Visited my new old high school today and plan to take classes in my old new school
When I graduated from St. Mary’s High School, just after electricity was discovered, the school occupied a building just adjacent to the St. Mary’s cathedral, downtown. We didn’t really have an athletic field of our own, but there was a narrow gymnasium under rear property of the church—below ground. We used the Colorado College fields as our home turf, since it was just down the road, about a half mile. Our library was microscopic, but we were next door to the Pemrose Public Library, so that became our library. I think there were just under 500 students in that school (about 98 in my graduating class). Today, the school is housed in the burbs, it has a wonderful gym—I didn’t check out the library, but I hear alumni donated land for athletic fields. There are just 310 students now, but the school has a very nice “feel” to it. If I were ready for high school, I’d go there.
My old school building has become the downtown studio of the Pike’s Peak Community College now, and ironically, I plan to take a few classes in that building—I need to go back through the French language before I go to Provence next spring. I plan a three month stay there, maybe in IX. So, in a sense, I’ll be going back to my high school and taking the same first class I remember taking when I moved to Colorado from Miami in the just-past-dark ages . . . French.
The character I’m writing about lived in Rome from 1880 to 1920, but left around the time the fascists too over t live in Provence. I don’t know much about Provence, but it was recommended to me as a good place to have fled at the time. The character stayed there until the war and then migrated to the US.
I spent almost 3 months in Italy—mostly in Rome—over the winter researching the period and trying to brush up on my Italian, which was as rusty as the Tin Man.
Some interesting things I learned when in Rome. The area where the character lived and worked was the Trastevere area, near Isola Tiberina. At beginning of that the time, there were still no walls around the river and it flooded routinely. There was a terrible flood in the 1870′s that killed many and triggered the wall project. The area at the time was a beach, people went there to bathe and it was considered healthy. Tiberina island has always been associated with health and healing, and it contained a spring which was considered healthy to drink. There were a lot of changes to that part of the city around that time and the walls project changed much of the area along river.
When you look at Rome, in general, you need to remember that Rome was not built in the same way that we built things here. Often the foundations and even wall elements from earlier buildings were incorporated into the new buildings, so the way the streets run, the walls angle and so forth are strongly influenced by the ancient buildings—they are still there, often buried below ground by sediment left from the regular alluvial flooding.
Obviously, I learned a lot more that this in my time there, but I already knew or thought I knew) Rome pretty well. I know it much better now and like it even more.
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