Tag Archives: Italy

Travel Note: Puglia Stage

travel, , ,

An administrative note from the powers that be: we are traveling to Apulia for a stage (the Italian word for field trip) and will be staying there for the rest of the week. The UNISG program includes about a week’s worth of travel every month or so, where we go to another region of Italy or another country, and spend time learning about local products, meeting producers and sampling the specialties of the region. Puglia is well known for its olive oil, beaches and aggressive men. Ah, my first stint in southern Italy.

A sample itinerary (for Tuesday 6/15):

8:30 – Breakfast

9:00 – Departure to Terranova

10:00 – Visit a local farm that raises Murgese horses, free range pigs and produces Capocollo di Martina Franca

12:00 – Visit an artisanal butcher, Romanelli; lesson on the capocollo production process and tasting

14:00 Visit to Martina Franca

16:00 Visit the wine cooperative of Locorotondo

17:00 Visit to Alberobello

19:00 Departure for Cisternino

20:00 Arrival in Cisternino and dinner at Fornello Menga Restaurant

According to the website, the hotel has wifi in public areas, so hopefully I’ll have some internet access in between hanging out on the beach. Otherwise, my computer will be completely dead weight and I will catch you all on Friday night.

Turin: Piazza San Carlo Panorama

architecture, ,

A panorama of Turin’s Piazza San Carlo, one of the most important town squares in the city. The Americans in the group lamented the lack of town squares in the US when we saw this one. Much of the architecture dates back to the 17th century, with an equestrian monument dedicated to Emanuele Filiberto (Duke of Savoy) in the center, flanked on both sides by the rococo Palazzo Solaro del Borgo, with twin baroque churches dedicated to San Carlo and Santa Cristina on the other end. In the Palazzo Solaro, you can see echos of admiration for the Louvre in Paris. In modern times, the plaza has been the site of many public gatherings, from victory celebrations for Juventus (soccer) fans to mass with the Pope to commemorate the public display of the Holy Shroud of Turin (believed to be the burial cloth of Jesus).

Don’t forget to click to zoom.

Back Roads of the Italian Countryside, or My Daily Commute

life, , , , , , ,

Note: This post is mostly geared towards UNISG students, so it will be fairly useless to you unless you need to get from Bra to Pollenzo.

Living in Italy, you start to realize that there are always two ways of doing everything, the official system and the back door in-the-know route. Take the process of acquiring a permesso di soggiorno residency permit, required for all non-EU citizens staying in Italy for over 90 days. In Bra, you can either go to the Post Office, pick up an application kit and struggle to figure out what to put down so as to not have your application rejected, or you can go to the Al Elka-L’incontro center for foreign citizens, which provides consulting services and staff who fill out the application for you. Granted, the center is only open for 7 hours a week, on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, but that is different gripe. Ah, Europe.

Similarly, there are many ways to get from my apartment in Bra to UNISG campus in Pollenzo. There is a bus available and one of my flatmates has a car, but I have opted to make use of my bicycle and bike to class daily. This has led to some scary, ahem, entertaining rides to class, since intercity Italian roads strongly favor wide trucks and no shoulders. And so, I set out to find an alternate route to school besides the one suggested by Google Maps, and began exploring the back roads between Bra and Pollenzo. After a week of exploration, I had discovered a number of small dirt-lined roads, some of which were unpaved and lined with gravel (e.g. a bike flat waiting to happen), others which were just as crowded with traffic as my original route. Then Laura, one of my classmates, told me that she had learned the perfect route to get to campus from an undergrad student. Free of traffic and thoroughly paved? I jumped to follow her.
Continue reading Back Roads of the Italian Countryside, or My Daily Commute →