olive oil and it tasted just like bacon bits! Delicious!

Oh, I almost forgot one of my favorite aspects of Arezzo: befriending the owners of the little stores and restaurants! Some of my go-to food places have learned who I am over the past month or so, and it's a blast to talk to them when I stop in. There's the lady from Istanbul Kebap who loves to talk to us whenever we go in there and always gives us free baklava (she's my favorite), and the men who work at both Panini & Co. and Bloom's (one of the bars in town) who know all of us americani. Last but not least, we have the guy who works at Pizzeria del Corso -- the one that I joke about with everyone here and call him my boyfriend, haha. Il mio ragazzo... really I just call him that because the fact that Pizzeria del Corso has an amazing calzone salsiccia and is right down the street from my apartment means that I'm quite a regular and therefore see him quite often. He's really nice though, and always knows my order and that I usually take it "da portare via" which means "to-go". All of the people that I've met in Arezzo have been extremely friendly and kind, which is really nice for us americani who don't always know what we're doing.

Anyway, that's just about all I've got for now. I'm going to try to post again tomorrow after I get back from Art History class in Florence to talk about my recent trips that I've taken. Plus, I should have brand-new pictures from our class at the Uffizi Museum to share. 

Allora... a domani! Ciao ragazzi!

Finally a new post! (Side trip update)

Okay, so I have officially failed at my attempt to regularly post on here. I'm sorry friends!! If I were to say that the past couple weeks have been INSANE, it would be an understatement. But, they have been amazing!

Let's see if I can try to catch up a little bit...

The last time I posted was about my weekend trip to Firenze. Since then, I have visited Pisa, Montepulciano, and Paris! I'll try to do a highlight reel of those trips before I fill you in a little bit more about life in Arezzo.

Pisa--

Some of my friends were taking a flight out of the Pisa airport, so a few of us decided to tag along and visit the city for the day. It was a great day trip! We took some epic touristy pictures, had lunch, walked around, ate gelato, basically a standard visit to an Italian town. There's not that much to see in Pisa, to be honest, other than the tower and the surrounding area to that. But it was definitely worth it to visit for the day!

Woah look at me stepping on the Leaning Tower of Pisa?!?

We just couldn't resist taking the super touristy pics. Yoliio right??

Montepulciano--

I went to Pisa on a Friday, so the next day on Saturday a different group of my friends all planned a day trip to visit Montepulciano, a smaller town in Tuscany just south of Arezzo. My parents actually stayed there for a while and said it was a beautiful little town. By their input and with some great recommendations from a friend of mine who had visited Montepulciano, we thought it would be a great place to visit a few "cantine" (wine cellars) to have some wine tastings and just explore. We thought it would be a pretty relaxing trip, but it actually ended up being one of the most adventurous days yet!

The story begins with getting off of the train at the Montepulciano station. It's not exactly a main stop, so you have to get off of the train pretty quickly. I was bringing up the rear of our group, and some people were taking a little bit longer to gather things up and leave.... meaning that as I was about to step out of the train, the doors started to close. Literally closing on me. So, I just jumped from the inside of the train onto the platform -- it's higher than just a normal step. It's kind of hard to explain, but basically it was just hilarious because I almost got shut on the train. Suffice it to say, that was just the beginning. We get out of the train station expecting to see a bus station with buses running up to the actual town of Montepulciano, since the city itself is up on a hill about 9 km from the train station. What I'm thinking now is that we should have stopped at the larger Chiusi train station to get the buses, because there definitely weren't any running from the small station we were at. Regardless, we had no clue how to get up inside the city walls... we didn't really want to spring for a taxi and no one wanted to walk 9 km there and back. So, we just kinda started walking down the street to look for a way to get there. We happened upon a little winery and vineyard right down the street, and we started talking to the man working there to see if he knew how we could make our way into Montepulciano. He tried to call some cheaper taxis for us, but nothing was working out. Eventually, he offered to drive us up to the town himself in his own car -- there were 8 of us so he took us 4 at a time and only asked us for 10 euro for each trip. We didn't know what else to do, so... why not? He was awesome!

After essentially hitchhiking into the town, we explored for a little bit and found somewhere to get lunch because all of that thinking and stressing had made us extremely hungry. Lunch was a-mah-zing, and then we made our way to the first wine tasting at a place called Cantine del Redi. It was quite possibly the coolest "store"-- if you can call it that -- that I've ever been to. We walked through a bunch of stone tunnels and saw all their wine casks and barrels... I'm not really sure how to describe it, but let me just tell you it was awesome. Here are some pictures...

We didn't see a single person while we were walking through all of that, but we had been informed that we would eventually make our way to the tasting room. And we did!

Their wine was delicious. Montepulciano is known for a particular kind of wine called Vino Nobile, so I couldn't resist buying one of their good bottles of it to take back to Arezzo. A girl can never have too much variety in wine, am I right?

Anyway, as the day progressed we saw some more cool buildings and architecture and visited two more places where we had wine tastings. Probably one of the most epic things I've done so far was at one of these wineries where they have an Etruscan tomb from 500 BC in their cellars. Not only did we visit this Etruscan tomb, we also shared a bottle of their wine and drank it IN THE TOMB! It sounds creepy, but it wasn't at all (it's not like there are still bodies or anything in there). We had a dance party and just hang out down there. It was a once in a lifetime experience!

There is way more to tell about Montepulciano, but I don't want to go on for too long. Just know that it is definitely worth a visit if you ever have the chance! Just promise me you won't go because it's where they filmed a scene from Twilight's New Moon movie when they were in "Volterra"... Because it is. If you can put that slight mishap aside, Montepulciano is great!

From the movie

My picture of Piazza Grande

Stupid Kristen Stewart. (They added the fountain for the movie)

Montepulciano also has BEAUTIFUL views of the countryside over the city walls. The photos really don't do it justice.

Paris--

What can I say about Paris? The architecture, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower... all of it was just beautiful. I think my favorites were visiting Notre Dame (I even got to hear mass and receive communion there!) and Sacre Coeur along with drinking champagne at night in front of the Eiffel Tower. The Louvre was way more fun than I thought it would be, though. Mona Lisa isn't exactly a postage stamp, but she isn't as cool as the Victory of Samothrace -- in my not-so-qualified opinion. We did have one experience with very rude French people, but overall most people were fine and we had a nice time. The food, especially the bread and the breakfast food, was DELICIOUS! I have to say, I like French bread much more than I like Tuscan bread. If you don't know, Tuscan bread has pretty much no salt in it... so it's very bland.

I also bought a book at a bookstore called Shakespeare & Co. that's close to Notre Dame. Apparently that's where F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway would hang out when they were in Paris. Pretty cool. Oh, and we went to Laduree! It's a place known for its desserts, especially macaroons. It was soooo good. The macaroons were great, but I think my favorite thing I got there was a raspberry tart with passionfruit cream. Seriously, best dessert I've ever had in my entire life. Absolutely worth the 6,70 euro haha.

I said "hi" to Mona for all of you

The Victory of Samothrace, my favorite piece at the Louvre

The crew! In front of the Louvre

Shakespeare & Co.

Notre Dame

Sacre Coeur

Poppin' bottles!

Our first breakfast (plus ham and eggs not shown)... so much food and it was all amazing

Well, I'm running out of time before I have to go get "aperitivi" or pre-dinner drinks with my class and my awesome Italian professor! I will post again soon to update on the happenings in Arezzo! I'm staying in town this weekend, so I should have more time. I love and miss all of you and I hope to hear from you soon! 

Buona giornata!

First week of classes and a trip to Florence!

I now officially have one week of classes here in Arezzo under my belt. We had Monday off for MLK day, so things got started off on Tuesday with Beginning Italian. I'm not actually sure that knowing Spanish is going to help me too much with learning Italian in the beginning because I have found myself slipping into trying to say something in Spanish that means something different in Italian since they are so similar. But, I'm really going to try to pick up a decent understanding of the language while I'm here. Fingers crossed! We also had a short meeting with my Italian Culture through Literature and Film class to make up for missing it on Monday since it is a seminar class that only meets on Monday afternoons for 3 hours. We started reading our first book, Orlando Furioso, and had to read the first 15 "canti" -- or chapters -- by next class. It's actually been pretty interesting! It's kind of the Italian version of an epic like The Odyssey or Don Quixote but it has a lot more storylines and wayyy more characters and separate plotlines... so, like this sentence, it can be hard to follow at times. The first 15 canti were good, though.

I get the feeling that Wednesdays are going to be the coolest days of the school week. That will be when my Renaissance Art History class meets every week. Now this is not your typical art history class where you just look at slides and want to fall asleep the entire time (apologies to my mom, the art history major! haha). Ours is more of a field class, where pretty much every week will consist of traveling to a new location -- whether in Arezzo, Florence, or Rome -- to actually SEE the art while our professor lectures about it. Instead of just looking at a picture of the David, we will be standing in front of it while learning about it. So cool.

My only other class is called Getting to Know Arezzo, and we meet about once a month to do some sort of activity that shows us a little bit of what Arezzo is all about. We had a GTKA class this past Friday that was just so awful... we had a wine-tasting at a local vineyard!

View of the vines and the center of Arezzo in the distance

Life here is so tough, right?

We met up at the OUA center first where Jason and Monica, the faculty-in-residence who teach the class, taught us a little bit about different kinds of wine here in Tuscany and the different standards they can be categorized into, from "Indicazione Geografica Tipica" (IGT), to "Denominazioni di Origine Controllata" (DOC), to "Denominazioni di Origine Controllata e Garantita" (DOCG) and what rules the winemakers have to follow in order to fit these categories. Then we made our way to the vineyard (its name is La Striscia) which was just a little while outside the city walls. Some of the class walked there (about a half hour walk) and some of us took the OUA van. I've been feeling a little sick this past week and it was pretty cold out, so I took the van. I definitely want to walk through that area at some point, though, because even driving through it was beautiful. Anyway, we toured the vineyard, saw the vines (not exactly in bloom, unfortunately... drawback of it being January), and where they make the wine itself. Then we headed into their cute little room where we tasted 3 of their wines and they made us antipasti and lunch. It was great! I even ended up purchasing one of their Chianti wines to share with my mom when she comes to visit -- Surprise Mom!! :)

When we got back from the wine-tasting, a few of my friends and I spontaneously decided to join some more people from our program on a train to Florence that left in about 2 hours from then! Yay for last minute decisions, haha! We stayed in a hostel there that was actually much nicer than I had ever heard about hostels being... I'm afraid that now I might be spoiled. It was pretty much like a hotel with bunk beds. Anyway, it was just a great weekend! We went out on Friday night to dinner, a few bars, and a discoteca, and then we woke up on Saturday to shop and walk around. It is just a beautiful city and I can't wait to go back about 5 more times for class!

Sorry I'm kind of shorting you on the details, but I need to go get ready to head to mass at the Duomo here in Arezzo. I'll post a few pictures here but I plan on uploading some to Facebook later tonight. I didn't take too many in Florence, sort of because I knew I would be back, and also because one of my friends, Amanda, took some great ones with a much better camera than mine, haha. But don't worry, there will be plenty more when I go back to visit Firenze again -- literally at least 4 times just from my Art History class.

So, for now, buona giornata! (have a good day!)

La Striscia

Florence