Museo D'Arte di Umbria (and cookies and haircuts)

Another week of Italian classes under our belts,and with it came the introduction of a tense I had not previously studied and frankly hoped never to need to learn, the passato remoto.  It is used to express actions that occurred in the past and have no continuing effect.  This is exactly what the passato prossimo expresses as far as I can tell, so I don't really know the point of the passato remoto, but it is used in books, papers, and magzines all the time so I guess we need to  understand it.  Unfortunately, most of the common words (eat, drink, talk, go, do, have, know, etc.) are irregular and have to be memorized.    We talked about a lot of different topics in our classes this week, as I realized when I went through my notes and made a list of new vocabulary words. The subjects ranged from everything to do with a wedding (one of our classmates is getting married February 1) to the biography of Casanova (a vehicle for using passato remoto) to Italian politics.  WW II is ancient history to our 20 year old classmates as is the Vietnam war which  many of them have never heard of.  (It came up when Tom was explaining that he was in the Navy during the Vietnam war).  It was interesting to hear the Italian version of the American's involvement in WW II and how they seem to be trying to distance themselves from Mussolini--the party line according to the book we were using and our teacher was that Mussolini was a dictator who forced fascism on the people who never wanted it and rose up in revolt against it. Maybe a little revisionist history there.

After sleeping in late today we headed to the nearby Museo D'Arte Di Umbria which has Umbrian artifacts and art works from the 9th through the 19th centuries.  The museum is housed in an old palazzo which is itself very interesting, with high arched ceilings, frescoes, marble stairways and beautiful arched windows.  It has an extensive collection of the work of Perugino which was very interesting and beautiful , but we definitely had our fill  of the Mary-Jesus pictures after a couple of hours.

View of Piazza Maggiore from inside the museum

A famous triptych by Perugino, originally part of an altar

View of the Umbrian hills from the museum

Interactive exhibit--match the body parts

Backside of the clock in the campanile (inside museum)

"art shot" of the city through the museum window

Tom posing in the one room with contemporary art

When we emerged from the museum after a few hours, we found the weather had gotten significantly colder (snow was in the forecast but we didn't believe it) so we decided to head back to the apartment.  On the way I found a paruchiere (hair salon) and they said I could get a haircut in a few minutes so I waited there while Tom went on a short walk to a viewpoint.

Pictures from the viewpoint

When Tom returned from his walk, expecting me to be ready, I was still waiting. When will I learn that "a few minutes" in Italian time is anywhere from 30-90 minutes?  It was amusing to see a client with wet hair put a towel on her head and go outside to smoke with one of the stylists while I was waiting.  Smoking is way more common here.  Also, they will send to the nearby bar for an espresso for you while you wait if you like (or an apertivo).  Tom went to the bank and the enoteca for some Saturday night wine and I was still waiting when he returned.  I was just about to leave when they called me back for a shampoo.  The shampoo lady didn't know I understood Italian (kind of anyway) and made several rude comments about my dirty gray hair! My hair is definitely gray but not dirty--I had washed it only 6 hours before.  She at least had the grace to blush when the stylist came in and I talked with him in Italian.  The stylist was a very nice guy named Danieli who told me I should visit his hometown Narni because it is the "piu bello di Italia."  All Italians think their hometown is the "piu bello" but Narni actually is supposed to be very pretty.  Danieli gave me a great haircut and a brief italian lesson so it was worth the wait.  We stopped at the nearby bakery and got three different types of biscotti (all of what we call cookies are called biscotti here, not just what we think of as biscotti).  This was purely in the interest of educational research of course.  Thus endeth the lesson for the week.