Caccia al tesoro (Treasure hunt)

January10th: It was an early morning start as we had a meeting at breakfast at 8:15 to discuss our individual projects and to start organising the trip to Venice. As usual at breakfast a ever cheery Fiorella brought me in my capuccino, which has become an early morning habit which is probably not good for the waistline but certainly very delicious.

Class was quite interesting today. We did some more work on the imperfect tense and then watched a clip from the film Primo damme un baccio. We worked in pairs and one person had to watch the movie and narrate what was happening to their partner who had their back to the television. Then the roles were reversed. Finally we all watched the segment together to see it in its entirety. We then listened to the title from the movie learnt some new vocabulary. We had lunch as usual atBar Toncelli.

After lunch we returned to the university where we were put into groups of three or four to do a Caccia al tesoro(treasure hunt). I was very happy to be working with Goretti and Fiona. Firstly we studied the questions and decided which order we would do them in. Most of the questions were related to the historic centre of Prato and what things symbolised and why things were named as they were. We stopped lots of people to find the answers and took turns asking the questions. We were supposed to copy an epitath from one of the churches but unfortuantely it was closed. We even went into l'ufficio di Provincia di Prato where I was lucky enough to be given a beautiful wall calendar of Prato which a lot of us had missed out on earlier in the week. They only had one and Fiona very kindly said I could have it, thanks Fiona. We were also given a book called La famiglia senza frontiere. My turn came to ask someone a question and I was asking an elderly gentleman a question and guess what, he was French. Luckily Gorreti could decipher what he had to say. Elizabeth, Antonella and Carmelina won the game convincingly.

That evening after the end of the lessons Goretti, Deb, Adriana, Cecilia and I did a bit of shopping. We all bought beautiful, silk ties that are apparently "molto di moda." They were all so stunning it was very difficult to choose just one. Goretti bought one and then we moved on. Further down the via after checking out a few other cloth shops I decided I would return to the original tie shop and bought one too. Adriana then bought one as well so in the end the guy in charge did a pretty good night's trading.

We then made our way Il Jewel, a pizza and music bar where we ordered beers and pizza. Stefano who runs it, is very friendly and helpful. This time I was wiser and shared a pizza with Goretti, a pizza con procuitto crudo. As you can see from the photo, even that was quite a large serving. I then went back to Cecilia's room where we watched some telly and she showed me her family photos.