the traveling picnicmonger: Elizabeth and I get a taste of Italy 1/4

Alrighty--so this is going to be a long post. If you just want to look at pics, scroll down.

There's so much to be said (all good!) about our (first?) trip to Italy. I'm going to preface it all by saying that Elizabeth and I were only there for 29 hours, and only saw two cities. Actually, we spent just about the same number of hours on an overnight bus to get there and back. The bus ride was as nice as an overnight bus ride could have been. Finding a good position to sleep on a bus is an art. My favorite involved having my left foot posed on my right knee, with my left elbow resting on my left knee, and my curled up left wrist holding up my head. Easier done than said. You should try it. But not for a fourteen-hour bus ride. We rode through Marseille, Toulon, Nice, Turin, Milan, all to get to the lovely Bologna. At times the bus felt more like the Polar Express because in the middle of the night I'd wake up, look out the window, and find that we were surrounded by snow-covered peaks. There were two bus drivers who switched about every 2-3 hours all the way from Barcelona to Bologna and back. But enough about the bus.

You might be wondering how Elizabeth and I came to choose Bologna and Ravenna to visit out of all the lovely Italian cities. This is going to make us seem like huge dorks (debateable if we really are or not), but honestly, we chose these cities because we had learned about them in classes we had taken freshman year. Ravenna was the star of a Byzantine art history class that Elizabeth had taken, and Bologna often came up in my favorite class of my college career thus far, Botany and Anatomy in the Renaissance. This worked out to our extreme advantage, as Elizabeth could relive everything she had learned by telling me about the gorgeous mosaics we saw in Ravenna, and I could do the same by telling her more than she ever wanted to know about the anatomical theater in Bologna. We decided that for future trips (Loire valley, mayhaps), each of us would study up on one landmark so that we could play tour guide for the other. (Alright, so it's not debateable--we are huge dorks.)

I'm going to be honest in saying that I had not even heard of Ravenna before Elizabeth saw that it was close to Bologna, and therefore a must-see for our short northern Italy trip. The bus arrived in Bologna at around 11am on Friday, we stopoped by our hotel, and as the room was not ready yet, we wasted no time and set out for Ravenna. One train ride later, we were enjoying the quaint little town that is Ravenna and all that it has to offer. We saw mosaics in Apollinaire nuovo, San Vitale, its adjacent mausoleum, and Apollinaire en classe. Elizabeth taught me all the goodies. In San Vitale, for example, she pointed out to me one of the first instances of Christ represented as a lamb, before the church decided that it was an iconographic no-no. The mosaics were also chock-full of representations of the four evangelists and borders that liken to Muslim geometric designs. As Elizabeth explained, Byzantine art is not often thought of as colorful, and the figures are often seen as rigid and dull. This is not at all the case with the mosaics. The tiny bits of glass have held up their color very well, and many of the people portrayed had billowy robes. The overall effect of the mosaics from far away was a velvety texture, although I held Elizabeth back from touching the roped-off masterpieces to confirm or deny this observation. We did, however, question if any of the artists had seen a real sheep. They are a little wolf-like. Some of the ways they tried to display depth perception and shadows were cute. Better than I could do. Elizabeth also taught me what a squinch is--basically handing me on a silver platter my new favorite word and secret weapon for Scrabble. But I won't bore you with a definition.

Post continued in part two. . .