Skinny yogurt in a saucepan

Tuesday I got up early again and got ready to go back to the academy library.  I had my usual breakfast of yogurt and granola.  The yogurt carton says Magro! in huge letters.  Since this means “skinny” in Italian I assume that it’s low fat.  The kitchen in my flat is nicely equipped with cookware, dishes, and utensils, but for some reason there are no bowls.   I eat my breakfast out of a small saucepan. 

Shaving is a little bit of an adventure here.  The sink in the bathroom is the proper height for your average Italian, meaning that it’s about waist-level for me.  I have to bend almost in half to get my face close enough to get wet.  Other than that, though, the bathroom like the rest of the apartment is pretty nice.  There is a tiny washing machine next to the shower.  Maybe Wednesday I will try it out.  I’ll have to remember to put the drain hose into the bathtub.

I caught the 115 bus up the Gianicolo and hit the library to check some references for topography and inscriptions from the late Republic and early Empire.  The library does not have wireless; you have to plug your notebook in with an Ethernet cable if you want Internet.  There are also a few public workstations to use.  I took my iPad this time because it’s lighter and took notes with it.  A few hours of epigraphic research goes a long way; when I finished for the morning I headed back down the hill to my apartment and a quick skype chat with Gary.  Then I headed into the city to visit another of my favorite monuments, the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Imperial Peace that the Senate dedicated to commemorate the peace that Augustus brought to the Roman world (by military conquest, political shrewdness, and being the richest person alive at the time).  The day turned very warm and sunny, a contrast to what friends at home tell me the weather is like there.

The Ara Pacis is a great work of sculpture in white marble.  An open enclosure, decorated with superb reliefs of religious symbols and a procession of religious and political figures, including Augustus and the imperial family, surrounds the altar itself.  Mussolini had the monument put in a hideous building that looked like a Fascist-era airplane hangar. It is now housed in a museum on the east bank of the Tiber.  The museum was designed by the American architect Richard Meier, and I love it.  It’s very minimalistic and in my opinion is a great setting for the altar.  Lots of Italians hate it, mostly because an Italian didn’t design it.

In the late afternoon I headed back to Trastevere and stopped to get something for dinner: a couple of arancini.  These traditional Roman street snacks are deep-fried balls of risotto with a center of vegetables and buffalo-milk mozzarella.  I took them home and had with a salad, eating once again on the steps of the fountain in Piazza Santa Maria di Trastevere.  A couple of Australian college students tried to hit me up for a “loan.”  I asked them if they had any collateral.  They changed “loan” to “handout,” and I told them that I was a poor student too.  I don’t think that they were amused.  Then I went to the little market in the middle of Trastevere (I was out of skinny yogurt).  Just as I was entering, the power went out for the entire block because of some construction going on.  This of course then set off a bunch of alarms (just like at the library at home!).  Eventually the power came back and I got my yogurt.

I took a walk around Trastevere as it was getting dark.  Since so many places are closed on Mondays, Tuesday tends to be a little rowdy.  Much of the rowdiness comes from American college students studying abroad who discover early on that Italians will sell alcohol to anyone over the age of nine.  I’m really glad that this apartment has double-glazed soundproof windows.  I headed home, checked email, read a little, and went to bed.