"Presente"

This weekend we had a field trip to Trieste, Padua and Acquilea.  Trieste especially was a fascinating city: it was controlled for centuries by the Austrian-Hungarian empire, and today it still seems very anti-Italian.  It's a sort of melting pot of European cultures in a similar fashion to the United States.  It has architecture that looks both French and German, and food from all over.  Even the dialect changes depending on where in the city you are.  Overall, it reminded me a lot of Nice and Munich... very surprising, but these are my comparisons. It was clean with white buildings, beautiful clock towers, and wide streets. 

         Anyways, it honestly wasn’t that exciting of a field trip (very "educational" but a lot of pretty inconsequential facts) so I’m only going to spend time talking about the good parts.  Padua wasn’t that exciting: we stopped for lunch and then got back on the bus, so that was that.  We arrived in Trieste Friday night and I was exhausted but much more in awe of Trieste than I had been of Padua.  We got split up into these beautiful quaint “hotel” rooms (they looked like apartments to me) in one section of the city.  It was fun to be on a trip with the rest of our Elon group.  I think we all connected pretty well because of all the time we had together outside of the classroom and also because we’ve spent this entire journey together, more or less.

Anyways, I’ll start with the coolest part of the trip: we went to a World War I memorial in Acquileia.  We climbed 300 steps to the top.  Our teacher told us that Mussolini had built this memorial.  He’d been frustrated with a memorial across the street because it had evoked depressing emotions with those who visited; it was barren and had war equipment besides the buried men.  So he built this grand and sleek memorial sight with these huge granite steps that climbed to the top of a mountain.  Apparently he thought this would help people view fighting in war as something honorable and as something worth dying for (not that it isn't, but some Italians viewed war as unnecessary until Mussolini came along and showed them that war can win you immortality).  He thought people might view this memorial as a symbol of what could happen if you die in war: you could get a "fast pass" to Heaven and immediate access to God (since the memorial ends at the top of the mountain).  This was fascinating, and uniquely, eerily beautiful to me.  

The steps that climb to the top also say “PRESENTE” on them, one after another, hundreds of them.  Apparently, during roll call in World War 1 (perhaps they still do this, but I was told the story specifically regarding the first World War), after each man’s name was called, he’d say, “present”(or presente, since he was Italian).  They wrote this word on the stairs as a way of saying that they are all still here and that they are all still present, or at least that they were here, that they were present, and they need to be respected and remembered for that.

         That was one of my favorite facts learned on this trip, topped only by this one: apparently, when a soldier died and his name was called, all of them, every single soldier, would say “PRESENTE.”  In their unique way this was like carrying the dead man with them by saying, “yes, he is still here.  He is within us.”

         So I loved everything about Acquileia. 

         

We did a walking tour of Trieste on Sunday with our literature professor and saw Italo Sveno’s house (we’ve been reading him this semester) as well as James Joyces house (which made me really frustrated that we haven’t been reading him instead, because our teacher said he wrote the “single greatest English novel ever written” – Ulysses).  That wasn’t that exciting, but then we saw a café that a lot of great authors have written in (besides James Joyce, Hemingway wrote in it), which I loved.  The trip would have been a lot better, in my opinion, if we’d just stayed in this café. But instead our teacher took us to three different cafes to try different Trieste coffee, because I guess their known for it. I don’t like coffee, so it was relatively pointless for me.  Coffee is disgusting to me no matter where you drink it. 

         We had a lot of free time.  One night we stood outside and drank wine in the rain.  That was a lot of fun.  On the way home we stopped at a concentration camp, the only concentration camp that exists (or has ever existed) in Italy.  It was heartbreaking, of course, but also interesting to compare with the one I saw in Germany.  Perhaps it was more heartbreaking because it was smaller and just seemed like a couple of brick buildings - it didn't seem as momentous as the other one.  There were letters inside that some of the men had written.

We also visited a small town and a cathedral and a chapel.  The chapel was painted by Giotto and beautiful.  The other cathedral was interesting because of how old it was.  The city, actually, was around before Ancient Rome and had a lot of cool old artifacts.