sunday + light/shadow assignment

gosh i'm not the best blogger. in depth saturday in verona update will be coming (possibly this evening, maybe tomorrow), but i'll tell you a bit about my day yesterday. got up at a reasonable hour this morning (early enough to make the free breakfast downstairs that they put out between 7:30-9:30 am) and was only very very mildly hungover. good for me. had a leisurely breakfast and showered by 10:30ish am.

yesterday was this important venetian boat race, i think it is called vogalonga or something like that. people make their own boats and race them down the grand canal (though i actually don't think i saw any homemade looking boats... suspicious). so we watched that for a while from the accademia bridge (which is like a two minute walk from the don) even though the weather was kind of windy, gray and shitty.

after that we went to the ducal palace (where the venetian government worked out of back in the day) in san marco. we spent i think over two hours in there looking at art for a "scavenger hunt" project for art history. it was interesting, but tiring. i don't really have pictures from in there because you aren't allowed to photograph. but, side note, we saw tintoretto's painting called paradise and that is apparently the biggest canvas in the world. it was massive and took up an entire wall.

after that i got lunch with my group (krissy, sarah and abby) and we did some work on our group project. we visited the campo (basically town square) and the church we were assigned. i'm sure i'll post an entire entry on it later this week when i am much more knowledgeable and have written my paper. long day.

here are some more pictures from assignments. these relate to light and shadow.

third assignment: color

these first pictures are more monotone/color doesn't matter.


these photos rely more on the color!

second assignment: vaporetto stop

my vaporetto (public transportation on the canals) stop that i was assigned to explore was san silvestro and i liked shooting there. enjoy!








my vaporetto stop was san silvestro and i liked shooting there.

first assignment

padua (or padova as those crazy i-talians spell it)!

last friday after our morning critique a small group of us took a train to padua for the afternoon/evening (yeah i'm only a week late with this post... oops). our journey started out a little bit on the downer side because it was kind of drizzling and we were all pretty tired. it got even worse when we got off the train and realized that we were in a really grey/industrial area. i didn't know what to expect from padua, but it wasn't that. anyway, so we start walking in a random direction that seemed like it would be right (okay, it was pretty much striaght ahead). and then we see this large frosted glass structure in the distance so we're like, "oh, cool, maybe it is a big tunnel thing we can play in." but it was actually so much cooler than that. turns out it was a 9/11 memorial. in... padua. i'm not sure what the reason for it was, maybe a bunch of italians were in the towers on business when it happened? i don't know, but i like to think that there is no reason. here are some photos (that darker piece of metal looking thing is an actual structural beam from one of the towers):that little figure is sarah!
anyway, so as lame as it sounds, after we saw that things just kind of got better. the weather started to clear up a little bit and we came into an area that was more like a city. and i had a really nice afternoon.

we were on a mission to find the church of san antonio (that's saint anthony for you americans) because vanessa (one of the TAs) really wanted to see it. i also wanted to because i always remember mom praying to saint anthony when something was lost. so anyway we stumbled upon this big open area with lots of statues and a fountain and stuff and a church in the distance. we assumed that it was san antonio. nope, not san antonio. i forget what it actually was, but we took like a 45 minute detour while we circled it and tried to figure out where the hell we were/where the hell saint anthony was. but we eventually found it!












anyway, here are some images of the REAL saint anthony's:













then we grabbed some delicious dinner and on the walk back to the train we ran across some street performers. it was awesome because the one dude sitting down was basically playing a piano but he was doing it by using a mallet to hit the strings on the open top. i will leave you with them: