Cinecittà Mostra - Cinecittà Shows Off

Walk around Rome for long enough and you'll start wincing at the architecture of the fascist era.   Strictly symmetrical, with a focus on utility of design, these buildings present a no-holds-barred functionality with little decorative value.

Under Mussolini's unified Italy, this modernist style was adopted in the architecture of the 1920's and 1930's, with Rome's Cinema City ("Cinecittà") built to this style in 1937.  Originally constructed for propaganda-film purposes, the complex was bombed during the second world war, and following the war Cinecittà became a misplaced-persons camp.

By the 1950's Cinecittà was once again making movies.  Legendary classics such as the Fellini films La Dolce Vita and Casanova, the american blockbuster Ben Hur and Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet were created here.  And in more recent years Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, and the HBO series Rome were filmed here, too.

Friday at noon we finished our last grammar session for the week and took the Metro line A out to the furthest point on the Anagnina line to visit Cinecittà.  Cinecittà lies about 10km south-east of Rome.

We arrived at the studio in time to take a guided tour in italian, with a handful of us standing in the sunlight listening to our guide recount the early years of the complex, the famous movies that were produced by equally-famous directors and how the intricate crafting of movie sets involves construction of massive wooden mounts, covered in tons of polystyrene, gesso and paint.  And also, how the internal sets are created, used, dissembled and stored in the giant warehouses that stand on the boundaries of the Cinecittà.

We had a great time walking over the huge Gangs of New York set (now looking even more dilapidated) and the impressive sets of the Forum and Subura of the Rome series.  Buildings of imperial Rome are painted in the pompeiian colours of red and ochre, with the "ancient" stones of the forum leading into the jumble of the subura, where the upper-storeys of the houses almost touch each other across narrow alleyways.

Afterwards, we walked though the mostra (exhibition) of sight and sound - a long tunnel-like space is covered in moving images on the floor, ceiling and walls from Cinecittà's epic films - ducking into various smaller rooms to see post-production, costuming and internal movie sets. 

We all agreed it was a fantastic experience.  Although we found the commentary difficult to follow in rapid, non-school italian, it was another facet of learning the language and great to see another side of the city.

After catching the metro to the San Giovanni stop, we ended our day drinking Sauvignon Blanc from the Fruili region at an enoteca in Monti, before walking back down past the Colosseum and Vittorio Emanuele monument in the early evening. 


At the Largo Agentina we said our goodbyes to Karina, who leaves today to fly back to Belgium before Juliana and I resume school again on Monday.  Its been great having Karina around and I'm going to miss her.  The great thing about being here in Rome, aside from learning the language and enjoying the city, is the fantastic friendships I've made over the past few weeks.  We all plan to meet back in Rome in the not-too-distant future.

Exams over, normal blogging resumes

Yesterday I celebrated, along with my fellow students, passing exams and moving on to the next level of italian.  We've all had a pretty hectic week of revision, experienced some jitters, and had lots of practice conversation and review of those pesky past tenses, passato prossimo and imperfetto.

By now, our group is able to converse in jerky sentences about most day-to-day things in italian.  Often we mess up the tenses or use the wrong pronouns, but we're all progressing in the language.  And after a couple of glasses of wine after school, we all seem to  understand each other :-)

Last night, by way of celebration, we started off with drinks at the Cul-de-Sac, a tiny wine bar with a great selection of bottles.  Cul-de-Sac is in the Piazza Pasquino, the square abutting the Piazza Navona and the piazza is home to Pasquino, one of Rome's talking statues.

Pasquino dates back to the 3rd century BC, and was unearthed in the Parione district of Rome in the 1500's.  He's been the mouthpiece for Roman residents for over 500 years, mostly being covered with anti-government (and at one time, anti-papacy) satirical poems.  Walk past on most days and the statue will be pasted with anti-establishment slogans and messages.  From the outside tables at Cul-de-Sac, you can face Pasquino and raise a glass to him.

 

After dinner in the truly lovely Via della Pace, more wine, and a mixture of italian, english, french and flemish conversation we headed off home in different directions.  My walk took me through the Campo de' Fiori, over the Ponte Sisto and on to the Via delle Cinque.  It's been warmer and drier this week, and crowds of people were out enjoying the clear night.  At 11.30, some groups of revellers were only just sitting down to dinner, and my local bar, the Ombre Rosse, was hotting up.

 

I had all good intentions of heading over to the Monti district today.  It is a characterful, up-and-coming part of Rome and I've heard so many people praise its restaurants, tiny winding streets and artisan workshops. Monti is located slightly uphill away from the Colosseum and is described as a much less touristed, more "local" part of the city.

 

I took a detour through the Pigneto district and on to the Trevi Fountain, specifically looking for the Ace of Cups, incorporated into the Trevi fountain during construction.  A local curiosity, I learned about it through one of my italian tutors back at home.  At the time I made a mental note to look for the enormous stone cup, created by the fountain's architect Nicola Salvi.  The story goes that as work on the fountain progressed, a local barber who had a shop in the piazza was very loud in his criticism.  Salvi put the big travertine cup in front of Barbershop to block the barber's view (and his criticism, presumably). 

 

Up behind the Trevi, and approaching the Quirinal Hill, I headed back down past the recently re-opened excavations of Trajan's Market.

 

Around 2pm I was getting hungry and the rain started to fall.  Having come out without an umbrella I was getting drenched, and eventually ducked into a doorway near Trajan's column.  That doorway opened into the Enoteca Provincia Romana. 

 

So, the upshot is, I still haven't visited Monti.  But I spent a fantastic couple of hours looking over the excavations of Trajan's Market from my table inside the enoteca while the rain fell.  The Provincia Romana showcases products from the Lazio district (of which Rome is part) - from Affile to Zaporolo, my menu informed me - and a very good lunch, with wine, is 15 euros.

 

Tonerelli filled with spinach and ricotta, sauced with slow braised pork and sage is the best pasta I've ever eaten.  With a glass of light red wine, and espresso and biscotti to follow, I'm in food heaven.
 

Obelisks and Obika

I've had a great relaxing weekend in Rome. The weather has been clear and sunny (albeit cold), and there's been a good mix of study and leisure.

Saturday started with a school trip up to San Giovanni in Laterano, the "official" church of the papacy. One of the great things about my language school are the cultural trips, usually involving some aspect of ancient Rome. These take place every Wednesday evening and some Saturdays, and are usually led by Silvia, a historian engaged by the school. Silvia's enthusiasm and knowledge of ancient, medieval and baroque Rome is fantastic. And her italian is slow, clear and easy to understand :-)

Quindi, Saturday morning saw me crossing the Tiber at the Ponte Garibaldi and haring off to the Lateran for our meet-up. Despite the cold and my lightweight coat, I was almost steaming by the time I sped up towards the obelisk of San Giovanni.

Don't you find the obelisks of Rome fascinating? Trophies of Rome's conquering heroes, 13 of these giants exist in piazzas all over the city. Eight were shipped to Rome from Egypt between AD 40 and AD 400, using specially constructed ships to carry the weight of the stone. The obelisks were transported down the Nile to Alexandria, and across the mediterranean sea to Ostia. Pliny wrote about these ships in his Natural History, and it's thought ships carried the obelisks suspended under the water to bear the weight. 

At 11am, our small group huddled at the base of the obelisk under a bright blue sky and listened to the exploits of the Emperor Constantine - his creation of the original church in the 4th century and his battle against Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge - and the remodelling and enlargement of the  church under Pope Sixtus V, and further embelishment  by Borromini in the 1600's. And we learned too that the Lateran obelisk originally stood in the Temple of Karnak in Thebes before Constantine had it shipped to Rome in 357. Standing first in the Circus Maximus, the obelisk was moved to its present location in 1588. As Rome's tallest, it can be see directly from the Colosseum taking the approach along the Via di San Giovanni in Laterano.

 

The interior of the cathedral of San Giovanni is certainly magnificent but we were all captivated by the cloister. Curved and twisted columns, inlaid with mosaic, line the covered porticos of the cloister, guarded at each of the entrances to the central garden by stone lions and tiny sphinxes. Along the walls of the cloister, sarcophagi, statuary and fragments of columns are embedded.

We crossed over to the Scala Sancta, the sacred steps, and watched groups of people climb the ancient steps, thought to have been brought to Rome in 326 from Jerusalem. Medieval legend says these are the steps Jesus Christ ascended to meet Pontius Pilate. Pilgrims and the devout climb the stairs on their knees as an act of holy indulgence. At the top of the stairs is a sanctum containing an ancient relic, the icon of Santissimi Salvatore Acheiropoieton (or "not made by human hands" - that is, the work of angels). During Easter the Scala Sancta are climbed by thousands of pilgrims who make the journey to Rome.

 

Our Saturday tour was a long one, with about four hours touring the Lateran complex. We had a late lunch on our way back down to the city, afterwards walking down though the late afternoon sunlight to the spot that always seems to be Rome's marker, the Vittorio Emanuele Monument.

 

As always, after a few hours of italian my brain is tired. But on Saturday I was bodily tired too - a lot of walking (10-12 kilometres)! Today has been a relaxing day, with a walk through the Largo Argentina onto Rome's Via Condotti and the Spanish Steps.  The winter sales continue: Hermes, Armani, Max Mara,  Prada and Furla are clearing their stores for Spring.  Bargain hunters are everywhere and the Via del Corso was packed with people.  There were so many people sidewalks were abandoned; most were walking along the city streets.

 

It was all a bit crazy, so for sanity's sake I dropped into Obika, the mozzarella bar in the Campo de' Fiori for a glass of wine and a plate of San Daniele prosciutto and fresh cheese:

 

before heading back for a long and newsy Skype with Jim, followed by an hour with one of my conversation exchange buddies, also via Skype, on my weekend in italian. 

Monday marks the beginning of my fourth school week, with an exam at the end of this week to (hopefully) move up into the next level.

Wish me luck!

It's not all wine and roses, y'know

I'm going to come clean: I'm finding it tough being a student.

I know, I know - you think I'm sitting about in cafes, drinking endless cups of espresso and ambling idly off to school for a couple of hours, don't you?  I can relate to this, because that's pretty well what I envisaged for myself.  I'd just put in a little bit of effort and somehow, miraculously, the language would just wash all over me.

This is emphatically not the case.

For starters, every weekday, for three and a half hours, I sit in a schoolroom listening to, or talking in, italian.  No breaking into english.  No sneakily using the internet to translate a tough sentence (though trust me, Google Translate does not translate; neither does Babelfish).  No opening your dictionary and checking out a word.  And its rapid-fire italian too.  Don't know, or can't differentiate, the difference between ho sbagliato (I made a mistake) and ho svegliato (I woke up)?  Well, avanti! Work it out and move on!

On top of that, there's about four hour's study a day, to get through the set revision and prepare for the next class.

On top of that, there's the need to read as much as possible, talk as much as possible in everyday situations, and watch the news, documentaries, sit-coms, commercials - in fact anything that will help with the spoken word.

When Friday evening comes around, I feel quite liberated.  I excitedly plan the walks I'll take through Rome, the museums I'll visit, the shopping I'll do and the leisurely coffees I'll drink.  I don't do Friday's revision because I'm planning my weekend, chatting with Jim on Skype, or messing around on the internet in a devil-may-care, hey-what-the-heck-it's-Friday sort of a mood.

So I spend Saturday sitting in cafes, smiling at everyone, strolling down to Trastevere or over to the Campo de' Fiori, and having a bit of social time.  Then I realise it's Sunday and a) I haven't done my laundry or any shopping and more importantly, b) I haven't done my homework and it's all a mad scramble again for Monday.

Sometimes I feel like this:

When I want to feel like this:

Despite which, I have to say, I'm loving it. My brain is engaged, and sometimes I can grammatically make myself understood. I actually get a kick out of having a conversation with the cashier at my local supermarket, or an even longer conversation with one of my language exchange buddies. Just today, I talked for half an hour about the concept of dumpster diving, and the adoption of food-scavenging, by the X- and Y- generation middle-classes. I might just nail this language yet.

Link: A taste of school life

Want to envisage what learning italian in Rome is like?   Check out this video made by my school http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQgQMsZvZM8. 

Most of our teachers are featured, including blonde Silvia who takes us around Rome on historic walks with such enthusiasm and knowledge for her city, and the lovely bearded Claudio, who makes Tuesday dinners, and weekend tours, so much fun.

 

Down to San Clemente

This afternoon I found myself standing outside the Colosseum, with some of my fellow students in probably the coldest Rome day yet.  At 2pm in the afternoon, it was 3 degrees.

I've already mentioned that my language school, the Leonardo da Vinci scuola, runs extra activities during the week for students.  These range from Monday tandems (language exchange) to Tuesday pizzas or pastas, Wednesday history walks with Silvia, Thursday pronunciation classes and Friday or Saturday tours or trekking.

Today we visited the Basilica of San Clemente with Claudio.  We arranged to meet outside the Colosseum Metro stop at 2pm.

I took a detour before meeting up with the group through Rome's Jewish quarter where the restaurants, who specialise in carciofi dishes, were displaying the last of the season's bounty.

These beautiful artichokes are slow braised until tender, then crisp fried in olive oil and served as an antipasto dish, and I plan on trying some before they disappear in the Spring.

After climbing up to the Capitoline Hill past the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, and a very quiet museum office, I headed down past the Roman Forum onto the Via dei Foro Imperiali.  From Trajan's Markets, you can look back to the huge Vittorio Emanuele monument, with the quadrigas on top visible from just about anywhere in Rome.

Rome is very quiet now with only a smattering of tourists.  As we stood fidgeting in the cold, and listening to Claudio recount the history of Nero's Palace, the Great Fire of Rome and the subsequent construction of the Colosseum by the Emperor Vespasian, I was slowly conscious of beginning to pick up more and more italian.  Of course Claudio's expert mime techniques also help with comprehension.

As we made our way over to the Basilica of San Clemente, we passed the excavated gladiator school and stood peering over the edge into the honeycomb of rooms used for training and fighting.  Claudio recounted how the gladiators used a secret tunnel for approaching the Colosseum, no doubt springing into the central arena to much audience surprise.

 
 

I've written about San Clemente before, the three level church that stands just behind the Colosseum in the Via Labicana.  The 12th century church at today's street level is really lovely, with its golden mosaic apse and Cosmatesque marble floor, and its ancient columns of marble and granite.  What makes this church fascinating, though, is that it stands over the footprint of a 4th Century church, and under that, 60 feet down, is an a Roman house of the Flavian period and mithraic temple.  For five euros, you can collect your ticket from the kiosk and descend 2000 years.

As we explored the faded mosiacs of the second level, Claudio told us that scholars have been able to discern the passage from Latin to vernacular italian in the annotated scenes of the life of St Clement.  And there is profanity here too, with the capture of the saint by Sisinnius who exhorts his slaves 'Fili de le pute, traite', which translated means 'Come on, you sons of bitches, pull!'.

 
 

Climbing down to the lower level, once a Roman street, we passed the narrow passage between the private house of wealthy Romans and the public offices, thought to have been the imperial Mint of Rome.  

Within this room, the subterranean waters can be heard rushing below, and a niche cut into the rock shows the water cascading down over the stones.  Claudio told us there were two theories as to the source of the water: it either comes from one of the original aqueducts of Rome, or a lost spring, attributed to the deities.

Talking and Eating in Rome

Finally winter has arrived in Rome!

Today it has poured with rain.  The puddles are several inches deep around Trastevere, and also over on the Via del Corso, where I went today for a meet up with my new languge exchange buddy, Mario.

We met for an hour and a half in the Feltrinelli bookshop cafe (Feltrinelli are the largest chain of bookstores in Italy) and it was challenging and fun.  Although it is a bit daunting to meet a total stranger and mangle their language in front of them, I found Mario a genuinely nice person who was very easy to talk with.  And of course, like most Roman X- and Y-gens, his english is near perfect.

We have agreed to meet up once a week over coffee and split the conversation between italian and english.  This is great for learning in an equitable environment; there is more of a balance when both parties are learning (as opposed to a teaching situation, where the balance is always towards the teacher). I'm hoping I can continue to talk with native speakers via Skype when back home.

Above is the Piazza Navona, photographed from under my umbrella as I walked over to the scuola after my meet-up.

School today was fun - we are currently working in the future tense, with some inventive 'In the future [classmate] will...'. Stories ranged from become a famous actress, play professional soccer, become a prima ballerina, speak italian better than the italians...

I really love my new class, and my classmates are a great bunch of people.  Some of them have come to Rome to live, some are here only briefly, and some have a few months like me.  New people come and go all the time, and today an Australian guy joined our group.  We both got some pleasure out of hearing each others accent and have arranged to hook up at some stage for a drink (something we do better than any other race, we think).

Yesterday I missed my class as I'd previously booked a Context tour before switching to afternoons. The tour took us through some of the food highlights of Rome.

First stop was in the Jewish Ghetto to taste some olive oil from a Tuscan producer, who has opened a small farmshop in the city. The oil was grassy, slightly cloudy, fresh and delicious.

Next stop, for a range of cheese tasting and wine, was at Beppe e i Suoi Formaggi.  An absolute standout was the gorgonzola, paired with nebbiolo wine.  As Beppe, the owner, has married a frenchwoman the store showcases italian and french products. The shelves were stacked with cassoulet, duck confit, foie gras, dried pasta, chocolates and wine.  And the smell of cheeses, when walking in, was pungent and heavenly.

As we walked, our guide explained the eating culture in Rome, and particularly the adherence to the traditional four pastas of Rome  - carbonara, amatriciana, cacio e pepe and gricia.  Gricia deviates only slightly from the amatriciana in that there are no tomatoes in the sauce.  This hails back to when the italians were highly mistrustful of the tomato (related as it is to deadly nightshade).

We continued on over to Rosciolis in the Campo de' Fiori area to taste Rome's best pizza and watch the enormous slabs of dough being worked, prior to going into the oven.  A few minutes later the dough has transformed into  golden and crispy pizza bianca. The pizza chef was a natural showman :-)

Onward into the Campo de' Fiori piazza and to the Norcereria, to taste salame, prosciutto and other cured meats.  One salami was studded with black truffle - it was really something to taste AND smell.

 

By now the rain had really set in, and dripping under our umbrellas, we headed to an artisanal gelateria on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele for gelato.  Vice is a relatively new gelateria in Rome, and has already made a name for itself.  The gelateria uses single-sourced producers for their flavours - sicilian mandarins, lemons from Amalfi, pistachios from Bronte, hazelnuts from Alba.  And the chocolate is made from Valrhona.  The good news is, there's only 4% butterfat in their gelato.  That's better than yoghurt!

Our last stop was to see the coffee roasters at Sant' Eustachio, one of the best and most famous cafes in Rome.  By now our group was ready for the restorative power of espresso (although it was interesting to learn that coffee was banned by the christian church a few hundred years ago, until one particular member of the papacy relented).

 

After our tour finished, I joined one of my fellow travellers to see the presepe (nativity scene) in the church opposite the cafe, before it is dismantled until next Christmas. This one is fantastic in its tiny detail, including the faithful reproduction of the buildings of the Piazza San' Eustachio. Even the tiny bakery has a glowing wood oven!   As the festive season is now officially over, the Christmas lights are beginning to come down, and it'll be quite bare along the Roman streets when the last ones are taken away.