FOOD

Cibo! So much good food here. The tomatoes are to die for, I could seriously eat one like an apple. And everything is fresh and preservative free! "Organic" doesn't really exist.

Highlight reel:


1. Trip to Todi/Titignano: the entire program went to the little hill town of Todi for the day, finished with an 15 course delicious meal at a medieval castle in Titignano.


2. 24 Hour Bakery! The concept of open 24 hours doesn't really exist here. They have the wackiest store hours- they close for lunch from 1/1:30 to 4 which is super inconvenient. But they do pastries right.


3. Home cookin'. Me and my two roommates Corin and Alexis take turns making dinner. Corin has made some really great sauces for pasta and Alexis made some delicious stuffed peppers. I've contributed some homemade pancakes (from scratch) and salads. We really love making home bruschetta too. Just chop up some tomatoes, add a little basil, put a little olive oil on the bread and toast it! Divine. One night Corin made pesto-rubbed chicken wrapped in prosciutto! It was basically all the left-overs we had in the fridge, and it was great. Last week she even made gnocchi from SCRATCH! It was quite the process and took her about 2 hours. But it was worth the wait.




4. Geeeelato. The consistency is somewhere between ice cream and rita's, leaning more towards the ice cream. But the aforementioned Old Bridge is our place! For 1,50 euro you get to pick 3 flavors and they load you up. Cones too! And the whipped cream is free, and it's the good kind.




5. Carbs carbs carbs! I'm waiting to have my to "die" for pizza in Naples, but they do a pretty good job here. There's a restaurant literally right outside the residence that serves pizzas to "take away" and you get a huge personal pizza for only 5 euros! It's great. And they have a chain here called Pizza Rustica where they have huge rectangular trays of pizza and you tell them what kind you want, they weigh it, cut it in half, and then wrap it up and you eat it like a sandwich. It's cheap and delicious! And the pasta! My best meal here by far was when we got cacio e pepe. We absolutely love love love Anthony Bourdain's show No Reservations and he recently did a Rome episode before I left. The first place he goes to he calls "Restaurant X" because he didn't want to turn it into a tourist trap. He gets the cacio e pepe which is some fresh pasta, tossed in cheese and pepper and then served in an edible bowl made of cheese. Again it's all about the fresh ingredients! Our waiter knew we were there for the cacio, but he was super nice and we want to go back in the spring and eat outside like Tony did!


6. Nutella. Since peanut butter here is rare, a lot of people basically eat nutella in place of peanut butter. We love the grocery store here, Carrefour. Like Weis & Giant they have store brand stuff and we discovered that the Carrefour nutella is actually better than the fancy kind! We've moved on to our own personal jars because we eat way too much of it.



7. Prosciutto. My new deli meat of choice.

Finally!

This is extremely long overdue, but I wanted to get my blog rolling before spring break! So much has happened in the past month I don't even know where to begin!

I guess I'll start with last Thursday. Art history classes here function a little bit differently because a lot of the artwork that we're learning about is actually located in Rome. On Tuesdays I have a lecture, and on Thursdays we have "excursions" where we go to museums and churches to view artwork on site. This particular day was special because we went to the Vatican museum & I got to see three of the most amazing works of art EVER.

1. Laocoon: my absolute favorite sculpture.



A little history: it was discovered in a man's back yard during the Renaissance and after they excavated it the Pope bought it. Michelangelo was actually there during the excavation.


2. The rooms of Raphael: amazing frescoes that cover the walls of the Popes quarters. The School of Athens is the most famous one. In the center is Plato and Aristotle and they're surrounded by poets, mathematicians, philosophers, and artists. The man in the center left is actually a portrait of Michelangelo. But it was so impressive! For some reason I had the idea that it just covered a small 5'x5' area, but the figures were almost life-sized.

3. The Sistine Chapel. AMAZING. It was so much information to take in at once, and I think I had a little bit of an advantage because I've studied it a lot so I knew what I was going to be looking at. I actually expected the space to be bigger and the ceiling higher, but it was still incredible nonetheless. My teacher told us that during the restoration he got to go up on the scaffolding and see the ceiling up close. That gave me goose bumps! Unfortunately you can't take pictures in the chapel, but they wouldn't really have done it any justice anyway.

The morning was a little bit of a sensory overload, I felt like I needed to decompress after. So we went to Old Bridge (the BEST gelato place and really close to the residence) and got gelato. :)