My Italian Friends and Familia

I've been thinking that I should have done all of this blogging while I was actually IN Italy, experiencing everything. But a) that wasn't really possible given the shady internet situation in most places I found myself, and b) I think it might actually be better this way. I journaled the whole time I was there--y'know, with a notebook and a pen--but rehashing everything is letting me remember, relive, and relay the most important, lasting impressions. The moments of drama (of which there were few) or the days I was upset just seem to fade away, and everything I did and learned remain. This, I suppose, is that story.

My second camp was in a town called Marina di Carrara, a beautiful town by the sea, in fact, it's the port town of Carrara, where most of the white marble in the world comes from. The place is absolutely beautiful. I remember one day after camp my family took me to the beach, and I was standing in the water looking out at these beautiful marble mountains and thinking I might have died and gone to heaven. It was out of control. This was taken my first day there, when the sky wasn't even clear. They're still beautiful, and I miss being able to see them every day.

Camp here was an entirely different beast. It was much smaller and my class of nine had kids from 11 all the way up to 14 years old in it. I felt significantly more relaxed at this camp--probably because there were less kids and I'd already done one. Plus, I just revamped and recycled most of my lesson plans, although I had to add many more activities because it took these kids much less time to complete everything. Bingo, however, was still a huge hit, as it was with my first camp. I'm not sure why this was...

Anyway, here is one of the new activities I added, the Make A Monster game. The kids made some pretty cool creatures!

My class this time around was nine kiddos in total, as I said, again with varying levels of English. Some spoke very well and some... well, I was lucky they could ask to use the toilet. Here we all are in our class room on the last day.

This lo spetaccolo was about two dragons who stole the king's treasure, and it took two wizards and two knights to bring it back. It was cute, and the kiddos actually memorized their lines this time. My dragons also looked super cool, with claws, wings, and masks (which were terrifying for me but one must sacrifice for art). My crowning achievement, however, was on carnival day when we played Pin the Tail on the Dragon, and I drew the dragon. Which was pretty amazing considering I can't really draw much of anything besides stick people and tornadoes, with the occasional flower. Here he is, my little dragon. :) And of course, he was in the show too; I couldn't bear to part with him after only using him once.

Although camp was how I spent most of my time, this journey was really about so much more than that. This time around, I stayed with an amazing family with two adorable kiddos. They really took me in and made me feel like I was one of their own--a cool cousin or aunt, perhaps--and I could not have been more grateful for it. I had the whole top floor to myself, and a huge bed, and a real, stand-up shower--something that I'd noticed was lacking in several places in Italy. The family was amazing, too; my "dad," Michele, was a certified wine taster, so dinner was always a special treat. My "mom," Rossanna, was a great cook--although she would not claim to be--and her English was amazing. They were both extremely caring and excited to show me anything they could. In fact, within about two hours of picking me up at the train station, I was traipsing around this tiny mountain village called Nicola, which I'd seen from town. All I said was, "I'd love to go up there!" and then... we were there.

The town was tiny--only about 100 people, I guess--and there was no way you could get a car around any of the streets. The town was also, like most things in Italy, extremely old. And not, like, crappy American standards old, but legitimately over 500 years old. The dialect of Italian they spoke there was so different, Michele and Rossana could barely understand what they were saying. Here's a picture of three cats we came upon, lounging with no worry about being run over by a passing vehicle. This street is what most of the streets in Nicola looked like and can best be described as the definition of "quaint."

This panoramic is the view of Marina di Carrara from Nicola. The house were we all lived is there, somewhere.

I was happy in my first placement that there were no kids--no spontaneous baby sitting requests, no annoying video game noises, no having to awkwardly play with a kid that doesn't understand what I'm saying. But these kiddos were awesome. My first day my "sister", Monica taught me to play a card game (all in English, mind you) called Burraco, which I played literally every day with her little brother, Ale. Moni's English, as you can guess, was pretty darn near perfect, and Ale's was... well, we found a way to communicate. I actually found that most of the Italian I picked up was from the kids--they speak slowly and in easier words and often repeat the same thing. It was so cool that we actually learned from each other. But I digress... The kiddos were great little humans and I'm happy I stayed with them. Despite hearing camp songs outside of camp, and one night of Bungalowing during our dinner barbecue, it was great having them around. My family really believed in being a family--eating dinner together every night and playing and talking together. It was beautiful and, in today's world, rare.

They took me out to dinner on Friday night, my last day with them, and we ate seafood by the sea, and played a little Foosball. I miss them but know we'll keep in touch.

I mentioned at the train station on my first day that I noticed Pisa was close, and the day after I arrived, the family took me there. It was only 40 minutes by car, and Michele and Rossana had actually gone to school there. Michele was not only a wine taster extraordinaire, but a history buff, so he gave me the scoop on everything he could. It was awesome.

He told me that "the first look is the most important" so when I first saw the tower, I tried to appreciate the moment and take it all in. I'd missed the glimpse of it you can see from the road on the car ride over, so when I walked through the arches of the old city gate, I gasped. There it was... leaning just like you've always seen it. It looks exactly like I thought, almost to the point where it looks artificial. But it wasn't artificial. So of course, I took the obligatory "I'm holding up the tower" photo right away.

The tower is actually the bell tower of the church complex and the big building in front of it is the actual cathedral. As is true with every church I saw in Italy, the detail and construction of the entire complex was amazingly intricate and painfully lovely. These people knew how to build God's house and churches here just don't look the same to me anymore. Here's some of the detail on the tower...

The doors of the church were cast in bronze. Students at the university, before an exam, would go to these doors and touch their favorite animal for luck. Here you can see part of the door, and a spot on the lower left that's been rubbed more than others...

Finally, I learned that each city has its own flag, along with the Italian flag. This is Pisa's.

For the weekend I had in Marina di Carrara, I went to Cinque Terre with two other tutors on the Saturday and had family time on Sunday. Cinque Terre was the place everyone told me I NEEDED to see in Italy, even moreso than Rome. It's this little collection of five (cinque) towns on the side of a mountain and on the sea. It is so beautiful and picturesque there it's hard to describe, and, looking at what I've just written, the words can not possibly do this magical place justice.

Since there are five towns, and we wanted to see all five, we took the train to the last one, Monterroso, and worked our way back towards the first. We hiked our way from #5 to #4, Vernazza. And it was a hike. I sweated THROUGH the straps of my backpack (attractive, I know) and struggled with my sunglasses, which broke before I even got out of the train station. Eventually, they fell down into some trees and were lost for good. The hike took, according to Rick Steves, about 90 minutes, but I think we took longer because we took breaks and stopped to look at the amazing scenery unfolding around every bend in the road and break in the trees. Like this...

That was looking back at where we'd come from, and realizing just how far we still had to go...

Every step, though sweaty, was worth it. We got to #4 hot, hungry, and sweaty, but happy. I felt good about accomplishing the hike, and better about finding lunch! We ate at a place recommended by, you guessed it, Rick Steves, which proved to be delicious. I ate a local dish, which was fish and potatoes in a tomato-y sauce. Some evil olives sneaked into the dish (they were NOT in the description!) and I managed to give them all away except for one that snuck past me. Gross. It didn't, however, ruin the dish.

We hopped on the train to see village #3, Cornelia, where we paused for some jump shots and some more scenery. This is my favorite photo of the day.

Oh, to be the people on that beautiful sailboat...

We had wanted to hike to town #2, Manarola, but the trail was closed for some reason, so we hopped on the train. From #2 to #1, Riomaggiore, there is a walk called the Via dell'amore, the Pathway of Love, built, at first, as a trail between the two towns, uniting them where before they had been isolated. The people of the two villiages liked the trail so much, and the opportunities it presented for them to meet people from the other town, they asked that it be improved. Over the years, couples began to put graffiti and locks all along the trail, signifying their undying love for another. The trail still bears these marks today--and many more. The locks are hooked onto anything along the trail you can imagine, they keys theoretically tossed into the sea nearby, like the ones here.

I thought it was rather nice that people still believe in that sort of thing. Anyway, we headed to Riomaggiore and had a wander around and a glass of wine after a long, hot, amazing day. I had the Cinque Terre D.O.C wine, actually made there, and brought a bottle back for the family, which we drank with dinner at Nona and Nono's house two nights later. This was the view from a little bridge overlooking part of Riomaggiore. Somewhere down there is the little cafe where we enjoyed a glass of wine. Not bad, huh?

On Sunday, Family Day, my family took me to the quarries in the morning for the Marmo Tour (Marble Tour) and then to a place called Malaspina (Bad Thorn) Castle. The quarries, those white mountains I saw on the first day, is pretty much where all of the white marble in the world comes from. Michelangelo got some marble there for several of his works, and the world's foremost marble carving (sculpting?) school is in Carrara. So they've made a tourist attraction out of the quarry, and it's THE thing to do in Carrara (duh) so we did it. Rossana had never actually been there before, so she stuck with me on the English tour and we experienced it together. The entire tour was fascintating, actually, and I learned WAY more about marble than I will ever need to know, but it was interesting anyway.

I learned all about how they cut the giant blocks of marble, how the guys of old who worked there lived, what marble dust is used for (toothpaste!), and what an "iron pillow" is. No, it's not the most uncomfortable bed pillow in the world--it's for wedging between a block of marble and the wall from which it's cut to split the two apart. Anyway, we were inside the actual mountain where marble is cut. You can tell by my hardhat...

And the tunnel you see here is a short one--the one we had to drive through to enter the quarry was about 300 feet long (I think...). It may have just seemed that long... But it was longer than the one here.

After a morning of getting our marble on, we came back to the house for lunch, and set out again to see the castle, which has been around since, I think, the 13th century. The castle was built as a fortress, so it's on the top of this hill where you can see for miles and miles (good choice, I'd say) and inside its walls is the town of Fosdinovo, where people still live. The thought that people have been walking, living, loving, shopping, playing, and dying there for hundreds of years sort of blows my mind. Here's a view of Fosdinovo looking out from the castle.

And here's a shot of the castle itself, as we walked up the hill towards it...

Legit.

The castle tour was only in Italian, so I didn't catch much but I had a little pamphlet that explained a bunch of stuff, and Michele and Rossana helped me when and where they could. Some of the castle was actually closed, because the family lives there in the summer. In fact we ran into the newest member of the family, little Anna, on our walk around the grounds.

This wall shows the family symbol of the Malaspina, the white branch with the thorns on it. This wall was SO cool looking!

The castle has, as most really old things do, a pretty fascinating history (kidnapped babies, seized power, raping, pillaging, princesses buried in the walls, lovers dropping through holes in the floor, you name it) and actually housed Dante Alighieri for a time, which is depicted on several murals found in one of the halls of the castle. There are even, they say, ghosts. If you want to read more about the entire place, click here.

Throught my time in beautiful Marina di Carrara, I did so many things. I took a walk out on the pier at night with Rossana, I ate delicious gelato several times at Rosselini's, the best gelataria in town, went to the ocean for an afternoon swim, played countless games of Burraco. We walked around Carrara one evening before dinner and I saw the church where Michele and Rossana got married. One night, we all ate dinner with Rossana's parents, who were perfectly lovely, and we listened to her father's stories of WWII, which were fascinating, eye-opening, and sad, and then proceeded to get my butt kicked at Burraco, even though her father, who was my partner, is a champion. One night, all of the girls even got to meet up with one of the first people I met in Europe, way back in Nice, whose camp was very close to ours. We went out for a gelato, a beer, and a walk, and talked about camp. It was great to have some girl time!

I will always look back on my time here with nothing but fond memories and love for this place. I miss it so much; my little adopted town between the sea and the mountains where I found a family.

For the full album of pictures on Facebook, click here.

More to come in a final installment.

Much love.