Today is my third day in my Italian Language School, A Door into Italy. I was assigned to a middle level group, as I expected—there are a few people here who are quite advanced and can hold sustained conversations in Italian, and then a group of relative beginners, and then there’s the rest of us. Still struggling with which tense to use and often failing to come up with the vocabulary one needs. After three days, though, I feel that I am making progress.

English, of course, is a common language for many of us, but my class of eight is very, very diverse. There is one other American man: an engineer from Hawaii on sabbatical from a job in South Sudan. The other man in the class is from Tokyo and is here in Italy working for his company which has sent him to school for three months to learn the language. The five women include a Ukrainian, a Palestinian, an Israeli, a French speaking Swiss, and finally a Tanzanian woman who met her Genovese husband online. The school’s winnowing seems to work pretty well, as we all seem on about the same level.

Yesterday, after class the school offered a guideded walking tour of the city, providing a great introduction to the city of Genova (Genoa). After several cool rainy days, the sun has come out and it feels like spring, so there are lots of people touring and shopping.

As I mentioned in my last post, my neighborhood seems to be a working class/middle class enclave. The tour took us through the heart of the city, including governmental and banking buildings, historic monuments like the city’s Duomo or Cathedral, San Lorenzo, and an area consisting of lots of small, narrow alleys with shops, businesses, galleries and restaurants.

This last area reminded me a lot of the central part of Siena. Even though the tour took us nearly two hours, we didn’t make it to what is called the Porto Antico area and the bayside promenade, which I hope to see in the next couple of days. I am adding some photos I took of our group as we wandered around.

Again, the duomo certainly is reminiscent of the duomo in Siena, although the Siena church seems to have been done by better craftsmen and artists. Still it is lovely to walk into these medieval buildings and be reminded of the bygone days of faith sacrifice.