GL Week 5

This week at dinner Mike made a comment about making a bucket list for our remaining time in Rome; he said with a little more than three weeks left making a list would be helpful. I can’t believe I only have three weeks left here! A couple of us were on this train this week and we were saying how it feels like it was just the beginning of August yesterday and now it’s Thanksgiving and Christmastime. It’s amazing; I just don’t know where the time went! By far week five has been my favorite week here! Aubree and I gave a tour of the Borghese Gardens and Via Vento, my family came to Italy and I’ve been able to spend time with them showing them around, and we visited the Gucci Museum, which if I had the choice I would visit daily!

To start off the week on Tuesday Aubree and I gave our walking tour which consisted of showing the other students the Borghese Gardens, Via Vento, Santa Susanna, and Santa Maria Della Vittoria. I know personally for myself I had a lot of fun giving the tour, and the gardens were really beautiful. In our Smiles reading for this week Edith Wharton makes the remark “these gardens have excited so much admiration that little thought has been given to the house, though it is sufficiently interesting to merit attention.” While yes I did enjoy the massive gardens I found the Borghese Gallery, which was at one point a house, more magnificent than the gardens.  In fact the Borghese Gallery has been my favorite museum we have toured as a group so far! It just astounds me that every room we walked through, with the elaborate painting, and marble floors there was someone, at some point, sipping tea or taking a nap in the room.

After visiting the museum I went and found my family and was able to show them around! Wednesday we went on a tour of the Vatican which was amazing. I mean just looking at the massive ceilings and walls I can’t even imagine painting them. As I am in every building I enter I was completely in awe. As memorable as the Vatican and Sistine chapel are by themselves being “escorted” out of the Sistine chapel made it even more so memorable. In the book The Italians in chapter 10 Barzini talks of the pursuit of life and basically what it boils down to is power, personal power to be exact. He states that, “Without power all threats would be risible and bombastic gestures… The choice between one alliance or another, between hostility or peace, resistance to the last breath or immediate surrender, are the result of a realistic estimate of the forces each side can marshal.” In the chapel our tour guide, who was licensed with a badge, was telling us about the artwork in the chapel and pointing out things and all of a sudden she had museum security telling her to be quiet and she wasn’t allowed to speak at all. She showed him her badge and told him we were a tour and she was just explaining the chapel, however, he wouldn’t take her explanation and told her just last week the rules changed and if she wanted to talk we needed to leave. We decided just to be quiet for a little bit until the security guard wandered away then she started talking again. Well I’m not sure where he came from, but, all of a sudden he was back yelling at her and poking her telling her he warned us and now we had to leave, of course we had no idea what was going on because it was all in Italian but later our tour guide translated. Anyway, instead of immediate surrender, Barzini’s words, our tour guide argued back for a while until three more security guards came over and too joined the dispute. It was after that we were escorted out which led to a couple more angry word exchanges; our tour guide said they were purposely picking on her and ganging up on her and just basically being completely unfair. Using Barzini’s theory though it was because our tour guide was seen as a person with less personal power that is why the security guard was able to “pick on her” and in the end essentially escort us out.

Besides that little hiccup it’s been such a fun week being having my family here and being able to show them around Italy.  As it is currently I’m sitting on a train and we are traveling from Florence to Venice. Being able to take my family to Florence and myself being able to go for a second time has been so great. With only three days left with my family before they head back home and with only having three weeks left in Italy myself I can’t wait to see what the rest of this trip will be like!