Parma and James Bond

On Friday, I went on another group-sponsored trip to Parma, a small city about an hour and a half away from Bologna. Not only is Parma famous for prosciutto and parmesan cheese, but it's also famous for its art. We went to Parma specifically because it was a trip with the ECCO program's art history class, and anyone was welcome to tag along. Right now there is an exhibit featuring Correggio, a Renaissance/Mannerist painter whose art preceded the style of Rococo. His art is all over Parma, and this exhibition was literally throughout the city. Aside from the special exhibit in the National Gallery in Parma with many of his paintings from other museums, he's painted three very impressive domes, two in churches, and one in a former monastery.

In both of the cathedrals, there were huge temporary metal staircases (one for going up, the other for going down) which you climbed until you were, literally, inside the dome. It was amazing to stand at the base of the domes and be so close to the frescoes. The perspective changes when you're that close to something that was originally painted to be seen from the ground, but it was such a unique opportunity to get up close and see the art. Correggio's style of perspective is particularly noted in the art world...I'll see if I can try to explain / do it justice. In one dome, he painted it so that it looked like there was no ceiling, but instead lead straight into the sky (or heaven, since it's a depiction of the Ascension of the Virgin), and in the other, it was octagonal, but he placed people in the eight corners so that you couldn't tell it wasn't circular. Amazing. We also visited the Camera di San Paolo, a room in a former monastery in which Correggio painted the ceiling. 

Our last stop was the National Gallery, which in addition to the special Correggio exhibit, is the home of Leonardo da Vinci's very famous Head of a Young Girl. The museum was great, but the art history teacher unfortunately made the experience almost unbearable. She stopped at every single painting and talked for a minimum of five minutes, and while it was interesting information, it was way too much, and unnecessary. The museum should have taken us not much more than an hour to see all of, and it took over two. She was asked numerous times by museum employees to speed up, was told that she couldn't stop at every single painting because we were a large group, but she actually said repeatedly, "Non me ne frega," - "I don't care," or maybe a more accurate translation would be "I don't give a damn." In addition, she kept waving her hands in front of the paintings and setting off the alarms with the flashing red lights. Over and over and over. Apparently she's a big deal in the art world, and wasn't used to being treated like a mere mortal. (It doesn't help that her voice is grating and not easy on the ears.) But it's a testament to how beautiful Correggio's art is that I managed to enjoy myself in the museum despite this professor's tour!

For lunch, we grabbed panini, and while they may not have been traditional Parma ingredients, we had a poppyseed panino with prosciutto and wonderful cheese. It was a rainy day, but with all the art we had a wonderful time.

Saturday night, I went with Adri to see the new James Bond movie in Bologna. The movie opens in Siena, Italy, at the Palio (a medieval horserace), which I went to last summer with the Vassar Siena program. The movie was actually filmed at the same Palio that we witnessed, so it was really exciting to see it on a big screen. There had been fourteen cameras set up around the piazza, one right near us, but unfortunately no close-ups of anyone in our group made it into the movie. I'm not sure how they got the shots of James Bond running through the crowd and firing shots at the villain, because he certainly didn't do that during the Palio, but it looked very realistic. Movie magic! It was interesting to see it dubbed in Italian (almost every foreign movie that comes to Italy is dubbed...they're not too big on subtitles) and I could understand most of it, since Bond plots aren't too complicated, but I did miss some of the rapid dialogue. Another interesting point to note is that there was an Intervallo - Intermission - about 70% of the way through the movie, in the middle of a scene, right before some more shooting and explosions started. It was very strange. But a cultural experience, I suppose!