Erin Miller

Dear beloved friends and family,
I just wanted to share a few highlights of Italian life here in beautiful
Perugia.
1) Kisses on both cheeks. It is how people greet one another here. Mostly
boys to girls and vice versa, but also same gender couples. Anyway, I have
decided it is one of my favorite parts of Italy. A kiss on the cheeks makes you feel so loved, welcome, and important, like you’re part of the in-crowd. Plus, I
have had several very good looking guy’s lips on my cheeks. You guys should
all start the tradition in the States and see if you can get it to become a
normal thing there by the time I return.
2) the view. The view from my city is amazing, you can see all of the
smaller village towns from the street by my house. I’m not sure that it beats the
flatirons, but it is pretty cool. One of the things that you miss out on in
most American cities is that they were not built on a hills for
fortification. All of the towns around here were built on hills. If you ask a local how to get to the city center they say, “Salita salita salita, sempre sempre
sempre” (up, up, up, always, always, always).
3) the wine. It’s great, and it’s cheap (unfortunately not calorie free).
Each town specializes on a certain kind. And, it doesn’t give you headaches the
way it does in the US because the thing that is most responsible for the
headache is the preservative they put in it to transport it, which isn’t added here.
4) the Language. Italian is beautiful. Our teacher keeps telling us to make
it sound like a song, because when locals speak it, it does. I also love that
people around here expect me to be proficient in it, which will encourage me
to pick it up. Now, if only I understood all of it….I go through my day
constantly understanding about half of what is said to me and having about
half of what I say understood.
5) the lifestyle. The pace of life is slower. Everything closes for 3 hours
in the afternoon (for naps, of course) it’s called pusolino (the Italian
version of siesta). Everything is also closed on Sundays. No putting off your
grocery shopping till the day of rest, unless you enjoy shopping at the only store
open on Sundays, the Bangladesh grocers. It’s ok to be late to class because
you had to stop on the steps to talk to your friends in the sun. And if you
tell an Italian friend you can’t talk because you are running late for
class, they won’t understand because here nothing is more important than stopping to talk to someone you enjoy. And likewise, it is not nearly as much of a faux pas if your cell phone rings in class. The professor’s rings on occasion.
There is also an interesting Pagan church in town. It is
shaped like an octagon and full of pagan imagery, like something right out
of the DaVinci code. At some point some Christian came in and put a cross on
the top of it this octagon shrine to pagan gods. It’s pretty funny.
My big adventure this week was a Saturday trip to Sienna. Each of the
roommates picked a place to travel and created an itinerary. Then we picked a
destination out of a hat after this mandatory school breakfast Saturday morning, and went running to the train station, only to discover that the girl that planned
this particular trip, hadn’t checked the train times. So we ended up taking a 3
and a half hour route to a destination 2 hours away. We got to ride through some very small, industrial towns on “ghetto” trains, but it ended up being like
only 12 Euro round trip, which was cool. We saw the Campo and the Duomo in
Sienna. The Duomo was truly breathtaking. There was a Donatello statue of an
emaciated John, and a cross that the Siennese had looted after winning a war
that were neat to see. The tile frescoes on the floor and the stain glass
were my favorites. The frescoes had a mix of Roman and Christian ideologies,
including several depictions of Remus and Romulus suckling from a wolf. We
managed to get into the church just as the sun was hitting the highest
stained glass. Then we stopped by a wine shop where the owner let us sample several wines, mostly Chiantis, the specialty of the region. We had to run to the
train station to catch the last train back to Perugia. It took us 5 hours to
get back (piece of advise — always check train schedules) But it worked out
incredibly well because we had a two hour layover in Chiuso and ended up in
this local restaurant where for 12 Euro I had what was probably one of the
best meals in my life. Now it’s time for my evening stroll around the city.