Wednesday- We want to be college students in Florence!

We are back from parent orientation at NYU Florence and we both wholeheartedly agree that we want to be college students. Words do not do justice to the beauty of the campus, the dean's description of the humanist education and the energy of 125 college freshman all getting ready to start school in a few days. Mike and I loved every minute of the time we spent at La Pietra, the name of the villa that houses the campus. I am currently downloading the photos and you'll see how wonderful it is, even without photos of the interior, which are not allowed for reasons of preservation of the art. Caitie's class is very international. Only 40% of the students graduated from US high schools. The remainder of the students are from all over the globe - together they speak 27 languages. We met parents from Singapore, Mexico, Korea, Hong Kong, England, and Ohio. There are approximately 100 female students and 25 male.

The campus was donated to NYU after the last member of the Acton family died in 1992. Prior to his death he tried to arrange for the estate to pass to his alma mater, Oxford, but they thought the gift was too difficult to accept because the villa required extensive investments. NYU was willing to restore the vila and the gardens and presented a plan that matched the desires of the Actons- primarily honoring its heritage as a place for finding common ground amongst people about beauty. NYU has extensively renovated the gardens and the interior of the villa and made it possible for about 400 students to attend classes on the 57 acre estate. From downtown Florence, the campus is almost straight north. By taxi it took us about ten minutes to get to campus from the train station. You approach it by driving up a hill on the road to Bologna. The campus is in a residential area, where it sits quietly behind a six or seven foot gold stucco wall that completely surrounds it but blends in unobtrusively with the neighborhood. There are a couple of single car wide entrances, although only one is guarded and the others locked. The entrance is on the side of the dormitories, two side-by-side villas. These buildings look to be a few hundred years old, but they include elevators, and ATM and a cafeteria where the students take their breakfast and dinner. All of the buildings within the villa have some level of historical designation, and therefore have some governmental oversight about their refurbishment. The outside of the buildings are maintained in a look and feel of the period in which they were built, although the inside has been changed to accommmodate the current use. Caitie's room is equipped with two bunk beds built into the walls, and four 2 1/2 foot wide desks with a cabinet/closet above for their clothes. Mike and I had a good laugh at the fact that Caitie, who spent most of her life living in a tiny built in bed on the first houseboat, another built-in loft bed in our Mercer Island house, then a tiny closet bedroom at our second houseboat, has once again landed in a tiny built-in loft bed with a tiny set of storage space for her belongings. She has set to work decorating her personal space with some of her artwork that she brought from home- so already her space has a sense of style to it.

The photos from La Peitra are mostly of the dorm room and the gardens, as no photos could be taken inside the estate where the Acton art collection resides. It was an amazing collection, made even more amazing when you consider that NYU has protected the look and feel of the estate as it was lived in. There is art everywhere in this home, all of it reflecting the tastes of the Actons, and it is incredible.

The gardens make tremendous use of their outstanding position on a hilltop overlooking Florence. The hedges are tall enough to block views of neighboring homes, yet cut strategically to allow views of the Duomo and the city skyline. The space between the dorms, which are on a hill and the classroom villa, on a differnet hill is a set of slopes planted with olive trees. It is enchanting. To harvest the olive crop, the students volunteer for a weekend of picking in October. The goverment does not allow the university to sell the extra virgin olive oil that they produce, so the volunteers are all given a bottle. I have already put in my order with our olive picker. Wherever Mike and I go over the holidays (our house is rented until May), we will be carrying our little bit of La Pietra with us.

After the parent oreintation Caitie went to dinner with us and we wandered around the city together. The main street between the Duomo and the train station is crowded with people and a walk at 9:30 sees lots of action. Immigrants from Northern Africa stand on the piazza with all kinds of toys for sale- glow in the dark twirlies and crawl-on-the-belly-wind-up soldiers. Teenagers sit together in clumps of the stairs of the cathedral. Police stand in pairs talking and keeping an eye on things. Tourists wander around taking photos and pointing out things to each other. It is a happening.

We all love bookstores and we frequently end up in one, just as we did tonight. Caitie picked out a couple of classics to read before classes start on Monday, and Mike and I got a book on Florence, an Italian Resnaissance Reader, and an Italian/English dictionary. We tried to go on-line to recharge the pre-paid mobile phone today and could not fill in the blanks on the Italian order form, so the dictionary has an immediate purpose. We ended the evening with Caitie visiting for awhile in our room, then leaving us with a beautiful note of appreciation before she took her taxi back to school. All in all, it was THE perfect day.