The big task for my second Monday in Rome was to do laundry. The thought crossed my mind, I haven't done laundry in a week. Actually, I haven't done laundry in quite a few years, I'm sorry to say. First, I had to go to the porter at the front gate and buy tokens for the washing machine. It cost two euros per load. The dryer was free. But I needed to buy laundry detergent. There's an orientation booklet with great details about the rules for the American Academy. Once in awhile I come across an item left out that would have been helpful to have been told. One is that you need to buy your own laundry detergent from a grocery store. So off I went down the stone stairs to the area called Trastavere. I wrote about this last week. This time I knew right where I was going. Just beyond the Todis Discount grocery store is a bank, so I was able to get some cash out. I ended up only buying laundry detergent. I almost bought these huge bottles of water. I did not want to haul them back up the hill. And I didn't want to pay a euro and try to catch a bus back up the hill. It took several hours to do the three loads of wash I had. There were a couple of people who were also trying to do their wash. One guy laid out his whole load of wash onto the drying rack. There was no space left anywhere when he was done. It was like one large clothing puzzle.

I did a lot of reading today, trying to get ready for class on Tuesday morning. We are reading about the Republican portrait busts (Republican as in the Roman republic, not Bush, Cheney, and Rove) and the realism (or verism) they portray. It's a strange phenomenon for some Roman statues to depict Romans naked. It's a very Greek thing to do. You ask yourself, why would a Roman general be nude? I came across this really funny sentence in an article by Jeremy Tanner, "Portraits, Power, and Patronage in the Late Roman Republic." He's describing these full statues in which the head shows a typical realism of Republican portrait busts, but in these cases the figure is portrayed in the nude. He writes, "These recall classical image sof saviour-heroes with which not only Greek but also increasingly Italian and Roman viewers will have been familiar, as the heritage of classical Greek art was appropriated through force, purchase, and copying. Ofellius Ferus, the Foruli statue, and the Palazzo Spada Pompey strongly recall (in pose, drapery, and equipment) late classical paintings...." I don't think he meant "equipment" on a nude male as we might think.

I've had wonderful conversations at meals with other people who are staying at the American Academy. Michele Salzman, for example, teaches at the University of California, Riverside. This evening I sat with a woman who studies medieval Christian art. She's studying the tapestries that were designed to hang below the paintings in the Sistine Chapel. A gentleman introduced himself to me the other day. I only caught his first name, Yehudi. He is a composer. We simply had a nice talk about our lives and our families. Everyone here may not study the same sort of thing or be at the same level, but most everyone shares the circumstance of being away from ones we love. But we wouldn't do it if it wasn't important to be here.