Adrienne Jenkins

STANLEY HAS HIS ESPRESSO

2012-04-25T00:51:00.000-04:00

Here's Stanley enjoying his daily espresso and reading the newspaper in Rome. Almost every Roman has their own barristo or cafe' where they know the owner and regular customers. Our cafe' is Alex Bar--in Italy "bar" means cafe' not like in the United States. So when I say "I'm going to the bar." it means I'm getting a coffee.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROME

2012-04-23T18:07:00.000-04:00

Saturday was the City of Rome's traditional birthday and Sunday was a parade of Roman re-enactors...legions (literally) of Romans. Many Caesars, senators, legionnaires, slaves, etc. etc.

FLAT STANLEY IN ARRIVO

2012-04-22T05:23:00.000-04:00

My cousin's son Ethan (is he my 2nd cousin...I think....need a Table of Consanguinity to figure it out...Well, he has a school project in which he sends a cut out of a person named Flat Stanley. We're to take him around town with us this week and photograph him in various spots.

Land Art

2012-04-19T14:24:00.000-04:00

Here are some samples of the Land Art completed by my students over the past two days.

LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA

2012-04-11T06:00:00.000-04:00

As part of the trip to Veneto, we took the students to Ljubljana, Slovenia. This small city (but capital of Slovenia) is a combination of Prague, Amsterdam and Weimar. You could walk across the downtown in less than 15 minutes but it is filled with excellent buildings and urban spaces designed by Joze Plecnik. Very pleasant place.

TRIESTE

2012-04-09T06:07:00.001-04:00

We visited Trieste on the way from Ljubljana to Venice. It was an interesting town--a port town that had the pleasant grittiness of places like Genoa, Baltimore or Philadelphia, but with a Austrian-Hungarian accent. This is a photo of the canal built as part of an 18th century urban development.

MOON RISING

2012-04-07T02:01:00.002-04:00

The moon appeared over the Vittorio Emanuele monument last night--very beautiful. Just as I was photographing it, a plane transited the moon but it did not show up in the photo.

FORCOLE

2012-04-05T06:45:00.002-04:00

When in Venice, I visited the workshop of the guy who makes forcole or oar locks for the gondolas. Forcole are shaped to allow the gondolier to move the boat using only one oar and are thus shaped in response to need.
Here is the website for the shop:http://www.forcole.com/eng-home.htm

EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE

2012-04-01T00:06:00.000-04:00

This chair and this inset corner seem made for one another. It's the simple things...

SIGNAGE

2012-03-17T12:22:00.003-04:00

Not sure what this sign means. It was posted on a WC in a small church that we visited during history class.

PROJECT 1

2012-03-10T06:00:00.002-05:00

I finally found time to photograph the first project of the semester: Documentation and analysis of squares in Rome. Here is one that examined Campo d'Fiori.

BOLOGNA

2012-03-09T06:00:00.001-05:00

My bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R. My bologna has a second name it's M-E-Y-E-R. I love to eat it everyday and if you ask why, I'll say: Oscar Meyer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A.
Why do we pronounced bologna as baloney?
Anyway...the town is more famous for its mortadella and the 70km of arcades.

FLORENCE

2012-03-08T06:00:00.001-05:00

We spent three days in Florence where we looked at Renaissance art, architecture and urban design including Michelangelo's "David" and Brunelleschi's dome for Florence's cathedral. While there, we helped my former professor's wife, Pat Sachs, reconnect with people she had befriended when she and he were teaching there. Lastly, we actually met a prince: Ottaviano de'Medici di Toscana di Ottajano....an actual Medici. The Medici family was the patron of the great artists and architects of the Renaissance.

SIENA

2012-03-07T01:46:00.005-05:00

Here are some photos of our trip to Siena. Siena is a mid-sized, hillside town famous for its bowl-shaped piazza...not its bowl of pasta.

BOOK AD

2012-02-27T12:00:00.002-05:00

Here's the ad for my book. This is something that is distributed at book fairs or other events.

BUYING SUPPLIES

2012-02-26T14:00:00.001-05:00

Waiting in line to buy art supplies for the students.

ASHES IN BOROMINI

2012-02-24T03:12:00.003-05:00

The church which is usually closed everyday except Sunday mornings, was open on Ash Wednesday...with a choir.
Check out the iPad video--a first for me. Click on this text and then, when you click play, expand the image to full-screen with the icon on the lower right of the video.

TIE SHOPPING

2012-02-19T15:03:00.012-05:00

Click on the photo to see pictures & videos that accompany these captions.

Today Eric needed to get a new tie as he was heading to a reception at the Vatican to greet Bishop O'Brien from Baltimore who was being appointed as Cardinal. Eric wanted a tie that was very Italian and I think this orange tie fits the bill.

Eric learns how to tie a tie the Italian way.

Beautifully hand-crafted in Italy with what they call a "Seven Fold Tie".

Orange seems to be a color that always seems to be in vogue in Europe. As is it turns out, it may also be this season's in color.

Here's a window display of Spring 2012 men's Italian fashions. And yes, I think that's a male mannequin secure in his manliness wearing his man purse or courier bag slung across his body.

I couldn't be bothered to stand in line or deal with the crowds so I'm grateful Eric was able to attend the reception with Tom Kerns, an architect from Washington, DC and his wife, Roz. Tom has been in town this past week to teach Eric's students about how to paint water colors. Eric, Tom and the students have been out and about many of Rome's most famous monuments painting outside on days when the sun's come out.

Pope Benedict XVI Elevates Baltimore's Archbishop Edwin O'Brien to Cardinal

By chance, I stumbled upon this interview of David Letterman with Lady Gaga and she points out that she likes Letterman's orange tie which turns out to be similar to the one Eric bought.

SUN WITH CLOUDS

2012-02-19T14:00:00.000-05:00

ROMAN BATH

2012-02-17T10:14:00.014-05:00

Click on my face to see more photos. Today, Eric's colleague, Marina treated me to Hammam where we went to a spa called Acqua Madre.

The first room was the tempidarium 36°, a warm room where you wash yourself with natural black olive soap and relax on a warm marble bench.

Then we went into an awesome sauna room, the calidarium 45°. We went late Friday morning while most people are at work, so we have the room to ourselves which meant we had room to stretch out on our own bench, relax and breathe in the steam and enjoy the hot marble slab.

Since we could only stay in the hot room for a few minutes at a time, we alternated between the two rooms a few more times before getting our backs scrubbed by an attendant who used a coarse glove to exfoliate our skin.

Then it was a quick shower to get rid of the dead skin. I had no idea how dirty I was until I turned around and so the globs of skin left behind on the table and the attendant actually sent me back in the shower because I hadn't realized how much dead skin was still on my body that needed an extra rinse to get off.

To balance all the heat, at the end we plunged into a cooler frigidarium with a beautiful pool of water and strong massaging jacuzzi jets. To finish, we relaxed on wooden deck chairs sipping hot mint tea while we caught up on some light breezy reading, paging through a gossipy celebrity rag, something like People magazine except in Italian.

Awww, when in Rome. Whadda ya think, does my skin look more youthful?

WATERCOLORING

2012-02-15T02:52:00.002-05:00

Here are four of my watercolor experiments after a few years of no watercoloring. It took me about 10 to get to these four. We took the students out four times this week. They're improving tremendously.

LIVING DELIBERATELY

2012-02-14T03:17:00.003-05:00

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

CLEARING THE ICE

2012-02-11T18:00:00.003-05:00

I guess ya gotta use the tools ya got. These ladies are attacking the ice with claw hammers.

SNOWBALL FIGHT WITH THE PANTHEON

2012-02-11T15:00:00.000-05:00

I made a snowball (do the Romans know what this is?) and threw it at the Pantheon wall. Just to challenge the gods...Hubris on my part.

NOT A TYPICAL DAY

2012-02-11T14:45:00.015-05:00

Saturday afternoon.