My italian progress

I apologise for a month (a month!) between posts.

Truly, it has been a busy time for me as a language student.  I've now progressed to the top of intermediate italian, which has been an incredible amount of study over the past nine weeks.  At the moment I'm tackling the passato remoto, which any italian speaker will tell you, is an oft-used tense.   I have one more exam to go on the 22nd of this month, and that's as far as I think my brain will manage at this juncture.

At some stage I'll stack up all my language texts from the school, additional bits of printed matter from the many history walks I've taken with Silvia, the museum guides in italian; and the extra bits of material my language exchange buddies have given me and I'm sure it'll be a surprising amount of paper.

Some words continue to stump me and some verbs are just too close in spelling not to mix up, but all in all I can understand most of what I hear, have a conversation with the locals, make a joke in italian and have the beginnings of an italian rrrrrrr in my pronunciation.  This last one is a killer for me.  Try as I might, my "r" sound is disappointingly anglo-saxon.  A bit of wine helps!

So, I'm sure I'll look back on my time here with a lot of love.  It's an amazing city, Rome, for all it's traffic and chaos.

 

Living here in Trastevere means we are in the centre of city, and we can choose to walk over the Ponte Sisto to the Campo dei Fiori, along the Tiber to the Vatican and on to our new favourite part of Rome, Prati (Jim's discovery, and an area he spends quite a bit of time in), or over the Ponte Garibaldi with a right-hand turn at the Largo Argentina to the Campidoglio and the Colosseum.

 

Today we had a bit of a shopping spree over at Prati - a very satisfying pasttime for people under the weather with colds - followed by a late lunch in the Campo dei Fiori, photographed by Jim prior to devouring.  Tonight I've taken a run over the bridge down to Tiber Island, and we're about to head out to our favourite wine bar in Trastevere for an aperitivo before dinner.

 

I have another post to put up on our weekend away at Casperia in a day or two.