More Classes

Thursday and Friday were class days here at the hotel. On Friday afternoon there was another soccer excursion to Monterchi, but otherwise the students stayed in Citerna and (hopefully) attended to their studies. On Thursday evening we had a movie night down in the classroom with the help of an LCD projector and some speakers Jonathan bought last week. We watched Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights," which I had brought with me from home. Most of the students had never seen a silent film before—some of them even confessed to having never seen a black-and-white film!—but its selection as the #1 romantic comedy of all time by the American Film Institute earlier this year whetted the appetites of many. I think at least half the students showed up for the screening, and the overall response to it was very positive.

On Thursday afternoon my family went to Città di Castello for some sightseeing and grocery shopping. We wandered in the historic center of town for a couple of hours, visiting the main art museum (containing a badly damaged Raphael and some Sienese school paintings, but not much else of interest) and the duomo (pictured). Edward got a bit of a scare when he tried to go down an up escalator and was ordered off by a disembodied voice belonging to someone who was monitoring the escalator via closed-circuit television. We found our way back to the centro commerciale we had visited the previous week and got snack food for the kids, who are finding the 5-1/2 hour space between meals during the day a little trying.

On Friday afternoon my family made its first sightseeing excursion into Arezzo. We parked the car (in the rain) at the train station, which is just south of the medieval walls, and made our way up to the northwestern part of the old city. We visited the art museum, which boasted a number of works by Luca Signorelli and Giorgio Vasari (the famous art historian who also painted). Most of our visits of this sort are completely lost on the kids, but the redeeming feature of this museum in their eyes was an outdoor garden containing a fountain with fish. One of the fish had black and white blotches on it, and William kept calling it a "cow fish." After that stop, we walked a couple of blocks to Vasari's house, every ceiling and some of the walls of which he had decorated with frescoes. There are a number of other significant sights in Arezzo we hope to visit later, but that was all we had time for that day.