Design Program in Rome

Tonight is probably the last time the participants of the Design Program in Rome 2008 will all have the chance to be together... The UW faculty club is hosting an exhibition of our photography and tonight is the reception for the show. On the announcement below, my photograph is the black and white "hotel" one...

Day Thirty-One (Final day)

Well, the time has come. My final day in Rome, I leave for the airport in just four hours. Tonight was a very special time. We toured one last church and then we listened to Tojo give a presentation about Roman aqueducts and fountains. With everybody's work finally complete, Chris and Susan had a surprise arranged for us, a final spectacular group dinner at a really great place. The food, of course, was unforgettable, but the highlight of the evening was getting to spend time together as one large family, reminiscing on our time in Roma. We ate, laughed and drank for a good few hours and then Chris took us all out for one last cone of gelato. Our final event as a group was to all simultaneously throw three coins over our left shoulder into Trevi fountain guaranteeing us love, luck and an eventual return to the eternal city. 

Now, I must leave Roma behind and step into the next phase of my life. At my age, I have already experienced several important turning points. They come few and far between. My time in Roma has definitely qualified as a life changing event and I leave her behind reluctantly. So I depart with heavy bags and a heavy heart but really can't wait to see my Rachel and the dog-child again and as I said the other day....Rome is slow to change and I look forward to my next visit here....

Thanks for following my blog throughout the trip!

Grazie e arrivederci!

~Giuseppe

Day Eleven

Today we had presentations including Piazza Navona and the Catacombe di Priscilla On the way I managed a couple of self portraits in the security mirror on the bus and took a shot of this dog poking his head through the railings of what can only be a shop where they make carousel horses. This little doggy really made me miss Rocky, but I know that he is having a blast down on the farm and is getting plenty of love from Joanne and Trudi. I have never been in any catacombs before but have watched several shows about them on the history channel and am always fascinated by how far they sprawl beneath these old European citites. Rome has hundreds of miles of tunnels dug by the christians as burial grounds for their dead. The catacomb system we were in today stretched for 13 km and is home to 40,000 burials. It was cold, damp and dark, like a good catacomb should be. It twisted and turned through the carved out tufa. The walls are marked in various ways, including old christian symbols, my favorite being the anchor, of course. Other markings probably qualify as graffiti, people leaving their names and the date. I saw one from 1790, one from a scholar who used to study the catacombs, marked 1861, and some more recent from American soldiers during the war. I saw the states of Texas, Oklahoma and the city of Boston next to their names. Most of the tombs had been emptied to protect them from the visiting tour groups, however some were still sealed, including some tiny little infant tombs. At one point we even saw a skull in one! No photos were allowed so I snagged one from a resource at the Vatican.....it was very spooky down there....

Designer Insights and the Roma blog

Today I completed two of our assigned missions. The first is called designer insights. We have all been on the lookout for particularly innovative or different ways that design problems are tackled over here. If you have ever traveled overseas then you know what I'm talking about, maybe it is the little/big flush mechanism on the toilet, or the tiny cars designed to squeeze down streets that were built before automobiles, anything, here are thousands of little things in daily life that are different over here, some better, some worse and some just plain old different. I spotted my subject today on our walk to Trastavere. Check out the entry here on our official UW Design Program in Rome website. The other assignment is similar to what I do on this webpage, each of us was assigned two days of the trip to document in the form of journal entries and photos, the 25th and 26th were my days and should be posted here soon, in the meantime, check out the entries from my fellow students......

Day Ten

I got some great sleep last night and am feeling well refreshed. I think it was all the gnocchi that really did me in, total food coma. We kicked off the day with a quick jaunt through the Jewish ghettos. It is an area where one of the popes ordered all Jews to move to and the site of a rather large processing area for Jewish people during WWII, there is a small marble slab on one of the buildings in memory of the over 1,000 Roman Jews who never returned after the war was over. Many Jews still live here and I saw today what I think may be a first for me....Kosher fast food! We then ventured into a Roman neighborhood called Trastevere which is on the other side of the Tiber from where I am (Trastavere literally means "beyond the Tiber") This neighborhood has one of the highest hills in Rome on top of which a famous battle between Giuseppe Garibaldi's Romans and the French took place. Every day at noon they fire a cannon here to honor the brave men who died and it can be heard pretty much anywhere in the whole city. The hike to the top of the hill is short but very steep and I was very hot by the time we reached the top. There is a large crystal clear fountain full of cold water about halfway up the hill and once again I found myself seriously fighting the urge to leap into the fountain.

A final note, this city is absolutely COVERED with graffiti. Mel Curtis, the photographer traveling with us, actually found out that it is illegal to remove the graffiti without the proper licenses as many of it is actually of  historic nature. Supposedly there is even a spot where Napoleon carved his name into a building! Regardless of how you feel about graffiti, you have to admit that these are some very expressive, and in my opinion, beautiful examples of a long practiced hobby(profession?) These photos are only from my walk today, there are literally millions of examples of graffiti throughout the city, but I felt that the graffiti in Trastavere was exceptional in execution and creative expression, check it out:

Day Seven

I woke up early this morning and went to an open air market. They sell all kinds of good, cheap crap there. Clothes, hairdryers, antiques, jewelry, appliances, leather goods, shoes, household items. It's the kind of place that you have to haggle to get any kind of fair price. Then I spent the afternoon in the studio working on tomorrow's assignment. After that we all went to the larger of the girls' apartments and had a potluck dinner. Their apartment is absolutely incredible, no holes in the walls, no broken light fixtures, and most importantly, no bees in the ceiling. The food was amazing and plentiful, oh, and also all made by our group. Spaghetti carbonara, bruschetta, pizza, salad and, of course, vino. I brought the pesto I made yesterday. I cooked it at the house and then carried it in the pot eight blocks to the girls' apartment. It was probably a bad idea because I had accumulated a following of a few homeless Italians along the way who were quite mad at me for not handing out my pesto....What could I do though, let them just reach in and grab a handful?!?! I felt kind of bad, but it is what it is, right? After dinner I went back to the studio and mostly finished up my first project, besides a few tweaks here and there. 

Day Six

Last night was a ton of fun. We visited the Centrale Montemartini museum, It is a collection of many old Roman busts and sculpture housed in what used to be an old steam power plant. The statues are scattered about the two HUGE 5000 kw dynamos. The contrast between the ancient and the (relatively) modern is striking. I think this was one of my favorite sites so far. Afterwards we headed out for a night on the town to celebrate the completion of our first week in Rome. We went to visit one of the girls' apartments for some drinks and then headed out to mingle with the people.... We found a great vantage point in Campo de Fiori for people watching, a favorite past time of the Italians, though they people watch in a very different way than we tend to, particularly the men. They are pretty intense, they tend to stare in a way that feels a little invasive for us Americans. It is fun to follow the girls in our group and watch the unrestrained rubbernecking of the Italian men as they pass. They seem harmless for the most part though from what I can tell. Then we wound our way through the streets to Piazza Nuovana which was relatively mellow compared to the craziness of Campo de Fiori. We bought a few beers and hung out next to some centuries old fountain just shooting the shit and getting to know each other a little better. We have such an amazing and diverse group representing so many backgrounds, I am lucky to be involved with such people, it really adds to the richness of this experience. We decided to call it a night around two o' clock in the morning and walked some of the girls home to their apartment. As we turned a corner near the house, the Pantheon suddenly loomed over our heads, the oldest continuously functioning building in the whole world, and here it was, on our casual walk home after a night of drinking.

The interior of the Centrale Montemartini

One more note for today before I head out for Pizza. We were discussing some of the history of our neighborhood this morning and I noticed that my friend Dana had a really cool graphic of the location of the UW Rome Center. It stands on the same location as the ancient Roman Theatre of Pompey, which is where Julius Caesar was assassinated. Steps from my front door, the great Roman Emperor was killed, WOW!  Check out her post here, and the cool graphic with it....