Today I sit in a beautiful apartment in Barcelona, Spain, where Alaina and I arrived last night after spending 8 fantastic days in my homeland away from home, Italy. An invitation from a friend to spend a week at his house on the island of Elba is never to be turned down, and so our summer plans were set in motion; a week on Elba became three weeks in Europe, hitting all of our friends and family on the continent…
When I enrolled at Middlebury, I knew that I wanted to take advantage of their incredible language program and Italian was the obvious choice for the practical reason that I wanted to study in Italy. I had never been, but I was sure that I needed to go, and so after 3 years of study and a summer at the language school, I landed in Firenze for my junior year abroad. It was nothing short of life-changing. I fell in love with a culture that appreciates friends, family, food and free time like nowhere else. Life is Art and Art is everywhere there. It was the inspiration for Supergood, which spawned guerilla art works on the Middlebury campus the following year.
Elba is a small island in the Mediterranean, with beautiful beaches and 3000 foot mountains. It is a perfect spot for idyllic relaxation, which we managed well with great friends. We then spent a few days driving through the unparalleled beauty of Tuscany, staying at two wonderful B&Bs, where I had a chance to practice my language skills and converse with some passionate Italians on various subjects ranging from fresh ricotta and aged prosciutto to mountain biking and the ugliness of the World Cup final (14 yellow cards?!?). I love the brain strain of foreign languages, and will certainly experience more of it in the next few weeks with my struggling Spanish and high-school French.
