Masters Reading Response to The Italian

This piece was very interesting to me. Maybe it is because it started out with an assassin in a church and secretly I've been obsessed with assassins. They just fascinate me. But that's beside the point. Italy in this piece was represented to me, as a place where rules are their own. For example: the Englishman was extremely surprised when the assassin was able to walk around the church freely. The friar explained that was because he sought sanctuary there and his justification was that this assassin would starve without the sanctuary. Italy seems to be a place where a lot more is legally acceptable. Our group recently discovered that Italians, especially the ones throughout history, have been oppressed by whatever empire had taken them over at that time. So, breaking rules was their way of getting back. The other day, we ran into a couple who rode the bus without a bus ticket and their justification was the fact that it was late and no one really cares. The other thing that I've noticed about Romans and rules, especially regarding crossing busy streets, was that there are no rules. They just walk across whenever they feel like it. You may or may not get honked at, but every driver will stop. This is relevant to The Italian because that's the way it seems to be within the churches in Italy: there is a different set of rules. I think this could be the same in America, but you don't here about it, and you definitely don't see it with assassins. Italy is represented as a place with it's own code of conduct, that can still be seen today.

Junkyard Quote Post Three Week Two

I sit on a suede couch next to Joanci and am in the middle of telling a story about where I will be living in the fall to Jo, when the buzzer sounds. Joanci, thinking its her alarm clock, meanders into her bedroom, but the buzzer sounds again. I look at Jo. Its the door, which opens to the voice of a woman's rapid Italian. I can pick out two words: Jehovah's Witnesses. I see Joanci's spine crinkle: No speak Italian.
Oh you're English? Do you have a Bible? 
A pamphlet is passed and the door shuts.

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week Two

Down past the Metro in Bologna, Rome, there is a small sign that reads "YouthStation Hostel." If you were on the other side of the road, behind the orange trees that sop up the Roman air, you wouldn't see the blue and white. Once you enter the welcome area, a woman with a slightly German accent hands you a paper and asks for your passport, you pay fourteen euro and get a laminated tag with the wifi code and a key. Doors line the hallways of a green building, you pass Asia, North America, Rome. Europe and Great Britain are on the other side, you meet them at the common area where a girl in a pink shirt and black skinny jeans takes a pizza out of the microwave. The woman at the desk tells you that "there is a grocery store down the street" and "you better hurry, because it closes at eight."

Junkyard Quote Post One Week Two

"grease mullets dance in sweat"

"made by a French accented Italian"

The Capuchin Crypt, filled with real skeletons from the Barberini family, welcomed us with a woman at a granite desk asking five per head. We walked through the same information from the two hour lecture from a St. Francis enthusiast. The crypt, an underground tomb with a set of stairs and one sign that reads no smoking, cellphones, pets, food, or photography, in symbols. We are in Rome, language barriers are the medians.
The underground home for the heart of Pope Sixtus the fifth's niece also houses intricate wall decor and chandeliers made from kneecaps and vertebrae.

Reportage Post Week Two

Today, we walked from Piazza Libertad to the Alberghiero, where Daniella went to school to be a tour guide. We were welcomed by a man with hair past where the neck meets the back and his co-worker, who reminded me of the secret service with Ray Bans darker than night and the ear piece to talk to the Director, who we met at Elisa's party the weekend before. I smile at the teenage girls at the front desk, dressed in matching uniforms and spoke better English than my Italian. To the right, the kitchen, with four boys younger than me laughing at my misshapen lump of dough: a jagged edged circle. I thump the rolling pin in the pimpled boy with the earring in front of me, and sigh. He wraps the end around the pin, trying to smooth it out, the boy next to him tosses flour to destickify it. Side glances at a snickering Jenna prove that my pasta will never live up to the standards of this cook. I think about how grateful I am for High School and the opportunity to go to College, where my work lives up to my standards.
In the other room, where we migrate like herded cats after scarfing down too thick strigoli, there is a group of teenage boys and a girl at the front of the room, dressed in graphic tee-shirts from surf shops and Hollister, awaiting instructions from a saggy pants teacher with a buzz cut. He looks like a friend of my mothers, her trainer from Chicago, with the sleeves of tattoos and bulging triceps. It makes me miss home, this Italian teacher of American Bartending.
Working Flair for two shots and Sex on the Beach is basically one person throwing bottles of Skyy Vodka in the air and jumping up and down in sync with bad Pitbull Zumba music. The row of added American stress bores into the stand from Bartender Stars, not blinking, not wanting to miss the drop of cranberry juice that spots the table.This is their final. I realize I would much rather have a cranberry scantron in front of me, than a twirling cranberry bottle.

Memory Post Week Two

A girl in a butterfly striped shirt, the same girl from the school up the street, holds a Stracciacelli gelato in her right hand, the calloused hand of her farming boyfriend's in her left. Their lips meet each others more than the sugar that drips down the cone. His spoon dips into a strawberry cup and a bluebird lands on the bench next to them, sings a tune that reminds me of the Hunger Games.
Italian children on bikes laugh in the background, a bell chimes: two o'clock.
A woman sits alone two tables away, nursing her own cone, a pad of paper with lamb, asparagus and pane sits in front of her; a pick up list at Tigre for dinner with a tabby cat tonight. I watch her watch the couple, eyebrows scrunching up with the right side of the mouth, hands fidgeting with the pen: click, click.
I think of the pen, my fingers unconsciously move to my left pocket, the silver cylinder with black etching; what you gave me three years ago for a birthday everyone else forgot. We stood on my balcony, fingers tightened on the metal spirals. My eyes searched yours for a hint, some speck of something in the pupiled blue, just like the girl in front of me now in Piazza Garibaldi.

Masters Reading Response to An Italian Affair

I might get some jeers or curious looks from some of my fellow English peeps, but I truly enjoyed this snip-it from the novel. It was an easy read that I felt like I could really get deeper into the piece through the second person writing style. That way, as a reader, I was able to become part of the story and be Laura. The other thing that I really enjoyed about the story was the way that Italy was represented. Although it was the cliched idea that you go to Italy for an Italian man to sweep you off your feet and become your lover, it was really interesting the way the way that Laura Fraser writes it. It reminds me of the movie Under the Tuscan Sun, when the main character goes to Italy on a whim and finds herself a Tuscan villa. In An Italian Affair, Laura goes to Italy to escape a bad divorce with her husband and finds a man who more or less is her imagination of what an affair should be like. He isn't even Italian, but a tourist himself. This is one of those times when Italy is portrayed as a matchmaking place, a place where people find what they are looking for. I don't know what it is or why it is that Italy continues to have this sort of reputation, but it continues to pop up in literature and movies, but it kind of earns this reputation as a magical sort of place where love blossoms. It could be because of the art that exists, or the architecture, or the discovery of knowledge that has occurred here. I know for myself, there is a sense of awe for visiting people and that awe seems to turn into lust in this book, especially sense the couple is traveling together to see beauty in the scenery. Italy seems to be a place that is a catalyst for this affair.