Down and Dirty

Meet Jon. What a fun looking guy, huh? (Maybe funny looking, hee-haw). Though it's mostly true, I still had to make him do some pose for the picture. Of the 3 or 4 other pictures I took of him, he looked rather bored.

I met Jon on Halloween of 2003. He was dressed up as the Marvel Comics character, The Punisher; I did nothing but wear a stupid hat and tell everyone I was this man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peisistratos_(Athens) Peisistratus, ruthless dictator of Athens. He is originally from West Philadelphia (Jon, not Peisistratus), and so is one of the few people I know who can sing the opening lines to "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" without irony. Though I didn't really talk to him then, I overheard him talking to my friend Lori. Both of them, apparently, had gone to Tulane University, in New Orleans, around the same time, and both of them had studied philosophy. Though they didn't know each other, they conversed about different teachers and fellow students. Small world, it turns out. Smaller still, I realized, when Jon told me one of his best friends is from Montgomery, and that her father owns a music store there. A little investigation revealed that his friend is the daughter of, presumably Art, of Art's Music Shop (her last name is... Freihling?). She went to The Montgomery Academy, and is friends with the only people I know from that school.

Jon is enroute to Seattle, where he will pursue his PhD in the epistomological branch of philosophy. Before starting school there he came to Italy to backpack around. His plane arrived in Milan and he took a train from there directly to Venice. After a few days there, he came down here to Rome. He stayed here for a week, and I tried to show him all of the highlights of Rome and Italian culture. After that week, we went together to Naples and to Pompeii. Though I splurged and bought us both tickets on the fancy Eurostar train-- wanting a nice ride in a comfortable train-- it broke down a half hour outside of the city, and we were forced to return to Rome and take one of the cheap, dirty Intercity trains, which meant we got there too late to go to Capri, as we had originally intended (the man who announced the train's malfunction said, in English, "The Large Driving Machine Number 1 has stopped working. We will now use The Large Driving Machine Number 2 to return to Rome."). Instead we spent that afternoon and evening wandering around the streets of Naples. Naples is a city as old and as rich in history as Rome, but Naples is also one of the most filthy cities in Europe. Though with a good cleaning it could be quite beautiful, no one there seems to care. It seems sometimes to me that the people who have the least respect for Italian history and culture and the beauty of the country are the Italians themselves. Not always true, I know, but tourists are not getting off the boat with cans of spraypaint and bags of garbage to cover the streets with. The piazza two blocks from our hostel had a statue of one of the heroes of Italian unification: Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour. In typical Italian fashion, it is covered in spraypaint and the base is strewn with trash--broken beer bottles and cigarette butts, empty bags of junk food, etc. And I wonder if even the most spiteful street thug in America would ever spraypaint a statue of Benjamin Franklin. It is a possibility, but not something you see. Even if it happened, the day wouldn't end without someone coming to clean it up. The next day we went to Pompeii. I've been there before, but it's something one can't complain about seeing twice. Afterwards we returned to Rome. That was yesterday.

This morning he left to go to Florence. He will stay there 2 days and then back to Milan, where he will stay for a day before flying back to America. In Philly, he will stay for just 4 more days before driving across the country with his dog, a friend, and all of his belongings. Part of me envies his adventure, until I realize I'm pretty much in the midst of one myself.

This week has been really nice, and couldn't have come at a better time for me. I've been locked away in my apartment for so long that I think I was starting to go a little stir-crazy.

Here are some pictures of ours from Pompeii. The one on the left is of the interior of one of the baths. The girl on the right is a French girl who was staying in our room at the hostel, and who kept appearing wherever we went (we even saw her outside of Termini, in Rome). The picture on the right is of me and a German girl we spent the day with, hanging outside of a baker's shop. You can see behind us the oven where the bread was made. The conical concrete object to the left is a mystery to me; there were usually several of them in each baker's shop, and there are around 38 baker's shops in Pompeii.

Jon's visit coincided with a new job for me: that of a Tour Guide. Yes, capitalize that 'T' and that 'G' because this is not any ole' tour guide job, but one for one of the most expensive companies in Rome. My last blog was an introduction to a longer blog I intend to eventually write about my exploits in a different tour company, but that job didn't work out. My boss was an incompetant bufoon and, after a simple communication problem on the phone during my second day, he started screaming at me before firing me. There was no compromising or explaining to him what had happened, he completely lost his temper and started insulting me before telling me he "can't have ----- like [me] working for [him]." For the first time in my life I was fired from a job. Though I'd already been to an interview with another company that looked promising, there was no gauruntee, and I was a bit worried, since both tour companies sounded like great jobs for me (except for the slightly pyschotic manager of the first one, who should have been heavily medicated), and they both paid extremely well. Jon arrived right in the middle of my worries and helped distract me from my stress and gave me some sound advice both before and after my second interview with company B, henceforth known as Through Eternity (the name sounds like a crappy romance novel, but whatever).

Through Eternity wanted me to go through 2 interviews. The first one was with an American, and I was to give a 15 minute lecture on The Transfiguration of Raphael. The picture below. Though I was nervous through the entire interview, the man doing the interview could tell that I was smart and could handle myself well once I got the hang of it. The problem with studying a painting like this is that I have to study thirty different, seemingly irrelevant or unnecessary things just to be able to talk about it with confidence. I have to study the New Testament story that it represents. Since the scene also has Moses and Elijah (and I'd never even heard of Elijah), I also have to go through the Old Testament. Then I have to familiarize myself with the various techniques that set this painting apart, such as the strong use of chiarascuro (the play between light and shadows), what Raphael's contemporaries were up to at the time, the different art movements represented in the painting (such as something called "Mannerism"). I have to study the life of Raphael, the life of the painting, the life of the man who commissioned the painting. I have to be comfortable discussing the contrasts of this painting, with its rich, dark colors, and tight brush strokes, as compared with the rest of Raphael's works. It really is a mind boggling venture.

If I wasn't having problems again uploading pictures, I would upload Caravaggio's "David with the Head of Goliath," which was the painting I had to discuss in my second interview. Far less interesting in terms of the number of figures or the details of the background (of which there isn't one), the painting presented more of a challenge. Again I had to study all of the things mentioned above about Raphael, but then I also had to study even more art movements, such as German Naturalism, Baroque, Venetian Poeticism, etc. Also I had to delve into modern Art, since Caravaggio marks one of the earliest breaks from traditional style. In short, I need to know the significance of every little detail of the painting and the painter and the time period in which it was painted. The second interview was with an Italian. His apartment was decorated with paintings which I assumed, due to the easel in one corner, were his. There was also a grand piano with sheets of music everywhere. He seemed eclectic and highly intelligent; I doubted I could hoodwink him. He also suprised me with a lot of hardball questions, questions he told me he didn't expect me to know the answers too, but which he wanted to see what sorts of guesses I'd come up with. I should get my Masters in B.S., because I think I did admirably well (example question: "What is the significance of David to the Rennaisance?"; think about that one, reader)But I persevered and beat the other 4 candidates for the job.

Now. Now now now. This is going to be a great job, but if you think the amount of studying I had to do for those two paintings is a lot, consider the fact that I'm going to be giving 5 hour tours of the Vatican museums. That is 300 minutes. Assuming I can manage to talk for 15 minutes about a single painting, I still have to stop in front of 20 paintings. That's boring, so let's cut down the length of each presentation to 5 minutes, that's 60 sections. Subtract 45 minutes walking... blah. Basically I'm doing a crash course in Rennaisance art, in Christianity, in Judaism, in the history of the Catholic Church, I need to know which popes commissioned which paintings and sculptures and basilicas and what years these popes lived in, what families they were from, how they were all related. I need to study Latin and Roman history, medieval Rome, modern Italy. I need to study different periods and movements in architecture and the functions of features. I need to know my Saints, who they are and what they're famous for; I need to know the revolutionary figures who united Italy. I need to know the architects of the piazzas and the years in which they were alive. I need to know enough to be able to do some guesswork if a question is thrown at me that I don't know the answer to. My manager gave me 5 books to read for starting out. I've already finished one and am well into the second.

Finally, never before have I felt more thrilled to be learning.