Martin Fuggle Downunder

Thursday in Urbania is market day, or more precisely market morning. We got up a bit earlier and had a quick look at the market before school at 9:00am where we went over the pronomi combinati homework and then started on 'il futuro semplice' and 'il futuro composto anterior' - yes 'il futuro composto anterior'.
After the morning break we did a tour of the market with Barbara. Most of us bought some porketta, calamari and fruit which we had for lunch. The afternoon session was conversazione with Simona and we covered a few topics and got into the politics in England, Australia, Belgium and Skopje in Macedonia.
At 4:30 after school there was the SegaLaVecchia in the piazza San Cristoforo just outside of our apartment. We stopped by to see the Bandino dei Brutti, went onto the Internet site to send a few emails and then finished up at Doddo for some pasta.

This morning Barbara started us on 'pronomi combinati'. They are the most difficult thing that I have come across in Italian and I have by no means managed to become comfortable with them in conversation.
However at the moment that is the least of our troubles. The direct debits that I set up to pay my mother's accommodation have been rejected because of the wrong account code being used for the direct debit. This has led to a flurry of phone calls from/to UBS Warburg, Colten Care and now my mother has got in the act. Why it took UBS Warburg from 23rd February to 13th March to find out that an electronic transfer had been rejected is a mystery to me and something that they need to answer. However it has caused a significant amount of angst and a lot of unnecessary cost. The whole point of electronic transfers is that they take place quickly and in the case of an error it can be determined and corrected quickly. UBS Warburg seem to be blaming Westpac for the delay in informing them of the rejected transfer which should have been resolved well before I left for Europe.
The second issue is that we are unable to get money out of any hole in the wall in Urbania using either the Mastercard or the Travelex Cash Passport which was specifically acquired so that we had ready access to cash funds. At the moment we have about 10 Euros to our name without any understanding why we can't get cash out. I phoned the National Bank's hotline in Australia and they state that there has been no decline on the card which means it's not even getting past the Bancomat in Italy. This sort of thing is just what we don't need!
Eventually we managed to get the cards to work in Urbania and the problem turned out to be that we were trying to get too much money out at one time. As soon as we reduced the amount we were taking out all worked just fine.
Back to the Italian. Barbara took us through 'pronomi combinati' and I find them very difficult. I have just completed the homework and I had a lot of trouble understanding the material and making sensible responses, anyway I will find out tomorrow morning.
We had an afternoon session on Italian Art and an opportunity to participate in a course of lessons. I am not sure that I want to do it since I would prefer to do the Italian Cooking with Jenny and a few others.
After we had dinner in the apartment we went to the Teatro Bramante to see 'Linda'. She is a pop singer and won a competition at the San Remo festival. Linda was very good and also very popular in Urbania. She belted out a number of songs over a period of two hours and has the most amazing voice and capability. The Teatro Bramante is fantastic. I will see if I can get some photos of the interior but it is one of the most beautiful theatres I have seen. We eventually got home at around 11:30 just in time to call UBS Warburg again to sort out the direct debits to my mother's residential care people.

After a breakfast at the apartment we set off for the scuola where we divided into two groups. Jenny, Sooi Lei and Joachim were in one group and Patrick, Richard, Tanja, Geoff and I were in the other group. Barbara took us through the passato prossima and the imperfetto for the morning and we had an afternoon of conversazione with Simona. Simona was great in the way that she guided the conversation and we covered a lot of topics but concentrated primarily on food and coffee. The Italians don't regard a cappuccino to be coffee and caffe latte - well what's that!
In the evening a number of us met at the Enoteca Vin Italia and met a couple of others who had been studying at an alternative language school. I had not realised that there had been an acrimonious split in Urbania and that the Scuola Italia was a breakaway group from another language school called Dante Aligheria. We met a couple from the other school at the enoteca and eventually went on to have dinner at La Loggia.
We are beginning to get to know what's what in Urbania and making a group of friends around students and staff at the two schools.

Today we started the Italian Language course at Scuola Italia in Urbania. As usual we woke up at about 3.00am so we had plenty of time to get ready and we arrived at the Scuola after a coffee at the Bar Centrale opposite our apartment in Piazza San Cristoforo. We were met by Roberto Ferri who features in Ci Siamo which is the book that we used at CIS in Melbourne.

We soon met everyone on the course and were surprised that there were only seven of us in total and 57% come from Melbourne! The people on the course are:

• Richard - he is from England and has been to Scuola Italia before and is just doing two weeks of study this year. He is retired now but used to work in the Government London
• Patrick - is from Belgium and has taught himself to speak Italian. His wife works in the European Commission and they both live in Brussels. He is almost retired and works one day a week as a lawyer in Brussels.
• Joachim - lives in Munich and is involved in the software industry. His company develops ERP software for the IBM AS400. He has a house in Tuscany (Cortina) and speaks Italian without a sound knowledge of the grammar.
• Geoff and Sooi Lei - are from Smythe Street, Mont Albert in Melbourne and have studied Italian at CIS in Carlton. Geoff is an anaesthetist and Sooi Lei is a nurse, and
• Martin and Jenny - who make up the group.

We have not met all of the staff yet but there seem to be more staff than students at the moment. Corinna and Barbara have been teaching us so far and they are fantastic teachers. Corinna took us for a tour around Urbania before we spent the afternoon with Barbara watching an Italian film called Mediterraneo.

Jenny and I spent time at the supermarket buying the essentials and non essentials before we spent a fair amount of time at Kikki Rikki where we had a coffee and aperitivo whilst getting onto the Internet. We got a bit of a shock when we found that money we had organised to be sent to pay for some things in the UK had for some reason as yet unknown not got through to the banks in the UK. We then spent a fair bit of time on the phone to Australia trying to find out why - we still don't know and now need to spend more time following this through. The whole purpose of organising this before we went was to avoid any issues while we were in Italy. Instead it seems to have caused us more trouble. We eventually sorted out the email and went off for dinner at Doddo, a trattoria just down the road from the apartment.

'Che disastro'. Today we explored the Italian rail system to a far greater extent than we had intended.
We started the day in our usual way by finding a small place for breakfast and then we headed back to the convent to say farewell to the good 'sisters' of the Istituto Oblate dell'Assunzione. A short passeggiata to stazione Santa Maria Novella where we bought the tickets and waited for the train and we were on our way to Urbania. Well - not quite. For some reason known to no-one at all I thought that we had to take the train to Arezzo and then a bus from Arezzo to Urbania - not too difficult I thought. Things started to go badly wrong when we were fined 5 Euros by the ticket collector on the train to Arezzo because we had forgotten to validate our tickets before we got on the train at Florence. This is not the first time we have given Trenitalia 5 Euros since I remember the same problem when we took a train from Camogli to the Cinque Terra last time we were here. Anyway we got to Arezzo and all we had to do was find the bus and hey presto we would be at Urbania.
No - unfortunately we had come the wrong way altogether and had to retrace our tracks past Florence to Bologna Centrale, change trains to Pesaro, take a bus to Urbino and then a bus to Urbania. No problem really, just a small inconvenience so I phoned Sergio Bozzi (the landlord in Urbania) but could only get his mother who only spoke something like Swahili, but I got the message that Sergio was not available. We bought our tickets to Pesaro, validated them (we're not stupid) and caught the next train to Bologna Centrale. It was running ten minutes late and we eventually arrived at around 2.55pm and were pleased to find that the next train (and only train for the day) to Pesaro was due to leave at 3.48pm and arrive in Pesaro at 5.40pm. A short wait and we would be on our way. Unfortunately the train was running late - one and a half hours late! We got to Pesaro at a bit past 7.00pm and couldn't find any buses to Urbania - that's not surprising since there weren't any.
To cut a long story short we eventually took the bus to Urbino and a taxi to Urbania where Sergio met us at around 10.00pm and showed us into the apartment. We had been travelling since 9.00am in the morning and were well and truly ready to hit the sack.

We are beginning to feel a little bloated and Jenny has decided that there's another thing wrong with convents - they don't have hair dryers as standard equipment in the room. As a result this morning was devoted to finding a hairdresser before we leave for Urbania sometime tomorrow.
We were up at the crack of dawn and had a light breakfast before heading off to find a hairdresser. Jenny found one not far from the convent and I then went to find another so that I could 'go out in sympathy' and get my hair done at the same time. Unfortunately I found a hairdresser with a desire to perform some sort of makeover on me and the jury is still out on the result. On the grounds that the difference between a bad haircut and a good haircut is about one week I should be OK next Saturday. Jenny's result was good and she should have nothing to complain about.
Once the hair was out of the way we set out to get to the Ponte Vecchio and the Palazzo Pitti. So we walked over the Ponte Vecchio and I assume it will still be there next time we go to Florence, it will still be crowded and it will still be smothered in jewellery shops. Once over the bridge, in more ways than one, we had lunch at a small place on our way to the Palazzo Pitti where we looked over the Giardino di Boboli, an exhibition of Florentine costumes from the fifteenth century to the present day and an exhibition of silver work.
In spite of feeling a little bloated and looking like the statue in the forecourt of the Palazzo Pitti, we decided to go out for dinner on our last night in Florence. We stopped off at a place in Borgo Pinti, just a short distance from the convent, called La Giostro. Unfortunately they were booked out but the more we looked at the window the more we realised that the Dorking Kindersley travel guide called Top Ten in Tuscany had graded it as the number one restaurant in Tuscany - no wonder we couldn't get a table on a Saturday night. Not far away we found another restaurant and enjoyed a good meal of typical Tuscan food. Jenny had ribollito followed by gnocchi and I had a bruschetta al pomidoro followed by arista di maiale and spinaci washed down with a Chianti Classico - all in all a very pleasant evening.
Tomorrow we take the train to Arrezzo and then the bus to Urbania ready for the start of our Italian lessons.

Jenny planned a good day for us in Florence. We started with breakfast in the convent at 7.30am which was typically Italian (bread, juice and coffee) and then headed off to the Uffizi Gallery. The queue wasn't too bad and we only had to wait for around 4o minutes which was our penance for not having booked before we left Melbourne. However while we were waiting the girl next to us did the most fantastic ink sketch of the cloister leading towards the entrance to the Uffizi. Once inside we got the 'audioguida' and started at room 1. The Uffizi is something not to be missed in Florence and we spent far too short a time there. However there is only so much time that can be spent walking, looking and listening that we eventually bailed out at room 32. It warrants many visits to see all of the exhibits and understand their relevance so there needs to be another trip to Italy sometime in the future!
Next stop was the cathedral but before we got there we stopped for the regulation coffee and Panini. We had also been having trouble with an old Canon IXUS camera that I had given to Jenny for her to take some photos. It seems that in spite of having spent $80 or $90 on a new battery it was losing charge within two or three shots. We decided to get a new camera for Jenny and bought a super small, but super capable, Sony Cyber Shot and I'm expecting some great photos from it.
The cathedral in Florence is disappointing in my view. I think it is because I tend to compare it with the cathedral in Siena which is the most beautiful cathedral that I have seen. Nevertheless the Florence cathedral is very impressive. Unfortunately the Baptistery has been closed for some years now and the Ghiberti doors have not been on display for at least five years that I can remember. I had not climbed to the top of the Duomo before so I thought I would try this year. It's a tough call and there are 463 steps from the bottom of the cathedral to the bottom of the cupola at the top of the dome. Jenny gave it a miss and just as well because there was sign at the start warning that people with heart problems should not attempt the climb. I realised how out of condition I was and have vowed to get back on the bike when I return to Melbourne. The views from the top were spectacular and I took a few photos of Florence and the hills surrounding it.
Jenny was keen to look at the San Lorenzo market so we walked the short distance into the thick of the market stalls. Leather and pashminas were everywhere but before we bought something we stopped at a bustling restaurant where it was possible to design your own salad. We had a salad and coffee there and felt reinvigorated enough to go back through the market. Jenny bought a couple of pashminas which felt and looked lovely - they were 'galah' pink and grey!
We had done enough for the day so we bought some salami and a few other things and headed back to the convent where we ate and planned for another day in Florence before we go to Urbania on Sunday to brush up on our Italian.

Today we left Rome and took the Eurostar to Florence. We had breakfast at the hotel and then walked up the street to the Internet caf

We had a restless night still suffering from the effects of jet lag. Jenny was awake all night and we decided to get up at round 5.AM and go for a walk before breakfast. Unfortunately we hadn't put our clock forward an hour when we left London and the forecast from the previous day was spot on and it was raining heavily.
Eventually we got up and went down stairs for a terrific Italian breakfast. The rain seemed to be stopping and we headed off on foot to see if we could go to the Teatro dell'Opera off the Via Nazionale to see a ballet. Unfortunately the performance was only for school children so we continued on our way a bit disappointed. We did a lot of walking and stopped for a couple of coffees on the way. The Piazza Navona was shrouded in scaffolding and the main fountain was not really visible. Many of the buildings were also being restored. Even so the Piazza Navona is one of the prettiest places in Rome.
From there we went to the Campo dei Fiori and had a coffee and slice of pizza. The stalls are very pretty and varied however we bought a couple of peaches which were just awful. On our way to the Piazza Navona and Campo dei Fiori we passed an information bureau where we found that there was a concert at All Saints church in Via del Babuino just off the Piazza di Spagna. The company is called I Solisti dell"Opera and they dress in costumes from the seventeenth century and perform many of the most famous operatic arias. We stopped off at the church to buy the tickets before heading back to the hotel to have a short rest before getting ready for an evening meal and the concert.
After a short rest at the hotel we went for a meal at Mama Angela's where we had a good winter soup and osso buco. Not the same as Jenny's but good all the same. We then set off for the concert and took the 175 bus from Termini to Piazza di Spagna. Unfortunately we missed the stop and had to find our way back from the Colosseum. We eventually got to All Saints Church just a little late but we didn't miss too much. The concert was good with an orchestra and a tenor, mezzo soprano and soprano singing various popular operatic arias.
At the end we decided to take the Metro back to the hotel only to find that the Metro at Piazza di Spagna was closed for repairs and we had to walk to Barberini to catch the 175 bus again.

London greeted us with pouring rain and officious airport staff. We arrived in Terminal 4 and then found our way to Terminal 1 for the flight to Rome. All over the terminal there were signs saying 'don't assault the staff' and it's no wonder since most of them seem incapable of treating people like people. We were herded through the security system and then stopped for a coffee, hot chocolate and a bacon bap before getting on the BA flight to Rome.
The flight was relaxed and we arrived in Fumicino airport at around 10.30am, got the train from the airport to Rome Termini train station and walked to the Royal Court hotel which was just a couple of blocks away from the station. The weather was great - sunny and around 18