The weeks are going by without much excitement as I've been slaving over schoolwork to try and get it all out of the way at once, which means by the time Friday rolls by I'm pretty much ready to call it quits on the books and go out and explore. Saturday was an interesting day because we had a bus tour around the periphery of Rome with my Sociology of Rome class. We started out in Piazza della Repubblica and made our way out into the Tiburtina area where we saw what early 1900s public housing projects looked like, and then continued to go see Tommasino's house from Pier Paolo Pasolini's A Violent Life. We learned a lot about architecture and class differences and how the expansion of Rome was very different from many other modern cities because it was based on leap-frog development and satellite communities connected through infilling. Our bus tour continued into Pietralata, where we saw more public housing but also one of the most shocking sights which was actual shantytowns made out of cinderblocks and tin roofs with fabric walls, completely destroyed by recent rains and covered in mud. I cannot believe people actually live in places like that, which seem like conditions staged for movies, and definitely not anything I'd ever seen first-hand before.

My friend who is also in the same internship as me and I both perked up when we walked around the Don Bosco quarter and ran into a wall pained by HOPNN with the telltake bicycles. What made the building more interesting, though, is that it is the local hangout for the neighborhood communists. Communism used to be a concept I heard about in class, talked about like a barbaric form of government demolished after WWIi, and only really learned in-depth about last semester during my sociological theory class where we discussed the transformation of communism from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Gramsci. It's crazy to think of how big a role the communist party continues to play in Italy, and how it builds communities of men with their own section of the neighborhood dedicated to their party. Our tour concluded at the ancient Roman aqueducts surrounded by fields of flowers and wild grass for miles and miles, which made returning back to the historic center seem like lightyears away.

The city center is starting to see a lot of green now that it's finally full-fledged spring, and walking across Ponte di Risorgimento and seeing the banks of the tiber overflowing with greenery is a lovely sight to see (not to mention the tree-lined streets leading to the Vatican on my way to school now). Sunday was an outdoorsy day, as I decided to take a walk up into Flaminio past the northern gate into Piazza dell'Popolo and somehow wound my way down into Colosseum territory to snap a shot of another Space Invader. My weekend concluded with a little buddy popping up right next to my front door (aka this papillon with angel wing ears), which is pretty random but also pretty cool considering it wasn't there when I left that morning and someone had come to put up art before I got home. This next week is going to be dedicated to finishing up my essays but I have grand plans to go down near Naples at the end of the week so that's something to look forward to!