Touching on Bellinzona

First of all, let me say "Mi dispiace" 

I know I haven't been on in a long while, but it's because this has been two REALLY busy weeks (well, one week and two weekends!)

As you know, We were traveling to

Monte Tamaro to see Mario Botta's Santa Maria degli Angeli Chapel, which--for any of you archi-buffs, is a pretty cool place. And we saw it. In person.

This post is a little heavy on the pictures I know, but bear with me, and we'll get through it together. The next post is on my model/bike ramp projects (exciting...? eh.) So soak it up, it may be a while before I get to the post from Campodolcino that you all are looking forward to.

We took the funiculare up to the Chapel, and I would have liked to hike, but we had no time--we had a lunch date in Bellinzona at 12.

Below right is the view of the Chapel as we approached it. You can see the gears of the funicular in the top of the picture.  

It was an awesome ride up the mountain, and I was definitely freaking out over some sweet alpine views. 

The chapel was absolutely gorgeous, and the views were awesome. Botta is not my favorite architect by any standard, even if he's the trademark architect of the Ticino, but this was really nicely done, and my pictures do not do it justice.

Will even took a nap at the chapel!(It was too beautiful to resist a little mid-morning snooze.)

 In fact, according to will it was just too Bottastic. Which is our new phrase for anything Botta-like in the Ticino. We get to use our lame architectural humor a lot over here, with all 16 of us studying here.

So we began the trip to Bellanzona, on our Mercedes tour bus. (which apparently is pretty common around here.)

We got to Bellinzona in time to wander through the market on the way to the Castelgrande, where we were having lunch. (Hell yes, we had lunch in a CASTLE!!)

Will almost got this sweet backpack, and I picked up a little something for Bleighton that I found at a craftsman's booth. The Market is fun, even though everyone pretty much spoke English, so I didn't have to try out too many of my new Italian skills. Which is probably a good thing, considering my skills are a little questionable...

The Castelgrande was pretty awesome, the interior and entrance was done by Galfetti, who is something of a local favorite, and is also (in my opinion) a thousand times better than Botta, just way more under-recognized.

After lunch, which was spectacular and included Polenta-- a local dish which tastes like a better version of grits and is made of corn, we hiked up to the other two castles in Bellinzona (there are three)

 The first one one the right is Castelgrande but is actually taken from the second castle. The hike was fast, because we basically power walked it. We only had a couple minutes to get up to all three castles (as in 30 minutes for a two-hour hike). I can't tell you how much my glutes and calves hurt the next day, I can only tell you that we did the hike in about 1 hour. It was intense... intensely fun!

(lame, I know-- again, you all most likely know me, and in turn my sense of humor, so no apologies here)

The second castle, Montebello is pictured below, and this picture was taken from Sasso Corbaro which is really more of a walled keep, but is also ridiculously cool. I don't have any good pictures of Sasso Corbaro, so I just opted to leave it off. So here are a couple views from each, and you can tell they're pretty far away (a hefty hike).

I'll leave you with a picture of Alice and I at the top of Sasso Corbaro on the ramparts!

Burn Baby Burn

Despite just having been in Lugno for an evening, we went back as a class yesterday for an architectural tour. We spent the first half of the day walking around with someone from Giraudi-Wettstein (pronounced Jeer-ow-dee Vet-shteen). Which is a relatively local firm here in the Ticino. The tour ended at the USI, which is the university in Lugano featuring buildings by some heavy-hitting architects and a master plan by Peter Zumthor. The building pictured above is by Giraudi-Wettstein, and the one behind the guys below is by Galfetti, who also happens to have designed the elementary school in Riva, which is sketched in a previous post.

After the tour, we sketched a little bit in Lugano and then had free reign of the city. As usual, Will fell asleep.

We decided that I'm going to post a picture of will sleeping in every city in Europe we visit. Because it's inevitable that this occurs, that kid can sleep anywhere.

The picture is of Will and our classmate Chris sleeping during a break in the tour. I have to give the photocredit to my other classmate Kristin, she's the one who captured this golden moment.

During our free time Jane, Will and I self-toured around Lugano, checking out the architecture, as I proceeded to get yet another burn. I have some ridiculously sensitive skin! There's now a running joke here that includes the phrase, "Hey Steph, it looks like you're a little red..."

Anyways, we ran into some really cool buildings, if you want to check out all the pictures so far, I'll be putting them online soon, whether it be flicker or somewhere else, I don't know yet. That should come in the next post once they are all up (so I'm not posting dead links all over the place). We saw so many things, and walked so much that we were only too happy to get gelato at the gelateria closest to the train station, which has this ridiculous view over Lugano.

Once again, I didn't get to do any shopping, which is definitely good for my wallet, and definitely bad for my morale. But this time it was because I didn't feel like shopping, whereas in Milan, we moved so fast I never had time to stop and shop. (But you better believe next time I will make time) 

As we were leaving the gelateria I heard a familiar accent. Yes, dear readers, I heard the unmistakeable accent of an American. So, being the socially graceful person that I am, I smoothly interrupted their conversation with a big, whopping, "OH, Are you Amercian?!" It turns out that the three people sitting at the table were all American, though one has been living in Europe (Lugano, mostly) for 50 years. She's a retired opera singer, and was discovered at Juliard by Toscanini and sang in La Scala and many opera houses all over southern europe. Her guests were a husband and wife photography team from Chicago (the accent I picked up), and we all had a great conversation. Rather exciting when I think about it.

We got back in time for dinner, which is very good considering I started my shift in the Dining room last night. (At the villa, each week three people have dining room duty, eventually everyone will do it as we rotate through- 1 from Architecture and 2 from business. This includes, cutting the bread, setting the table, and cleaning up.) Gitano and Luigi are our kitchen staff and cook, respectively, and Gitano actually speaks some english. Luigi speaks very, very little. I'm pretty sure he only knows the phrase "I don't speak English". 

Dinner and Lunch should be interesting, seeing as it's a bunch of guys and me in the kitchen (The other two students are guys from the business program). Today we discussed in Italian whether I liked ragazzi (loosly translated to "guys").  The boys got a huge kick out of that conversation, so I had to narrow it down. I'm an uomini (men) type of girl. 

I think we got it sorted out though, at least I hope so (some of those business guys are pretty cute!)

I have the rest of the day ahead of me, so we'll see how that goes. I have a 1/4" detailed model due on friday, for a project that I haven't got very far on yet, so these next few days may include a couple of late nights. 

For now, Ciao Everyone!

Lugano & Milano!

First of all, your daily glimpse of where I live:

So this is the Villa's Lobby. We hang here when we're ready to go out on excursions, or meet up. 

I know, it's pretty amazing. I don't know if I gave you any background on the Villa Maderni yet, so I'll do a little blurbing now:

The Villa Maderni was commissioned by the mayor of Riva San Vitale, who also happened to be the man that led the small area to become the Republic of Riva San Vitale, for probably about two months. The house is over 200 years old (250 actually), and almost everything but the furniture we use daily is just as old as the house! all of the doors, fireplaces, clocks, floors, and rooms are unaltered and original. A lot of the paintings on the ceilings and of the details on the walls are restored to a similar state. It's amazing to live in a place like this. 

I still can't believe it's real to wake up to all of this! It's so strange to see the alps out your window every time you wake up! (that's the view out my window!)

Alright, so again: we've established this place is gorgeous! 

So Friday night, we went (about 30 of us) to a silent film festival in Lugano which is just north of Riva S. Vitale. We walked around the whole city and into the park area, which is... you guessed it: Gorgeous!

After that little trek in the park, we decided to go hunting for a bar, or a club, or anything really. Well, I decided to play sheep for this one, and let the more...intense personalities take the lead. Let's just say we walked around forever. I think that would cover it!

In the end we did make it to the bar, where we spent a lot of the night, just hanging out and having a couple drinks. A lot of us are still getting to know each other (aka the business kids are still getting to know us, and we're still getting to know some of them-- there are a lot more of them!). So then we split a little bit: about ten people went home, and the rest of us elected to stay to go to a club and take the train back early. Well, split we did, but approx. 15 people is still a lot to take from place to place. I swear we look like a mob wherever we go!

It was a ton of fun, and I (typically) spent the whole night dancing. All in all, it's not bad to spend hours walking around when the place you're walking in happens to look like that 

<-------

Eventually we did find our way back to Riva San Vitale (at 4:30 in the morning!!!)

Saturday was (thankfully) low-key, and we spent most of it just hanging out at the Villa. I think everyone needed a break. I went back to the Lido (which is actually how it's spelled, and also how it's pronounced, so please excuse my misspellings from earlier posts) and Julie and I just swan around for a while, trying to ignore the preteen boys being obnoxious (I guess that's the same in every country).

Later that night we started a puzzle of the map of switzerland, but needless to say, that one's going to take a while!!  Everyone just wanted to do something fun (not to mention cheap) so we decided to have a night game of capture the flag. About 20 of us ended up playing, and it was pretty cool. We played in the local elementary school grounds, which is cooler than it sounds. My team won 2 out of 3, so that's enough to make anyone happy!

We called it a night pretty early (especially compared to Friday night) because we were all getting up early to get to go to Milan in the morning at 8 AM!

So today was Milano, and it was really fun. It wasn't too exciting, as we mainly did a fast moving tour of the city. We're supposed to go back with a smaller group, but this time was just a feet wetting for the urban setting. Thankfully, we reverted back to 5th grade and adopted the buddy system. What else can you do when you have 50 people through the streets of Milan?!

So Will was my main buddy, 

(that's him napping beside a bridge when we took a bar break halfway through the day). We basically whipped our cameras out and played complete tourists. It was great. I mean, what else can you do in a mob of so obviously American students?

So this next week we spend in classes and it's Bellinzona on the 29th! 

So until then, Ciao!!

I'll leave you with a picture of the Duomo in Milano [the fourth largest cathedral in the world!]