Italy Trip: Day 2

(Tuesday 19, 2012) After our exhausting day of touring Rome, I was excited to find out that we were going to have another day of touring Rome, but this time, it was going to be on a bus. To be honest, I didn’t really learn anything new except for when we drove by the Vatican. Even though I didn’t get to go inside, I was still happy to be able to see it. While on the tour, the recording kept saying that art is a major influence in Italian culture. This was very apparent back in the Roman era, but I have yet to see it be influenced in the present day, until we went to Giarduno dei Tarocchi. This place was a trip. At the beginning I wasn’t very excited to go to this place because I was exhausted after the bus tour and the 2+ hour drive, but when Leila started to explain the woman who built and lived in it for ten years was and what she did, it started to peak my interest. I still didn’t really know what I was getting myself into until we saw the first couple of art pieces. They were shinny and very bizarre. As I ventured further into her gardens, I started getting more and more excited to see how crazy the next sculpture could be. My favorite of the sculptures was the castle sculpture with the second floor. It was my favorites because it was so big and had so many different smaller sculptures and other art pieces. I thought the rocket on the second floor of this area was one of the coolest things I have ever seen in my life because the inside was filled with tiny mirrors that would ricochet light thousands of times in different directions. Also, I liked the little fountain in the middle of this castle of mirrors mostly because it was really hot that day and I was really close to jumping into it and hanging out with those 4 ladies. The other really stunning building was the house that she lived in. I liked this house a lot because it looked so simple yet complex. The room was mostly filled with regular white mirrors, which to me, made it look very simple and yet if you look closely, all those white mirrors are all broken a certain way to fill the entire room. I can only imagine the time it took to make all these sculptures and how attached she felt to some of them (which would probably explain why she lived there for ten years). I made the joke to some of my friends saying that if I lived in that area for that long, I would start to get sick and tired of seeing what I looked like. Plus, I don’t think that it had any air conditioning… But that’s fine because when it would bet hot, she probably just relaxed in the pool that is at the beginning of the garden. Over all, even though I wasn’t excited to go to the garden at first, I was when I left. And I feel that I walked away with a better understanding of some of the more modern day Italian art.