The June 19 Blog

Did I mention that when we came back to St. John's after our trip, we found that SERIOUS SHENANIGANS had gone on in our absence?

Today, I stayed in and worked on my Weebly. The night before, Antonia and I had stayed out in the courtyard for SIX HOURS after class. This may have been the day that Dr. Sebastian took us out for gelato. :)



GROUP PIC!!!

However, I do need to talk about something I learned, so I will talk about some things I've learned outside of class or things that have just come up without me going somewhere specific.

First, remember how I talked about how people wanted themselves portrayed as gods and goddesses in art? I found a movement like that while researching my Weebly. Jean-Marc Nattier (and we saw some of his paintings in the Uffizi, which happened after I was technically posting this but OKAY) painting a lot of pictures of royalty and nobility portrayed as Vestal Virgins. Now, as the clothing fit with the times, it's very interesting to see what his perception of "Vestal Virgin" was, but I think that it says a lot about how in his time, women were obviously supposed to strive for being virginal and loyal, all those things.

Second, I don't think I've posted on here about how it has really struck me that so many different people live on this world. As actress Gina Bellman says, "I have a bit of an anthropologist in me." And that's very true for me, though I'd never major in it (I appreciate the way it affects my life, but it's not what I'd want to do for the rest of my life). And yet, though people are so different, they're the same.

This involves a story.

I filled out my application to come to Italy in the free hour I had between my Chinese class in choir. It was cold that day, and I sat in the music building against a window that had some sun coming through it so I could keep warm. I knew I had wanted to go somewhere during the summer, that I wanted to be a writer and that I needed a second major to support my writing major, and that I would probably need to get a jump start on ACC courses to give myself some leeway to figure out what I wanted. In the end, I picked Italy for several reasons. I have a desire to not just visit places but to really get to know them, to understand a bit about how it works. I didn't get that the last time I was in Italy because I spent most of my time on a bus and really desired to know more.

Also, I'd been questioning my faith. Not really questioning whether or not I wanted to be Catholic but just wanting to know some more about it. So I signed up, hoping that I could go on this trip as a sort of pilgrimage and figure out some things that had been going on.

The moments stand out to me: having mass at St. Peter's and hearing the Our Father in four different languages; sitting in the Sistine Chapel and looking out over the crowd to find that nearly everyone at that moment had a hand extended toward the ceiling, pointing; the mountains of intentions I saw piling up in Maria Trastevere that people had left from all over the world, in every language imaginable.

The word "catholic" means "universal." But that statement is different when you look at things like that.