Wine Town and Gelato Festival- a souvenir -As "Wine Town" festival participants, Brian and I each got a nice wine glass to carry around Florence with us. (We also each got a pouch on a necklace so we would have a place to store our glasses between tasting venues. I'm not kidding - we had wine glass jewelry.) We brought these glasses back home with us, and in the past year, they have been our favorite wine glasses. I write this post now, because one of them was broken tonight. Like so many of our days in Florence, we stayed in the apartment through lunch, and then ventured out for the evening. Both the Wine Town festival and Gelato Festival began the day before, and we already had our tickets (and wine glasses). We went through Piazza Santa Maria Novella and Piazza Republica, which were common parts of our walk, and we sampled a few varieties of gelato. Our main goal, though, was to see as many of the performances associated with the wine festival as we could. Tastings of wine were not cheap, and so we had no more than our initial tickets provided - maybe 7 over two days. Performances and Wine at Palazzo VecchioIn a room of Palazzo Vecchio, in which we had never been, we saw a couple of unusual dance performances. I find it difficult to describe the first - I hope the pictures help. The central male dancer was strapped into a very large hemisphere of steel. Instead of having his feet on the ground, his lower half was converted to round ball; as he leaned and twisted, he could roll the ball around in a dance.
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Seeking A Day Without RainOur last weeks in Scotland were characterized by near-freezing temperatures and rain, which often became ice on the sidewalks. We traveled on foot wherever we went, and our enjoyment of walking deteriorated as our tolerance for long hours in the cold and wet diminished. In our final week, we felt that we needed to pack in a little more local travel and sightseeing, but the weather was prohibitive - as were the late sunrise, early sunset, and limited train schedule as Scotland prepared to celebrate Hogmanay (New Year's Eve). On our last Saturday evening, we sat down with a map, BBC Weather (online), and the Scotrail train schedule (online), and tried to plan a trip. Every reasonable destination for a day trip had significant rain predicted for Sunday: Dunkeld, Edinburgh, Stirling, Glasgow, Inverness, Dundee, and St. Andrews (and Perth would be rainy too). I followed the train routes on the map and looked for smaller towns, hoping for a clear forecast and a reasonable train schedule. One destination fit the requirements - Arbroath. A Celebration of the Florentine Lily and the White NightNote: I write this post in honor of today's iris - the first to open in my yard. "The Florentine Lily" is an iris that grew wild in Tuscany hundreds of years ago. The iris became the basis of the "Giglio" - the symbol of Florence. It was first seen on flags in 1290. While similar to the fleur-de-lis, the giglio has two stamen in addition to the three upright petals. It also has a rough, root-like area. Here is more info. Second Note: This post is quite long, as was this day. I know I'm supposed to write about specific days, but as I look through the calendar of the months in Perth, Scotland, I am somewhat overwhelmed by how things got packed in. Let me give you a run down of 8 very full weeks: Dundee and Perth
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Capuchin Bones, Borghese Trees, and TaxisBecause the program that Brian was teaching through was not simply a full-semester program, but a pairing of two half-semesters (where the students were in London for half and Florence for half), our Florence experience had a sense of repetition. With each group of students there were repeated experiences - introduction and farewell group dinners, special class meetings, and travel. We went to Rome twice with the students, each time for three days. April 28th was our last day on the second of these trips. It was also the last time I was in Rome. After the free breakfast in the hotel, we passed by the cat sanctuary and Palazzo Montecitorio, the home of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (one of the houses of Parliament). Some hours after we passed this location, there was a politically-motivated shooting. While this event did not affect us at all, it raised the tension levels in the city, which we did feel on our later taxi ride to the train station.
"Our Big Year"... refers to the academic year 2012-2013 when we spent the fall semester living in Perth, Scotland, teaching courses at Perth College, University of the Islands and Highlands, and the spring semester living in Florence, Italy with the Associated Colleges of the Midwest London & Florence: Arts in Context program through Monmouth College. I did not write these posts during that year, nor did I keep much of a journal. But I did write a simplified list of each day's activities in a calendar. In these blog posts, I will relay what some of our days were like and expand the stories of each day with more writing and photographs. Here are a couple of pages of the calendar. The block for each day is only 1.75" wide and 1.5" tall. Some days I really had to cram to get it all in; somedays were pretty simple, and I could hardly fill the block. There were many "red letter" days, like walking to the top of Kinnoull Hill in Perth for the first time, visiting the Isle of Iona and the Isle of Staffa on the west coast of Scotland, climbing the scaffolding around the main altar of Santa Croce in Florence to see the newly restored frescos, or running into Alain de Botton in the streets of Venice. I look forward to reflecting on those days and sharing these stories with you. I'm not sure where to start... We were gone for 304 days.We were in three countries, and we visited approximately 25 cities. I haven't tried to count the number of photos I took, But I will include some of the best ones here. A note to bird watchers (and movie goers):
While our "Big Year" had nothing to do with bird sightings, our referring to it as a "big year" comes from the name of the birding competition that we learned about through the 2011 film, The Big Year. |
AuthorInterdisciplinary Artist: Archives
March 2015
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