exhausted,

thursday night, thanksgiving: the nonna (patrizia's mother, busybody and all-around annoyance) finally leaves, after staying with us for five weeks. we breathe a collective sigh of relief, most of all patrizia "i put an ocean between us." to celebrate, i go out to watch a movie at the odeon, the english-language movie palace, which was showing bird's nest: herzog and de meuron in china as part of their 'festival' of films about contemporary art. the movie was quite good-- it was in english, german and chinese with italian subtitles, or, all four of the languages i 'know' how to speak/read/write in various capacities (a generous assessment, to be sure). what was both entertaining and a bit confusing was trying to either listen to the languages while also reading both the english and italian subtitles. cognitive dissonance, certainly!

friday through sunday were spent on a hectic, wet but generally fun trip to ancient italy: ancient rome, pompeii & herculaneum along with naples (for the archaeological museum) and sorrento (just because). even though i had been to all of the aforementioned places besides herculaneum, it was wonderful to hear about roman esoterica from the mouth of charles ewell, scholar/aracheologist extraordinaire and my professor for the ancient etruscan and roman art class that this trip was part of as well. also, herculaneum was probably my favorite part of the trip, being more manageable in size than pompeii and more importantly, far less crowded. we also went to a place called villa oplontis, located halfway between pompeii and herculaneum, which was only discovered in the 1960s and thus far more well-preserved than the other two. the examples of decorative art, especially the paintings and mosaics, were breathtaking. what i really find amazing about roman decorative art is that it never was regarded as 'art for museums.' these frescoes were all simply decorating the dining rooms and bedrooms of wealthy romans. the famous alexander mosaic was found in a dining room-- as part of the floor. we saw that in the museo archaeological in naples, which other than that, doesn't have much to recommend.