The Lovely Sansepolcro

Sansepolcro really is a wonderful place to study abroad. The longer I am here, the more I like the town I live in. We have been learning a lot about Sansepolcro and the history of the area in our Italy Today course. The town really does have a rich history.

The founding of Sansepolcro is mostly legend. No one knows if it is really true, but it could be. As the story goes, Sansepolcro was founded by two pilgrims, Egidio and Aranco, who were on their way back from the Holy Land. They had a dream and built an oratory and the town began there. Sansepolcro was originally Santo Sepolcro, which means Holy Sepulchure. Egidio and Aranco are carved on to the doors of Sansepolcro’s cathedral.

Sansepolcro became a Roman Colony. In the twelfth century, it consisted of only 6 streets. Sansepolcro is located in Tuscany, but is close to Umbria and Marche. Because of its position, its ownership was continually changing. It was owned by many powerful families at different times. In 1441, the papal state, which was the current owner, sold Sansepolcro to Florence, so it became a permanent part of Tuscany. Sansepolcro natives are extremely proud of their Tuscan heritage. We compared this regional pride to state and regional pride in the US. No North Carolinians want people to think they are from a different state. Sansepolcro became part of Italy when the Italian state was unified on the 20th of September 1870, which is why the street I live on is called XX Settembre, or 20 September.

As a student in Sansepolcro, I have a regular day to day life and I occupy a lot of my time the same way I would back home. In a typical day, we start classes at 9:00 am. We get our own breakfast from the student kitchen, which is stocked with cereal, bread, jam, Nutella, yoghurt, and other common cold breakfast foods. The first class of the day is Italian. I am taking six hours of Italian. We have been doing intensive Italian since we arrived in Sansepolcro and are going to have it every day for an hour and a half until mid October. Then we will switch to regular Italian. After Italian, we will have our other classes, some on Tuesday and Thursday and others on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

We eat lunch at 12:30. Lunch is arguably everyone’s favorite part of the day. We have lunch together Monday through Friday and it is always delicious. I am always surprised by how much food there is. We start with some sort of appetizer, followed by a pasta dish. Italians eat pasta every day. We will then have a meat and a vegetable, and sometimes a dessert. I have noticed while I am here that many Italian foods are made up of local ingredients. As Americans, we eat food from a wide variety of countries and regions. There is much less variety here, and the only places to get something that isn’t Italian are the Chinese restaurant and a Kebob restaurant. I really like the Italian good though, so I don’t go to those often.

Most of the time, we have guests from the community come for lunch. We have had the town’s chief of carabineri, two shop owners who happen to be wonderful opera singers, a local artist, Americans visiting from Nebraska, a couple from New Zealand, a former host family for Meredith College, some Goblin Gelateria employees who are about our age, and a South African amongst others. This is really helpful because then people in town know us and we get to meet people who live here. Sansepolcro is a great place for meeting locals. In the larger cities, we are more likely to meet tourists. We have made several friends in town. The people who owns our favorite café, the Café Gerasmo, know our names! Sometimes we also get to practice Italian at lunch because our guests don’t always speak English.

After lunch, sometimes we have more classes. Right now, I have a class after lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I spend almost all of my time on weeknights in the Palazzo writing papers, reading books, and doing Italian homework. Sometimes we will go to the café or ride bikes around town. We are on our own for dinner. I usually get pizza, eat lunch leftovers, or cook my own food in the student kitchen. There is a grocery store nearby and we have a hot plate, so we are learning how to do a little college style cooking this semester!

We frequently head to the central Piazza for gelato or just to walk around. It is a nice place where people meet each other, walk around, and enjoy each other’s company. This piazza is called the Piazza Torre di Berta. “Torre” means tower in Italian. The piazza actually doesn’t have a tower anymore. It originally had a tall bell tower in the middle, but when the German forces retreated from Sansepolcro in World War II, they blew it up. The people of Sansepolcro didn’t have the money to rebuild it after the war, so there is no tower today. These pictures are ones that Dr. Sara Andreini emailed us of the tower before the war and the piazza after the tower was destroyed. The last two are the piazza today with the plaque where the tower stood.

We have learned a lot more about World War II in Italy in my World War II literature class and in Italy Today. Dr. Andreini invited a man visiting the region from South Africa to come as a guest speaker to Italy Today. His father, Hinton James, was a pilot who flew a Spitfire plane in Italy. Most people don’t realize how truly global World War II was. Countries from around the world that aren’t typically talked about, such as South Africa, New Zealand, Ethiopia, Mexico, India, and many others were a part of the Allied troops.

Hinton James was hit while flying a mission to destroy train tracks that were supplying Germany’s troops. He had to bail out of the plane, but this was before ejection seats. He had to turn the plane upside down, open the cover to the cockpit, and fall out with his parachute. When he landed, he was near Sansepolcro. The German defensive line at one stage was just outside Sansepolcro. He was helped by many different Italian partisans, who were civilians or former Italian military working in resistance to German occupancy and helping the Allies. They helped him get back to the Allied side of the line. Many Italians risked their lives for him and some died. His son, who came to our class, is visiting the whole area with his two sons, and will meet the sister of a man who was executed for helping him escape. We just finished reading about the fronts in Italy in one of our books for WWII Justice and Liberty class called Italy’s Sorrow, so it was really interesting to meet someone with personal connections to the battles we learned about in class. It is a part of the rich history of Sansepolcro and the surrounding area.

This weekend is our first completely independent travel break and I am leaving Tuscany for a few days. I am planning to explore Venice. We are all excited and trying to find hotels and arrange train tickets.

Goodbye for now,

Meredith

Firenze

I had a wonderful time this weekend in Firenze! This trip was so much fun and a wonderful way to start the first of my independent travel experiences. Dr. Webb and John Rose came with us to Florence. Once we arrived, we were on our own to see the city and get back to Sansepolcro on Sunday. I decided to see Florence with some of my good friends: Emily, Patsy, and Meredith. We planned for over a week to figure out what everyone wanted to do and how to fit it all in. We came up with a loose plan and headed off to Florence on Friday morning right after our Italian test. It was a hectic morning, but before we knew it we were on the bus to Arezzo. In Arezzo, we took the train to Florence.

I already like train travel. It is really not that hard to figure out once you know the basics. The trains are pretty much on time and can get you around Italy quickly and efficiently. I would much rather spend time on a train in Italy than on an airplane. Public transportation in Italy is much more convenient than it is in the United States. There is a website for all the train travel in Italy, www.trenitalia.com. We will usually buy regionale tickets, which are some of the cheapest. In the future, I will buy a ticket in the station or in advance and then stamp it in order to validate it just before I get on the train. The train we took from Arezzo arrived in Florence in about an hour. Upon arrival we went to our hotel, a former monastery. It was really nice.

We had to head off in a rush when we arrived because we had found a museum pass that we wanted to get that afternoon. Thanks to some of Emily’s research, we found a pass to all the City of Firenze museums. It included almost every museum we wanted to go to and had a student rate. We figured that it was going to be well worth our money to buy the pass. Florence has some of the world’s finest museums, and they have lines that are several hours long. This pass worked like a reserved ticket, so we felt like VIPs as we walked right in past other tourists who had waited for hours. It was well worth it and saved us a lot of time.

We were able to see the Pitti Palace on Friday night, September 17th. The Pitti Palace is one of the Palaces of the Medici family, who ruled Florence during the Renaissance. It is now an art museum. The next morning, Saturday September 18th, we woke up at the crack of dawn to get a start on our day. The Uffizi museum is at the top of the list for every visitor to Florence, and we wanted to get there early to avoid the crowds. The Ufizzi is the other Palace of the Medici family. This is where some of the world’s most famous art is located. I read in my Italy Today textbook that Italy is home to about two thirds of the World’s art. The Uffizi is home to works by Botticelli, da Vinci, and Piero della Francesa. We saw the “Birth of Venus” and “Primavera”, two very famous pieces of art from the Renaissance painted as long ago as the 1480s. It was edcuational to see the originals of some very famous paintings, and I could tell that Emily and Meredith, who are both majors in the art department, were really glad we had gone to the Uffizi.

After a stroll through the leather market, we headed to the Duomo. Climbing the Duomo was my personal favorite part of the weekend. The Duomo is the cathedralof Florence. Its construction was started in 1296. It is a Tuscan gothic cathedral. The outside is made up of pink, green, and white marble, while the inside feels relatively empty in comparison to the ornate exterior. The Campanile, the bell tower, was added. Filippo Brunelleschi lost a contest to make the doors to the baptistery, but as a result he was free to be able to construct the dome. The dome is called a double-masonry dome because it was made by constructing a thicker inner dome and a thinner outer dome. By choosing this design, the outside of the dome could have a better shape and the inside, which provided the structural support, was protected. This also allowed the dome to be inspected by going in the space between the two domes. The inner dome is seven feet thick at the base.

The only way up the Duomo is by stairs. It takes four hundred and sixty three stairs to get to the top. Climbing up the narrow stairs, I could clearly see how the Duomo had been built as a dome inside a dome. Our staircase went between the two domes. Part of the way through, we could walk around the cathedral at the base of the dome and get a close up view of the fresco on the inside of the dome. It was a lot of hard work to get to the top, but it was well worth it. The view from up there was great and it was like being on top of the world. The Duomo is the highest point in central Florence and I could see the whole city from up there.

My other favorite part of the trip (ok, I guess I have two favorites) was going to the Piazzale Michelangelo at dusk on Saturday night. We took the bus to the park, which is up on a hill on overlooking Florence. We could see the twinkling lights all over the city. The Duomo and other important buildings in town were lit up. We needed to get back to the hotel within ninety minutes because of the validity of our bus tickets. We each bought a card that had 4 tickets on it when we arrived in Florence. Each ticket was good for ninety consecutive minutes. When we get on the bus, we stamp our ticket with the time. We each had one 90 minute ticket remaining when we left for the Piazzale Michelangelo. We figured out which bus to take back in order to do all this within 90 minutes and not have to buy another ticket. It started raining, so we stood at the bus stop and waited and waited and waited. Our bus didn’t come on time.

This meant that our tickets were no longer valid and if an inspector got on the bus, we would be in trouble. So there we were, really far from our hotel, in the dark and pouring rain. Meredith and I decided eventually that the bus wasn’t coming and that we would just wait for the next one, so we went to a little shop to buy new tickets since ours expired. The next bus was not for about twenty minutes. While we were at the shop, the bus arrived. We ran as fast as we could to the bus stop, and miraculously we made it before the bus pulled away.

It was an adventure. Typically though, the city bus runs right on schedule and is easy to use. All I had to do was buy a ticket from just about any store, find a bus stop, read where the route went, get on, and stamp my ticket. You have to remember to stamp your ticket though, because there are inspectors. It is kind of hard to figure out when you are at your stop since there isn’t anyone who speaks English, but if you ask the driver when you get on if the bus goes to your stop and stay at the front, he will kindly tell you when to get off. One driver even gave us walking directions from the stop! Of course, we only partly understoond what he was saying!

Our independent trip back to Sansepolcro on Sunday went smoothly. We were at the train station on time and got on the correct train. Somehow, we had the wrong times written down for the bus back to Sansepolcro though. We ended up having three and a half hours to kill in Arezzo, and most everything was closed because it was Sunday. We ended up eating dinner at a Chinese place. We were Americans in Italy trying to order Chinese food in Italian! The menu included everything from duck to French fries to ravioli to sesame chicken! It was a lot of fun. We finally got back to Sansepolcro late Sunday and are still trying to recover from a fantastic weekend.

The trip to Firenze gave me the confidence I needed to be able to plan the upcoming travel breaks. I am looking forward to seeing where else I end up this semester. Check back in next Friday for more!

Ci vediamo,

Meredith

Il Palio della Balestra

What a whirlwind of colors this past week has been! Sansepolcro has come alive with fire twirlers, people on stilts, flags, parades, dancers, hawks, drums, trumpets, crossbows, and multicolored costumes. Every September in Sansepolcro there is a huge festival in town that lasts over two weekends. Everyone is in the streets and enjoying the fun. It’s called Il Palio della Balestra and it started right after we arrived in Sansepolcro.
We attended the first celebration of the festival on Saturday night. Meredith College in Italy was invited to be in the procession for the event that paraded around the town and into the piazza. It was a big honor to us and Meredith College to be invited to join their tradition. We went to a costume shop and rented costumes from the woman in charge of the procession. They were all renaissance costumes with several pieces. We especially had fun wearing the head pieces. They are large round doughnut shaped headbands. We paraded around town and into the main piazza in our costumes with the rest of the procession. The announcer even said where we were from and who we were. We had front row seats saved for us, which was great, but it did make me feel like I was being stared at. We get stared at pretty much all the time though, because we are foreigners in a small town.

The program was fun and exciting. There was horse choreography, young ballet dancers, marching bands, a program with trained owls, fireworks, and lastly the flag wavers. Several of them will be out in the piazza at a time, each throwing his flag, catching it, and twirling it around, perfectly synchronized together. Then, at just the right moment, all will send their flag up into the sky. Each flag drops in different directions and are somehow each is caught by someone else. I don’t know how they manage to catch all the flags when they are trying to throw their flag to someone and catch a flag from someone else. The colors of the flags flying through the air bring a really festive and colorful mood to the center of town. When the program was over, we proceeded out of the piazza and around the town twice with drums and trumpets leading the way and announcing the procession.
The following Wednesday there was another event, the crossbow competition between the two sides of Sansepolcro. Inside the old walled city, there is a main square called the Piazza del Torre. The city is split into two teams through the middle of the Piazza. If you live on the side of the city where the gate leads to Rome, you cheer for the team Porta Romana. If you live on the side of the city where the gate leads to Florence, then you cheer for the team Porta Fiorentina. The names Porta Romana and Porta Fiorentina mean the gate to Rome and Florence. Men from each side join the crossbow competition and compete against one another shooting at targets. We cheer for the Porta Fiorentina because we live on that side of town in the Palazzo Alberti. Unfortunately, the Porta Romana won. That means that they represented Sansepolcro against the neighboring town of Gubbio just across the border into Umbria this Sunday at the Palio della Balestra.

The Palio della Balestra is the crossbow competition between Sansepolcro and Gubbio. It is the event the entire festival centers on. The tradition dates back to at least 1594 and maybe longer. It was started as a way to get men who weren’t in the military to be proficient with a crossbow in case they were needed as military back up. It always occurs on the second Sunday of September. The prize for the winner is a wool cloth called the “palium”, which is where the word Palio comes from. “Balestra” means crossbow.
We were fortunate enough to get tickets to the event and sit in the piazza with a wonderful view of the competition. First, everyone involved proceeds around the piazza. A priest says a prayer and blesses the people. Some flag wavers performed again, and then the competition began. A cylinder shaped target was set up on one side of the piazza and the men with crossbows were on the other side. They all shoot at the same target and no arrows are removed the entire time. This gives them a chance to try to knock the other team’s arrows out. Some do fall out. When everyone has fired one arrow, the judges come and get the target and take it away to judge it. I never figured out how the judging works, but Sansepolcro won! We were excited, especially since we on the Porta Fiorntina side had lost to Porta Romana side on Wednesday. However, this did mean that there would be more loud parades, drums, and trumpets outside my window all day!
Besides the events of the Balestra, I was also able to go to the Museo Civico with the Art History class. The Museo Civico is the famous art museum in Sansepolcro. I am not taking art history and I don’t know very much about it, so I decided to go when the Bankers, the art professors, were showing the art history class around. Sansepolcro was home to the renaissance artist Piero della Francesco. He is a well known artist in this area and he has several important frescoes in museums in throughout Italy and the world. The Museo Civico has one of his most famous frescoes, The Resurrection.
The Bankers gave us a lot of interesting information about The Resurrection that I would have never known if I had just looked at it. They had us close one eye and hold up a hand so that we could only see one side of the fresco at a time. We were able to see that the backgrounds and the position of Jesus were different on each side. The observer’s left side shows Jesus conquering and the right side shows Him judging. We also learned how frescoes were made. They must be constructed a very small segment at a time before the section of plaster on the wall dries. This painting is really important to the city. Not only is it valuable and historical, it actually saved Sansepolcro from being fired on by the Allies in World War II. The author Aldous Huxley had described the fresco as one of the most beautiful in the world, and the officer in charge of the Allied offensive in Sansepolcro remembered the quote and that the painting was in Sansepolcro. He decided not to fire on the city in order to save it, even though he had never seen the fresco! If not for The Resurrection, the city might not be anything like it is today.

I enjoyed learning about this fresco and I think that knowing some of the symbolism makes it much more meaningful. If I didn’t know some of these things about the piece, I would just say it was a pretty painting and move on. I am learning many things here that are not what I would normally study, that are making me well rounded. At Meredith, I pretty much stick to math and chemistry, which I love. I am looking forward to seeing more art next weekend. We will be heading to the city of art.

As much as I have enjoyed these two weekends to explore Sansepolcro, I am excited to be going to see another part of Italy. I am headed out to Firenze (Florence) this coming weekend. We are all working on our travel plans and trying to decide what to see. I personally hope to make it to the Duomo, Florence’s largest cathedral and one of the icons of Italy. Check back in next Friday to see how the trip went!

Ciao,

Meredith

Ciao Italia!

I love Italy! I am so excited to be here at last. My experience so far has been everything I thought it would be and more. I am so glad that I decided to come and spend a semester in this beautiful city. It took a long time to get here. First, I had to drive from my house to the airport in Raleigh, which took about three hours. Then we had to wait in Raleigh for our plane to leave. We flew to Newark, had a four hour layover, and an eight hour flight to Rome. We had fun getting through the airport in Rome. We got on a automated people mover shuttle not really sure where it was headed, but we wound up in the right place to go through passport control, baggage claim, and customs. We met our bus driver right away and began the four hour drive to Sansepolcro.

When the bus pulled into Sansepolcro and up to the Porta Florentina, my mouth dropped open. I could see the old city walls, street, and buildings. It was so exciting to finally be there. I had seen pictures of the town before I came, but they were nothing compared to what it was like to stand at the gate, see the sparkling sunshine, and feel the cool Tuscan breeze. We hauled our luggage down the street and passed a friend of Dr. Webb’s who had cookies for us. What a wonderful welcome to Italy!

Once we arrived at the Palazzo Alberti, we were enthusiastic to see our new home. The Palazzo is a wonderful living space. I live on the third floor (second in Europe) in a room with Molly, Emily, and Laurin. The second floor is where our two classrooms are. The dining hall and student kitchen are on the third floor. On the ground floor there is a pizzeria and a button shop. My room has five beds. We each have a night stand, lamp, closet, and set of shelves. The ceiling of my room is old wood beams and the walls are a very light green color. The palazzo doesn’t have any air conditioning, but it isn’t really needed. I enjoy getting to keep the windows open. The windows in my room are one of my favorite parts of the Palazzo because I can look out over the roof tops to see mountains and I can always see what is happening below me on the Via XX Settembre.

There is always something going on in Sansepolcro. People are outside walking around every night with their friends and family, eating gelato or stopping for a café. I like to walk around the town after dinner. I think it is a fun thing to do and I enjoy spending the time outside. People in America don’t spend so much time in public places after work. After dinner, we tend to stay in our houses and do our own thing. Everyone stays out late at night, even little kids. Most of the town’s events don’t even start until 9 o’ clock at night, and the restaurants are open until on past midnight. Now I understand why the shops close in the middle of the day and everyone goes home for a nap!

Now that we have gotten settled into life in Sansepolcro, we are getting started with our classes. I am taking six hours of Italian. Many Italians in Sansepolcro don’t speak any English, so it is important to know some of the language to get around. I am excited to be learning a new language and I am looking forward to being able to use it. So far, we have learned the alphabet and how to pronounce and spell words. This comes in handy when ordering something, even if we don’t know what it is. The girls who work in the gelateria complimented us yesterday and said that our Italian pronunciation is better already. I am looking forward to being able to have basic conversations in Italian. I get to practice the language every time I go outside.

Using Italian can be really interesting and fun when you have a very small vocabulary. I went to the gelateria a few days ago and saw a flavor called pesce-mango. We had just learned the word for fish “pesca” in class that day. I mixed the “e” and the “a” up and thought for a minute that they might be serving fish-mango ice cream (ick!). However, “pesce” means peach.

I also had to ask for directions in Italian. On Sunday, Emily and I headed to the grocery store. We got lost and asked an older lady for directions using Italian. We were feeling really good about ourselves when we understood the basics of what she said and were able to make it to the grocery store without any problems. When we arrived at the grocery store, it was closed. We realized that the lady had been trying to tell us that the grocery store is closed on Sunday when she gave us directions! It was an adventure.

My other classes are Travel to Learn, Italy Today, WWII in Italy: Justice and Liberty, and Educational Psychology. I am looking forward to the things that I will learn in all these classes. I think that at the end of this semester, I will have a thorough knowledge of what Italy is like, how its history has shaped its present, and how I can get the most out of my experiences traveling this semester and in the future. I have already learned so much about this beautiful country. Did you know that Italy has only been a unified country for a hundred and fifty years? Before that Italy was a network of city-states. There is such a rich history to everything here. Our oldest history in America is only around two hundred and thirty years old, while the Palazzo Alberti is from the sixteenth/seventeenth century!

I am excited about getting to take Educational Psychology while I am here. I am taking it over skype from Raleigh. I am getting a secondary science education licensure and I think that this will be a good opportunity to see what other school systems are like outside of the United States. I will be spending time in a classroom at a high school in Sansepolcro for this course. The high schools are different in Sansepolcro than they are at home. Each school has a different focus and students choose an area of specialization before they go to high school. Most students in the United States don’t begin specialized instruction until college, and even then our first year is spent primarily on general education. In a way, I think this system is good because students have a stronger background in their subject area. However, students need to have an idea of what field they want to go into at a young age. I am hoping to do my practicum in the science and technology school here in Sansepolcro and I will be exploring differences in education such as specialization as the semester goes on.

I am also really excited about all the things I am going to be learning about the Italian culture. For our Italy Today class, we are reading the book La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind. In the first chapter, the author talks about foreigners’ perceptions of Italy and what they think it will be like. He says that our “Italy” and Italians’ “Italia” are two different things. On the surface, Italy doesn’t seem extremely different from what I expected. However, I expect that there is a lot more cultural difference going on than just the obvious. I hope that as I live here and interact with people that I will discover some of what the true “Italia” is like.

I feel so blessed to have been given this amazing opportunity to be here. I would like to thank everyone who helped make this possible for me. Check back in for updates! My next post will be on the Balestra, the market, and the procession that our Ragazze Americane was invited to join.

Ci vediamo,

Meredith