Class begins

(Be sure to click on this picture for a full size panorama)

I met with my class today and we had a nice introduction to the program and the city and then a group dinner this evening. There are 14 students, and only one weirdo. We had a walking tour of the city for most of the day--I have basically walked around the whole city, but this time it was with the benefit of a guide. The professor for the program is actually an architect, so he explained all the different styles of buildings and showed us how to tell wheat era any building in the city is from. Sort of. Then, we had a little free time this afternoon before dinner, so I went back to the Duomo to climb up the dome (because my legs haven't gotten enough exercise yet). I just finished reading Ross King's Brunelleschi's Dome which is all about how it was built. Actually, when they started building the Cathedral, they knew the dome was bigger than ever built before and knew that they had no idea how to engineer such a thing but just figured God would find a way for it to happen. And it happened. I think reading the book actually made more more afraid that the dome might collapse, but luckily that didn't happen while I was in it.





Today was remarkably hotter than it has been the past few days. Such weather called for more gelato.


The other excitement of the day was my attempt to do laundry. The machine in my apartment has 2 dials and five buttons, and what looks like 18 settings. The challenge was to successfully do a load without A) ruining my clothes B) flooding the apartment or C) breaking the machine. So far, after pressing all the buttons in different orders and turning the dials, while the machine is both on and off, I have not done any laundry. I have not flooded the apartment. I may or may not have broken the machine. I may have to ask my landlord tomorrow to show me how to use it. That may not help matters as he speaks no english and my Italian is limited to "Buon Giorno" and "Quanto Costi?" and my phrase book only has such things as "Can you do invisible mending?" ("Puo fare un rammendo invisible?"). I'll keep you posted...