La Dotta, La Rossa, La Grassa

And now, for a short Bologna history lesson! 

Bologna is nicknamed La Dotta, La Rossa, e La Grassa. "La Dotta", which means "the learned," is because the University of Bologna is the oldest university in Europe, dating back to before the year 1088. The year 1088 is the commonly accepted year of foundation of the university, but it was actually chosen in the year 1888 so that they could celebrate the university's 800th anniversary. There are a few documents dating up to 20 years before 1088, but nobody pays attention to those. The University is also called Alma Mater Studiorum, or UniBo, for short.

"La Rossa," which means "the red," comes from Bologna's notable red roofs, but it also came to refer to politics after World War II. Bologna is the birthplace and home of Italy's political left, the Communist Party, and the smaller Socialist party. "La Grassa," which means "the fat," is the most obvious. It refers to Bologna's notoriously extraordinary cuisine...which, since we're on a food budget and cook most of our own food, we haven't really gotten to experience yet, but there's still plenty of time to experience la grassa (hopefully without becoming grassa!)

So that was the brief, but hopefully engaging, history lesson. We've been in Bologna for exactly a week, and I'm finally starting to feel at home here. Still no roommate, but she'll probably show up soon since UniBo classes start in a week and a half. We're also hoping that once more Italians move into the dorm, we'll be able to form friendships and utilize/improve our bastardized Italian. 

Speaking of classes, right now we're taking a two week intensive italian review, which covers an array of topics. So far we've focused on the student political movement on the 1960s and 70s in Italy, which unfortunately doesn't capture my interest all that much, but tomorrow we start opera, I Pagliacci to be exact, which is a bit more up my alley. 

Regular classes start the first week of October, and we have the option of choosing between our program's classes, which are taught in Italian but designed just for the program students, and classes at the university. I'm choosing to do one class at the university and two with the program. Many people are doing two or more classes at the university, but I'm actually interested in the program classes, so hopefully they'll all be good! With the program, I'll be taking Art History, which focuses on five female artists of the Renaissance, and Theater, which sounds like it will be a lot of reading out loud of plays in Italian. (What's not to love?) The class I'm taking at UniBo is called "The Semiotics of Art" and sounds really interesting. It's unlike any class I could take at home, and it's taught by a professor who's supposed to be really good. She teaches with our program in the spring semester, so she's used to us Americans and our level of Italian, which can't be said for all of the UniBo professors. Hopefully that link works, because I'm not sure I understand the topic enough to explain it, but it sounds good! 

Other than classes, we've been trying to explore Bologna, but there hasn't been much time. It seems like all of our free time is the exact same time that all of the stores are closed. We get two hours for lunch, for example, which is during the three+ hours all of the stores close for their afternoon pausa. Also, everything is closed on Sunday. It's so strange for me, coming from a big city, where shopping on the weekend is what people (and stores) live for, to see all of the stores closed on Sunday! But now that we know that, we'll be more prepared for this weekend. We've also gone for a few runs in a park about 20 minutes away, and the weather has been beautiful. It was quite chilly on the weekend, but it's warmed up again to normal early-autumn weather. 

And sadly, still no computer. But I'm remaining optimistic, really I am, that customs will eventually deliver to me my computer. But until that day, I have to rely on the generosity of others, or the computer in our program's office (which is in high demand), for internet. As soon as I get my computer, I'll post lots of pictures from the last few weeks. 

I'll end with one last tidbit about Bologna. In my last post I mentioned that Bologna has a ridiculous amount of arcades/porticoes. I found out that there are actually 44km of arcades in the city. Apparently the farthest distance you can walk without passing under an arcade is 8km!