Two very important things happened in my life this past week: classes started and I went to Venice.
I was excited to go to Venice because I’ve always wanted to go but I was also interested to see how I would react to the city because I’ve heard such mixed reviews about it. People have either told me they absolutely loved it or that they thought it was over-crowed and over-priced and not worth it.
I am one of those people who loved it.
It is true that there are so many tourists everywhere in Venice that it feels like they are running the city rather than the locals who don’t seem to exist. And English was spoken and written everywhere. I can see how someone might be disappointed if they had come to Venice on a short vacation expecting to see Italian life. But, if you go to Venice knowing it going to be full of tourists, like you, and that you just need to look past that and see Venice for what it is, it really is an incredible place.
The set up of Venice alone amazes me. It was built on an archipelago of 117 little islands connected by 455 bridges. As everyone knows, the streets are canals and the only transportation within the city is by water or foot. So we (four of my girl friends and I) spent most of the day just meandering aimlessly around the city, finding post-card worthy view after view, looking at masks and Venetian blown glass. The city is known for its Carnevale, the annual festival where people wear masks, (which was traditionally done as a celebration that hid distinctions between social classes) so Venice is full of intricate and beautiful masks. All of the expensive mask shops don’t allow you to take photos, but as I walked around pretending I was actually going to buy one I got to try some very expensive and very, very pretty masks! It was a lot of fun.
I also found it interesting that Venice is known as “the sinking city” and while I was there the Piazza of San Marco was flooded about two to three inches. This seemed to be a normal occurrence, the city just set up elevated walkways for everyone to walk on and sold cheap black plastic covers for people to put over their shoes. Since I’m twenty, I decided to just take off my shoes and walk through the dirty water in my bare feet. Anyway, since getting back from Venice I’ve been looking up articles on the sinking of Venice and it is all very interesting. It seems that the islands were unstable to begin with and that global warming is definitely not helping. But then some people say its not sinking at all anymore. I did read that it used to flood, the high tide kind of flooding it did while I was there, only a few times a year and now it does about 100 times a year.
The colors in Venice were my favorite part. The buildings were all brightly painted pink and yellow and the water was a shockingly vibrant shade of turquoise. The Venetian glass everywhere also added a lot of color. Being there really made me feel like I was walking around in a dream-world. I accidently ran into a couple weddings. It was a very enchanting city. Overall, I loved Venice and would love to go back and would tell anyone who has the chance to go to Venice – GO TO VENICE!
The second important thing that happened this week was that classes started. Three of my classes, one of which is an internship, are entirely in Italian. So I’ll be writing papers in Italian and trying to express my opinions during class discussions… in Italian. I’m having a much easier time of understanding the language than I expected but it’s still really difficult to express myself or be understood. I have a really strong accent and often confuse words right now to the point that I can’t be understood. For example, today in class I said that I bought a “collina” a hill, rather than a “collana” a necklace. It’s just really confusing. But I am really enjoying this process of learning a language and it is definitely making me feel more connected to all of the non-native English speakers in America.
Devoting so much of my life right now to learning a new language is also really fun because, as my roommate says, you get to experience a second childhood. She’s actually tri-lingual, and nearly speaks 4 languages fluently, so she’s done this more than once. And I just keep finding it more and more true. I have to completely see the world with new eyes in order to fully learn Italian. They have different tenses for time that I’ve never even thought about defining, they use their prepositions in such different ways, and then there is viewing everything as masculine or feminine. But on top of that, it’s just a different way of moving your mouth and using your vocal chords. The Italian language is spoken with a much more open and exaggerated mouth than English. I feel like I’ve been using my brain in such a different way than it’s accustomed to and I feel like I have to forget everything I know and start over in order to understand. It’s fun but it’s really challenging.
Also, I’m taking a class reading an English-translated copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Today, we read the first canto one by one aloud in class and after each of us read our professor (who is Italian) then repeated what we read in Italian, the way the text was meant to be read. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard and I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to hear something like that aloud.
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