Skip to main content

My Favorite Places




















When I visited Europe with my dad a few summers ago, I thought my favorite country would be France. By the time we left, however, I found my new favorite country: Italy. I returned the next spring on a school trip and had a chance to see more cities throughout the country. On my first trip, I visited Rome and Venice; on the second, I returned to those cities and also got to see Florence, Assisi, and Ravenna. Although I can honestly say I love every place I've visited in Italy, the two cities that particularly stand out are Florence and Venice. "Firenze" and "Venezia" are both filled with history and culture, and yet they are vastly different from one another. I love them for very different reasons. Florence is filled with red brick buildings, random plazas, and Renaissance architecture. Venice, on the other hand, is filled with canals, bridges, and storefronts lining the small sidewalks. Thanks to my two trips to Europe, I have found my favorite country and favorite cities.


Image of Florence Duomo taken by Shawn Harquail. Source: Flickr
Labels:

Comments

  1. Laura GibbsAugust 23, 2018 at 3:20 PM

    I am such a fan of the cities of Italy too, Shea! I did my graduate degree with a professor who taught at the University of Siena and also at Berkeley (where I went to school)... which was a great excuse to go to Italy! And if you are interested, there are so many Italian possibilities for projects in this class... even a whole collection of legends about the city of Florence itself: Legends of Florence by Charles Godfrey Leland. That might be something fun to explore when you are brainstorming project topics next week! Here are some more Italian story resource books online too!

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownOctober 25, 2018 at 11:01 PM

    Italy is such a beautiful country. I’m glad that you had such a great time there! I just read your introduction and saw that you are minoring in Italian. It is great that you were able to visit a place and create such a passion for it that you wanted to study their language. That will definitely be beneficial the next time that you visit. Any plans in the near future for another visit?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tech Tip: Word Counter

This word counter is so helpful! I usually go to a word counter website and write my text in there, then copy and paste it. This extension makes it easy to just write where I will posting my text so I don't have to flip between tabs. I usually am worried about meeting the minimum word count, but I usually don't have an issue hitting, I am just afraid that I won't. I think I am generally bad in estimating numbers in general, so I probably would be very off in my estimate if I just tried tried to guess how long my writing is.
Post a Comment
Read more

Story Lab: TED Talk Videos

For this Story Lab, I watched Ted Talks about stories and storytelling . The first video is the TED Talk of a woman named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria. From a young age, she has been a storyteller. She read foreign books for much of her childhood and based the stories she wrote based on what she read in these books. She eventually discovered books and she learned that writers could look like her. When she came to university in the United States, her roommate was surprised to learn Nigeria has English as an official language and that she was familiar with many of the comforts of American life. She believes people like her roommate have a view of Africans because of writing that portrays them as living in a dark place. When Chimamanda wrote a book, her professor told her the book was not "African enough" because the characters were similar to him, a middle-class man, and they drove cars. When she visited Mexico, she realized she saw the people there as poor immigran...
Post a Comment
Read more

Growth Mindset

I had never heard of Carol Dweck or the growth mindset before this week, but I love learning more about personal growth and leadership development, so I really enjoyed hearing about the idea. I'd be interested to see how much of a different a growth mindset can make, especially in school or the work field. I feel as if I have a growth mindset at times, but a fixed mindset at others. Sometimes, when faced with a difficult task in school or extracurricular activities, I think of it as a growth opportunity, while I sometimes feel like I absolutely cannot do it and shut down because of my mindset. I would like to try to focus on having a growth mindset this semester, and know I will need to find specific ways to do this. I think this could potentially be very beneficial to me as I try to practice my Italian language skills even though I am not currently taking a language class. I know keeping up with the language and continuing to practice on my own will be difficult, but I can use t...
Post a Comment
Read more