Welcome to our new blog! Through it we hope to chronicle our year in Italy and also keep in touch. We'll share some of our adventures and experiences, and we'd love to hear from you. Thanks to those who've kept us up-to-date on what's happening at home. Although we've had a great start to this year, we miss our family and friends and the ease of close proximity.
Our Italian adventure began with such an adventure. After a very long flight, the six of us were excited to land in Florence and glad for the shuttle waiting to take us to Siena, a small Tuscan city about an hour from Florence where we would spend our first 16 days in Italy. After two attempts to land, however, the pilot informed us that due to an unsafe tailwind landing in Florence wasn't possible, and we would need to land in nearby Pisa. With no way of contacting our driver, and not without some despair, we quickly considered our options and decided to dive right in and take a train. There are not enough pages to describe this trip from the Pisa airport to the Pisa train station to Siena via Empoli, but let me just offer some words and phrases, and allow your imagination to retell the story: four exhausted boys, two exhausted parents, 10 suitcases (two without wheels), one 46 lb. box, 1 guitar, 6 backpacks, a large camera case, tears, wailing, exceptionally limited Italian, little train travel experience, many stairs, broken lifts, August heat wave… but, we did it! We made it to our vacation farm in the hills outside of Siena at 9 p.m. (having landed at 2:30 p.m.), were warmly greeted by the owner of the farm, Giuseppe, and, utterly spent, went right to bed and slept through the night.
Our stay in Siena was just the balm our weary selves needed. We settled into our renovated, medieval apartment, cooked most of our meals and ate them on the brick patio, rode bus 4 or 11 into town nearly every day, took walks in the evening on our country rode past vineyards, olive orchards and sunflower fields, rode bikes, and enjoyed much-needed, good family time. Memorable moments included visiting the church of San Domenica where Ron delighted in showing us the actual head of the 16th century mystic, Catherine, the Patron Saint of Italy; going into the Siena duomo, known especially for Donatello's bronze sculpture of John the Baptist and its amazing floor, uncovered (it's usually covered for protection), which depicts stories from the Bible in inlayed marble; watching Eliot lead the pack and say, "Come on family, we're almost there!" as we climbed the nearly 400 steep, medieval stairs to the top of the clock/bell tower overlooking Piazza del Campo and all of the surrounding city and countryside for miles; and eating lots of gelato! Also, by necessity, we improved our Italian exponentially. We had all studied Rosetta Stone Italian for a year in preparation to live here, never knowing we would need it so quickly. In Siena, very few people spoke English well, so we mustered up what limited vocabulary and grammar we had learned and began using it. This was the most unexpected blessing of being in Siena because it gave us the confidence of knowing we were capable of communicating, made us want to learn more, and started growing in us a genuine love for the language.
We arrived at the Pepperdine villa in Florence on Sept. 7. The students arrived two days later, and our year as their faculty family officially began! The next two weeks were a wonderful blur of orientation activities and intensive Italian classes, group excursions to nearby Fiesole, Siena (which had become our family city), San Gimignano, Cortona and Arezzo, Italian-language-only, small group "uscitas" (outings) into Florence, many meals together and lots of bonding among us, the students, Elizabeth Whatley and the rest of the Pepperdine Florence staff.
As a faculty family we are beginners, and our learning curve is not long. We're getting our bearings and figuring out how to balance the needs of our own family with our responsibilities to the students and our intention to experience this year together as one very large family. Ron and I have scheduled time each week to go out on our own, and that's turning out to be an important time. I don't know much about previous groups, but I can tell you our group of 53 students genuinely enjoys being and doing things together. For example, when a few mentioned they'd like to go to a soccer game, Elizabeth put out a sign-up sheet and then, all 53 students, the Cox six, and several energetic staff members walked in one, stretched bunch from the villa to the stadium where we sat and cheered together as the Florence Fiorentina upset their opponent 2-0. Later, some others mentioned the possibility of taking a group trip in late October and, within a few days, over 40 had signed up to go to Pompeii.
