Enzo and Donatella are in a fight over how much she feeds the dogs. At first, I thought they were arguing about me. I knew just enough to know that the pronouns they were using for “eating all the time” and “going to get fat” were feminine and I was like “HEY I’M DOING A LOT OF WALKING” and then I was like, “Oh. They’re talking about Camilla.” Which is both a relief and kind of hilarious, given that they have taken to sleeping in separate bedrooms.

Everything is funnier with Owen around. This is amazing 92% of the time. The other 8% is when we’re in class. At least once a day something happens that has us both struggling to keep straight faces. Then there are days were it happens every five minutes. This happened the other day in Italian class. Two women came in to talk to the class about Italian conversation group. They explained when it’d be happening, where it was, and how we would get to talk to Italian students by going there. There was a pause and then the girl beside them asked, “This is for a movie?” which set the whole class off. Then, after re-explaining that they were here for conversation group, the women gave the girl a sign up sheet, which she promptly took, signed her name too, and then handed back to the two women without even pausing to think about handing it around to the rest of the class.

Everyone thought this was funny. Owen and I just thought it was funny the longest. We sat with our eyes down, hands over our mouths, shaking with laughter, until our teacher turned around and exclaimed how red our faces were which I at least, took as an invitation to burst out laughing – dragging Owen, unfortunately, down with me.

Something else that set us off that day, was the video we watched in Arts and Antiquities about a method of sculpting used in ancient Rome. It’s called Direct Something or Other and is hilarious because it’s the least direct thing ever. I have no idea how somebody created this or why they thought this was a good idea. There are about seventy five steps, one of which is simply “bury the sculpture in sand.” Our teacher and everybody else nodded and acted like this all made sense while Owen and I were trying hard not to have to excuse ourselves from another class.

I’ve been taking a lot of walks out into the countryside. My new favorite walk is up past the fort of Belvedere and then just away from the city. Yesterday I took a similar walk out beyond Fiesole. Unfortunately, it seems like all green space here is privately owned. I tried to enter a park yesterday only to be told by the guy at the little office by the gate that it wasn’t open to the public – I mean he only spoke Italian, so he could also have said “sorry, no gingers allowed” but I’m pretty sure it was the first thing.

The countryside out beyond Fiesole.

My skin has been really dry here so I borrowed one of Donatella’s moisturizers (not hand lotion this time, I’m pretty sure). The translation of what it did was, “fix all errors.” I figured dry skin would probably fall under the category of an “error” but I put it on and stared into the mirror for about fifteen minutes to make sure my nose wasn’t about to fall off. I’m not entirely sure how watching my nose would fall off would be better than having it plop off onto my Italian book, but at least in the mirror I felt like I had some control. I went to the grocery store a few days later to buy my own moisturizer. It’s 5 in I of something and, in addition to not understanding what that means, I have to use it extremely sparingly because it’s tinted for dark skin and gives me black face if I use too much of it. Grocery shopping can be kind of a struggle here.

View of Florence across the Arno River.