Mi Piace, Mi Gusta: Day 11 – Ho scritto un libro. (I wrote a book.)

Today’s Italian class was a continuation of our lesson on passive voice verbs, but we were also talking about books and libraries. During the opening part of our lesson, we had a series of questions to ask a partner about reading and writing. One of the questions was “Hai mai pensato di scrivere un libro?” (Have you ever thought of writing a book?)

Uh . . .  well . . .yes.

So of course, I had to tell my partner about my book, and the substitute teacher that we had for today happened to be walking past us at the time, so then I had to tell her about it too.

At the end of class, we had to pair up and  pretend that we were either editors at a publishing house or writers who had just written a book. Guess what my partner and I pretended!

Then we had to write about our book and prepare to try to “sell” our books to the publishers. So basically, I was translating the query letter from Angelhood into Italian today! Explaining my book in English is hard enough. Trying to explain in Italian with a limited Italian vocabulary is really hard! However, just like in English, it seemed to get easier the more I did it.

After class, I walked toward the Spanish Steps, not so much to see them, but because I was on the hunt for the apartment used in the movie Roman Holiday. Katie had read in her tour book that you could see it–at least from the outside. I’d also found a website that said the same, so using the address from the website, I headed off to this location north of the Spanish Steps.

This is what I found:

On the door to the right was a sign that said it was forbidden to enter (private property). So much for that! Maybe they got tired of tourists coming around.

On my way home, I passed through the  Piazza del Popolo, where they are setting up for a huge concert series. I tried to ask a guy there who was playing, but he just said, “Domani (tomorrow).”

After working on some homework and travel plans at home (which got really frustrating when I couldn’t find what I wanted online), I met Katie at school. We tried to take the Metro out to visit some churches, but the trains were so full we could not get on. Eventually, we gave up and just ate dinner in the neighborhood.

I’m tired and hope to get to bed early tonight. One nice surprise today was finding the Church of St. Joachim (Mary’s father) during my afternoon wanderings. It’s called “international” because it has separate chapels for a lot of different countries, like one with a painting of St. Patrick for Ireland, and one with a statue of Mary (Immaculate Conception) and paintings of women from the Bible (e.g. Ruth and Esther) for the U.S. It wasn’t a terribly old church but built to look like one. The best part was that it was open in the afternoon (when a lot of churches close), so I got to have some quiet time inside.