Warning: Another freakishly and abnormally long post, kind of like Barbie’s legs—if she were an actual person she wouldn’t even be able to stand up, etc., etc. Again, you’ll be rewarded for your patience if you read all the way to the end. Another present waiting!
In case you were wondering, HUF actually doesn’t stand for Harding University in Florence at all. It stands for Harding University in Food. Because I just ate more food than should be humanly possible to stuff into your body at the villa taste-testing dinner we just had. Oh. My. Goodness. I feel like I’m about to physically explode into a thousand million pieces. But it was honestly one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten, if the strangest—yes, I, Kellum Tate, the girl who as a three year-old would eat nothing but mushrooms and cold hotdogs and macaroni and cheese—have branched out. A lot.
And there you go with another reason to move to Tuscany. Because the food is to die for. Literally. I ate so much I am going to die. Happily, but die nonetheless.
Anyways, yes, I’ve been bad at posting, but if you had any idea how busy things have been then you wouldn’t complain. So… don’t.
On Wednesday, we had a day trip to San Gimignano and Montereggiano—yeah, I can’t pronounce that last one either. We got up way earlier than my steadily more exhausted body was prepared for and boarded a charter bus that went bouncing off across la campagna toscana (Tuscan countryside… be impressed with my mad Italian skillz) for about an hour and a half to our first stop, the medieval town of San Gimignano. (And just for the record… when I say “bouncing,” just picture the slowest, windingest, unable-to-see-in-front-of-the-bus-est ride you can imagine. Needless to say, Julia Rose, one of the Engels’ daughters, totally lost her breakfast, and Chelsie became the butt of many is-it-really-morning-sickness jokes… okay not really, but we were all thinking it.) Here’s a picture (I didn’t take it… I don’t have any from this far away):
Also, here are the links to the pictures that I took. Yes, there are a lot, but trust me, you’ll be glad you took the five minutes to look through them. They’re pretty swell, I think.
Pope Photo Album I
Pope Photo Album II (much shorter, promise)
Just for a little bit of background information (I know just how much you guys love it when I turn into your own personal walking, talking, typing encyclopedia so this is just for you), San Gimignano was a medieval town founded in the third century by the Etruscans (the ancient people who inhabited Tuscany way a long time ago that left lots of pottery and stuff but not much else) and first mentioned in historical records in the tenth century. However, it gained its fame first as a resting place for pilgrims on their way to Rome; if you look through my pictures, you’ll see one of a tiny section of Romanesque building that looks older than everything around it, fashioned from white marble—this is the only surviving part of the monastery that once ran the length of the town and housed pilgrims on their journey.
Today, San Gimignano is largely famous because of its fourteen towers, which you can see in the above photo. Fascinatingly, this is only a fraction of the number of towers the town originally boasted; at its peak, San Gimignano had seventy tours, which probably made it look like a miniature, medieval New York City. Even more interestingly, these towers didn’t serve a military purpose, and in fact, didn’t serve much purpose at all except to impress the neighboring towns. The wealthy families all wanted the loftiest towers they could afford to build so that all the other wealthy families would get jealous so that they could squabble and marry off their daughters to richer families and start blood feuds and do all those other things that wealthy families did in those days. Over the centuries, a few of the ancient towers fell down, but most of them were dismantled during the reign of the Medici Grand Duchy (yep, that’s pronounced the way you think it is, and yes, you’re allowed to laugh) because the Medici didn’t want the Gimignanians (no, of course I didn’t make up that word) to think they were better than the Medici.
But no one is better than the Medici so honestly I don’t know why they were worried… but that’s just me.
It is also worth noting that San Gimignano hosted both Machiavelli and DANTE at one point or another. Dante was pretty much everywhere. It’s a little bit of a joke with our group, as you can see from the titles of my Facebook photo albums.
We went into the church of San Gimignano where there were a ton of ancient frescos on the walls of the church, a fairly rare occurrence since most of the churches in Italy, even though most of them are as old as the one in San Gimignano, had their medieval frescos when the Renaissance and its (obnoxiously boring and classical) style of architecture hit the market. The frescos were beautiful; one of the side-aisles depicted scenes from the Old Testament (including one where God was pulling Eve out of Adam’s side, which was rather creepy, and another rather awkward one depicting the story of Noah and his sons and the exposure of his nakedness) and the opposite side aisle depicted scenes from the New Testament. However, most striking—and when I say striking, I mean “striking fear into the heart of all who look upon it”—was the fresco at the narthex of the church. (Oh yeah, look at me whipping out my fancy new architectural terms… ah-hem. Sorry. It just means the back of the church.) It was a Last Judgment scene, something popular throughout the different art and architectural time periods, but this one was the most terrifying of all. The different deadly sins were divided up into different regions of hell, and each was being punished according to his crime. For instance, the gluttons were all sitting around a table being forced to eat by demons; those guilty of avarice, which I think is a fancy form of greed, are trapped on their backs while demons poop coins into their mouths… and, if you can imagine, these were really the tamer of the punishments. Never seen anything so explicit in my life and this was inside a church from the Middle Ages. No wonder they all went to church.
After this, we were free to do whatever, and of course I did what I do best—whip out the camera and go wherever my lens points me. In Italy, my lens usually points me at laundry lines, so I ended up following one laundry line after another, through one “Passo Carrabile” sign after the next (which, if you’ve looked at my pictures, you would know that this means “Don’t come through this door under any circumstances unless you have a camera), until… well… I looked up from my camera, glanced around, and realized rather suddenly that I had no idea where I was. Somehow or another I’d managed to get myself on the backside of the city, outside the town walls, and it was getting rather close to our meeting time, too. At this point, I experienced a principle first mentioned in the Bible: the pull of the flesh and the pull of the spirit. The pull of the spirit, or logos, or the logical reasonability inside all of us, said, “Kellum, you have to go find the others now. Put the camera away and figure out where the heck you are and how the heck to get back to where you need to be.” The pull of the flesh, however, pointed at the poppies growing along the top of the wall, nicely framed by barbed wire, and said, “Take a picture!”
I obliged quite happily to the latter.
Luckily, I got to take pictures and still find my way back to where I needed to be—I’ve never been so happy to see a road sign as I was when I saw the one reading “Centro” with a little area pointing towards the center of town—but luckily I was just late enough that I couldn’t get the free gelato that we were getting. Which means that for the second time in a row, I’ve managed to stick to my goal of absolutely-under-no-circumstances-are-you-allowed-to-have-more-than-two-small-gelatos-per-week! Hooray!
After we left San Gimignano, we headed about twenty minutes away to the much, much smaller town of Montereggiano, which Dante mentioned in the Divine Comedy… what a shock. There was actually a street called Via Dante Alighieri. Anyways, the town is still completely contained in its ancient walls, and in its entirety it is only about the length of a football field. Kyle bought us all tickets to go up to the top of the wall, where you could walk along a completely see-through, shaking metal grate to get a gorgeous view of the surrounding countryside. And… I would just like to point out that for the first time in my entire life when confronted with heights, I did not panic, freak out, dislocate anyone’s wrist from grabbing on too tightly, or really feel afraid at all. I have no idea why, but it was utterly refreshing to be able to enjoy the view without feeling like my body was about to, for no reason at all, take control of itself and fling me into oblivion without the first thought to what my brain wanted to do. Also quite funny was the fact that a lot of the girls were wearing skirts, and as it was a windy day, this created quite the Marilyn Monroe effect—pretty funny, not going to lie.
There was a well in the middle of the main piazza, and when I see main piazza I mean the only piazza which took up most of the square footage (meterage?) of Montereggiano. Megan and Yaeger and Andrew all sang “I’m Wishing” from Snow White into it. I have to say, I kind of love our group.
Then it was back across Tuscany, bouncing up and down and trying to sleep and failing miserably until finally arriving at La Casa de Roberto e Ramona… Robbie and Mona’s condo! It was a pretty swell little apartment, too, cozy but very well-functioning and all kinds of original art on the walls. They had cooked us a fantabulous meal of American food (which I think a lot of people are missing, even though I feel like I could keep eating Italian style for the rest of my life… I’m telling you, the Arno runs through my veins) and a birthday cake for Molly, who turned 21 that day. After eating, we took a hike through the Tuscan hills to see the sun setting behind a ridge that had a castle perched atop it that has been in the same familiy for over eight hundred years.
And finally it was back to the villa for sleep…
… and then I slept for the entire next day, basically, during class, during lunch, and then all afternoon, and nothing much happened except…
Free travel got planned! We—myself, Kelli, Beth, and Katie—are going to leave from Pisa for Lisbon, where we will be staying in this sweet hostel in one of the oldest parts of town. However, we’re not really doing much in Lisbon at all, but instead taking two day trips out, one to a coastal town called Cascais where you can rent bikes and ride down the coast, and the second one to a national park with “the only remaining examples of primitive Mediterranean vegetation,” which is definitely what we’re going for, and definitely not for the beaches that are so beautiful that even I, Kellum Tate and hater of all things beachy, am excited to go see. Then we’re night-training to Seville, where we will see the world’s third largest cathedral (Gothic architecture, squee!) and the Alcazar, this really old palace that has been added onto throughout the centuries and includes examples of Moorish, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture all in one building and is absolutely fabulous. That night we’re training to Barcelona, where we will spend two days seeing the city proper, doing things like the Picasso Museum, the world’s longest park bench, La Sagrada Familia (the cathedral set to be finished in 2026 and the world’s most-visited construction site), and a CHOCOLATE MUSEUM OMG OMG OMG! The third day, we’re taking another day trip to Costa Brava, which has wonderful beaches again where we can pretend to be rich and also go to the SALVADOR DALI MUSEUM OMG OMG OMG OMG… he’s basically like the art version of chocolate to me. After that, we’re training forever and ever and ever all the way back to Florence.
It’s going to be the grandest adventure ever ^_^
Then, as if this blog post weren’t already reaching a length unparalleled by anything as yet seen by mankind, yesterday, Friday, we had our third on-site class in Florence, involving a visit to the church of Santa Croce and the Bargello, the National Museum of Sculpture. I’ll say one sentence about Santa Croce, so you won’t get too bored: It is run by the Franciscan monastic order, it’s mostly Gothic in style, and because of its low elevation in comparison to the Arno River, during the horrible floods of 1966 it was completely flooded with about a foot of mud, ruining many precious works of art that have taken decades of restoration (the international aid was absolutely incredible, particularly from the young people, called Angels of the Mud, who rushed to the city to do what they could… Robbie’s dad was one). After that was the Bargello… and I pitched an absolute fit because the piece of sculpture that we’d been talking about for weeks in class and which was first introduced to me in AP Modern European History my tenth grade year as the “youthful, sexy David” and that I’ve wanted to see ever since was on loan. Even the Michelangelos couldn’t distract me from the absence of Donatello’s David. I was not pleased.
I got over my annoyance, though, once we finally got food… at a Mexican restaurant, of all places. And let me tell you, it was utterly delicious, especially since I had just been craving Mexican food when Mom posted pictures of the fam eating at the local Mexican joint Habanero’s. Of course, it was served Italian style, which essentially means that you get about a hundred courses and by the end of it you feel so gorged that even clapping for the cooks is an effort (which Robbie always gets us to do, and if it’s in a more intimate setting, like someone’s house or somewhere that he knows the workers, Robbie also gets us to sing them a hymn).
After that, Chad and I wandered around Florence for a few hours, not doing much of anything except walking in all the really ritzy stores, incredibly high-end overpriced stores (we’re talking one hundred Euro, about one hundred and fifty dollars, for a T-shirt) and pretending to be able to shop in really ritzy, incredibly high-end overpriced stores—at one point we had a pretend argument about this gigantic ring that I “wanted for my birthday” and “couldn’t I have it now?” Quite fun, I won’t lie. I also bought three pairs of these highly cheap, unbelievably cool and funky earrings and Zane’s present for only nine Euros, and we also got four free bracelets out of the deal, too. Then, of course, since I’d been saving up the calorie debt all week, we went to the Most Heavenly Gelato place and perched up on the retaining wall next to the Arno and ate gelato for a while (I got the most wonderful coconut, as usual, and cookies-flavored, which basically shorted out my brain, and Chad got cheesecake, which literally tasted like real cheesecake, texture and everything).
And now we’re here, basically.
I would like to point out that the word “pulchitrude” means “beauty.” How in the world does such an ugly word mean “beauty?”
I would additionally like to point out that today, the Italian Google is in the shape of Tetris cubes because of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Tetris or something. However, the U.S. version of Google isn’t doing that. You lose, America, you lose.
Also, I would like to say that riding back on the bus from Robbie and Mona’s house Wednesday night, my nose was pressed against the glass like a kid looking at the window displays in New York City at Christmas time. Luckily, no one talked to me—I don’t think I could have spoken because my throat was all squeezed shut like a bad allergic reaction to a bee sting (how’s that for a horribly inappropriate metaphor for how your throat feels when you’re not quite crying?). Why? Because Tuscany is just so unbelievably beautiful. And at sunset, when the sun opens up its gates and a huge flood of liquid gold pours out onto the land and makes the most ugly landscape appear lovely, Toscana is beyond words, beyond photography equipment, beyond any comprehension apart from the experiential. The land here is older than old, the patterns of the crops and the woods and the fallow fields dating back to feudal times and some features, the rolling hills and the ancient cypress trees and the rocks fallen in a pattern too regular to be natural, even further back, further and further back into the recesses of time. And at sunset, all of that time suddenly gushes to the surface, a geyser of memory and emotion and beauty that hits you full on in the chest and rattles you to the core. It’s like I’m a harp string, and when looking, bare and unshielded to this rush of glorious natural wonder, God reaches down from heaven and plucks that string, and my entire being vibrates to the tune of a song so old no one for centuries has remembered the words, but they continue to sing it.
………
P.S. The prize is a postcard. Name and address into the comment box and you’ll get one.
The New Infamy 