Giorno per Giorno

I do realize that after being here for two and half weeks it might be a leetle late for me to give a blow-by-blow of a typical day here (as if anything in Siena is typical)…but I’m going to do so anyway. I also realize that I’m a terrible, terrible blogger and I apologize.

Breakfast is always at Nannini’s, which is Italian version of Starbucks (and like most things Italian, is far superior to the American equivalent). Thank goodness for Siena’s hills, because egg sandwiches or bagels or plain breakfast foods are apparently unheard of here. The morning here starts with some sort of coffee drink (cappuccinos or café lattes for yours truly) and a pastry. I have a champion sweet tooth and even I’ve been sticking with plain brioches lately because there are only so many days where croissants filled with cream, chocolate, or marmalade do the trick.

Class, unfortunately, starts at 8:45am. We’ve taken most of the rooms in the hotel, so we all pile into the lobby where Dr. C. lectures for three hours on what we’re supposed to have been reading. After class, we all collectively heave a sigh of relief, stretch, and then burst out of the hotel for the next three and a half hours for lunch, lying on the Campo, napping, and strolling. Really, it’s a tough life.

At 3:30 we meet outside the hotel with our dorky, tourist headsets on and Dr. C. leads the way on our afternoon site visit. Usually it’s a church or two or three and usually we’re looking at artwork and usually they’re frescoes. Yes, this is the ideal class for a Catholic Art history major. The common reaction among my classmates is grumbling. Mine is barely-suppressed squealing.

Site visits conclude around 5:30pm and the hours before dinner are spent either doing homework or procrastinating. The post-dinner hour is spent much the same way. And then the rest of our evenings are almost always on the Campo. The restaurants and bars are loud, busy, happy, there are people laughing (us included), pizza, gelato, and wine are within easy access, the sky is almost always clear.

Curfew is at 1am (it’s dreadful). Anyone still awake heads from the Campo to the tiny hotel balcony to talk, people-watch, and reiterate how we should all really go to bed but we’re not that tired. And then we go to bed, where I usually stumble around in the dark and try not to wake my roommates.

I could get used to this.