6-2-06

Since we didn’t have class today I explored a little bit. Actually, I slept in late and then went to do homework in a piazza. I ran into Raena at Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere while I was reading the last few pages of Juggling the Stars on the steps of the fountain. But the book was very disturbing at that point, so I went on a walk with Raena. We were originally going to tour the fountains mentioned in Fountains and she was also going to attempt to explain to me how the graffiti on the buildings and monuments is a shift in ownership of the space, and not delinquency, and how it has meaning and I should not be troubled by it. We started that conversation a week or so ago when I commented that, as a designer, it bothered me that something a person put great time and effort into was being somewhat thoughtlessly destroyed. We didn’t actually end up doing either of those two things, because we didn’t we got lost and didn’t want to look like tourists, so we didn’t pull out our maps and figure out where we were. It didn’t really matter, because we found some really neat places. We were coming down from around the Palazzo Borghese (I still haven’t figured out the difference between piazzas and palazzos) and the only reason I think that is because I saw the fountain which Professor Benson pointed out to us as being a very significant fountain last week when we were going up to see the Capuchin Monk Crypt. I remembered that fountain for two reasons, first because it has flies on it, and second because it seemed like a really tiny and unassuming fountain and I couldn’t figure out why it was so important. Anyway, as we were coming down from that area Raena pointed out a bell tower ahead of us, It was standing above a vast ruins, but you could still see two cupola’s one larger and one smaller. It looked like the ruins of an old church, except that the tower and the two cupola’s were still intact. I still don’t know what the place was, but we did stop at what is now a museum that stands next to it and also has a bit of a bombed out look to it. It wasn’t open and the information cards were in Italian, but I think that it used to be a temple built by Diocletian. I looked up his reign, because I had thought that he was the last person to persecute the Christians after Constantine, but instead I found that he started the Great Persecution a few emperors before Constantine, and set up the Tetrarchy and a system governmental division which roughly corresponds to the way in which the Catholic church divided responsibilities for an area.

After we saw these ruins, Raena looked at her map and we figured out where we were. When she heard that I had never been all the way down the Corso, or to the Spanish steps, she agreed to show me where they were. After we went down to Piazza Dell Popolo it started to look like it might rain, so we walked back towards the Sede, hopped on the Tram and went back to Trastevere. When I got back to the apartment I finished off Juggling the Stars, and I wonder if the reason I didn’t like it was because I couldn’t identify with Morris, or because I identified with him too