January 2015 – DEV – The Umbra Institute – Study Abroad in Italy

Ashley Webb is currently interning at Pashmere, a high-end fashion company. We met up with her for coffee at Bar Duomo, where she told us about her love for Perugia, stepping out of her comfort zone, and getting involved with the local community.

Co-Op at Fashion Company Pashmere

For right now, I’ve started out in charge of social media. I went to the Pitti Immagine Uomo Fair where thousands of people from all over the world, and there are more than a thousand exhibitions of various high-end fashion companies, anything from Nike and Puma sportswear to Pashmere and the more fancy clothing providers. It was also cool that I got to meet Sergio Múñiz there, a well-known actor in Italy.

Ashley Webb posing with actor Sergio Múñiz at Pitti Immagine

AT Pitti, I was in charge of taking notes and taking pictures, all of which are going to be edited and then placed on social media for promotional purposes. I’ve come up with a couple of social media campaigns to run on Facebook and Twitter, to make the company more well-known.

Perugia and Umbra

Perugia is the perfect size and is centrally located. It takes only two hours to get to Florence or 20 minutes to get to Assisi. It’s halfway between Puglia and Milano, so you can get around pretty easily. There’s more opportunity in Perugia to learn Italian and to see Italian culture because it’s not just a big city. You have that small-town community feel here, everybody knows each other. When walking to class I always run into random people that I know.

I knew that Perugia was a sister city with my home university city, Grand Rapids, Michigan, so I applied and was accepted for The Umbra-Perugia Sister City Scholarship (SCS). It allowed me to go abroad and learn a third language, which is greatly beneficial. Umbra is great because you know that when you come here and you are doing your community engagement work for a business class, you aren’t just working to a dead end, your work will actually get followed up on by the businesses you work with. The businesses get really involved and they’re grateful and excited to work with students. Overall, it’s just an amazing experience. I haven’t been able to work with a business like that back home.

See Perugia as you’ve never seen it before! A drone will provide you with breathtaking views of the city, flying over narrow streets and ending up at the Fontana Maggiore on Piazza 4 Novembre. The video was made thanks to a crowdfunding project within the Perugian community and the Umbra Institute chipped in.

Thanks to the association “Perugia: ieri, oggi, domani” for creating the project and all citizens of Perugia who contributed to this project.

“Well, the ocean isn’t really always blue, is it? It’s sometimes blue – but also brown, green, white….”

What began as a low rumbling of murmured acknowledgment in response to this statement quickly erupted into a dissonant chorus, not unlike the colorful tempest that had initiated it. Disagreement abound in our Aesthetics class at the Accademia di Belle Arti – a passionate, excited disagreement that never really ended, but merely underwent a change of topic from day to day. I loved it.

It turns out, a theoretical class about the philosophy art included a lot of very real debate on topics such as the definition of beauty, the grotesque, and the profound emotional impact of both. These ideas also found their way into the practical class I was following, Artistic Anatomy, where we practiced drawing the body not only as accurately as possible but also contorting and exaggerating it into different states of idealization and demonization.

And sometimes we just drew what we wanted, “like you did when you were children,” as my professor would say.

He and my Aesthetics professor were both lively, engaging, and understanding of the language barrier I sometimes experienced. Throughout each lesson they combined a respect for the past with an excitement for up-and-coming artists and students’ new ideas. Many of the “contemporary masters” we studied gave presentations in the Accademia’s library and lead live drawing demonstrations that lasted for hours.

Here in Perugia and especially at the Accademia, Italy’s centuries of contribution to the worlds of painting, sculpture, and aesthetic philosophy are constant, palpable sources of inspiration. I feel incredibly fortunate to have experienced first-hand the pride artists here have for their work. And I’ll definitely never think as the ocean as just blue again.

– Cat Tartaglia

Yesterday, the Institute was fortunate enough to host a presentation by Professor Marcello Simonetta, a Renaissance scholar, “Assassin’s Creed” video game consultant, and two-time author. Simonetta is in town to share the ground-breaking discovery behind his latest novel, “The Montefeltro Conspiracy,” a fact-driven tome with an overflowing cast of towering personalities such as Botticelli and the Duke of Urbino.

Incredibly, the research that became “The Montefeltro Conspiracy,” began with Simonetta’s decoding of a letter written by his own ancestor, Cicco Simonetta, secretary and adviser to the Duke of Milan. By cracking this letter five-hundred years after its writing, Simonetta has cast one of the most diabolical conspiracies of the Renaissance in a shocking new light…

To read more, check out “The Montefeltro Conspiracy,” on Amazon.

Balmy temperatures (for January) greeted Umbra’s Spring 2015 group during their arrival on Sunday. After being met by Umbra staff in Rome, students took private buses to Perugia. At Hotel Gio just outside the city center, students received orientation packets that included helpful handouts covering topics from culture shock to Italian customs. After more introductions and their first Italian dinner, students were shuttled to their new apartments on Monday morning.

On Monday afternoon, intermediate and advanced Italian students took written and oral placement exams. At Umbra’s open house, students had ample time to rent cell phones, ask questions, and take guided walking tours of the city center. After working up their appetites, Perugia’s newest residents experienced their first of several free pizza nights courtesy of Umbra. Tuesday (Epiphany, a major holiday here in Italy) consisted of a talk with a charismatic Italian police officer, more exploration of the city, and a community engagement info session during which students learned of the many service-learning opportunities available at Umbra.

Yesterday marked the start of Intensive Italian Week, a special schedule that combines classroom instruction and practical Italian lessons. These classes extend through Saturday, at which point students will prepare to begin their elective courses next week. Benvenuti a Perugia!

Brad Jones—accomplished food activist, academic and author—can trace his passion for food directly back to the History of Food and Culture in Italy course he took at Umbra Institute. Brad arrived in Perugia dead set on a career in the legal profession but he returned to Indiana with a very different set of goals. He had been convinced that food was not only good to eat, it was good to think.

Brad Jones, whose titles have included "cheesemonger." — Brad Jones, whose titles have included “cheesemonger.”

“My semester in Perugia had an enormous impact on the shape of my academic studies and my career,” Brad says, “The opportunity to bring together practical and theoretical aspects of food in the extraordinary setting of central Italy, with insightful classroom lectures complimented by field excursions working with cheesemakers, bakers, organic farmers, and others, has been truly invaluable. I wouldn’t be where I am today without it.”

That impact is easy to see. Brad returned from Perugia and spent the rest of his time as an undergraduate at Wabash College thinking, reading, and writing about food. “I basically wrote about food in every class that would let me,” he says. “I developed my own independent study on the history of food and culture in America that very closely resembled the Umbra course. I wrote my senior history thesis on the topic of Italian food nationalism through time and space. It really is amazing how deeply threaded food is in the fabric of culture. It’s at once quotidian and infinitely complex. It fascinates me to this day, how much using food as an academic lens allows you to see.”

Since graduating in the spring of 2010, Brad has built a rather impressive, and extraordinarily diverse, résumé working with food. He has volunteered on organic farms throughout Italy. He has managed the cheese counter and taught taste education classes at one of best independent specialty grocers in America. He helped found a start-up company that taught cheese and beer education classes in Boston.

In 2013, Brad spent the summer travelling across America. In a twenty-foot passenger van, with the backseats gutted and a make-shift army cot installed, he journeyed 15,000 miles interviewing and working with nearly 80 artisan food producers— from brewers to bakers, shrimpers to cidermakers. Equipped with a video camera, a tape recorder, and fundraised money, he and colleague produced a documentary of the changing face of American agriculture and the emerging landscape of alternative food production.

Brad also earned a Masters degree from the renowned program in Gastronomy at Boston University. While a

Brad Jones during an immersion experience in that quintessential Italian custom, making pasta. — Brad Jones during an immersion experience (in 2008 in Perugia) in that quintessential Italian custom, making pasta.

graduate student, he founded the first peer-reviewed graduate journal devoted to the study of food—a publication that has in short order been highly lauded across the academic community. (In an “it’s a small world after all” turn of events, Brad actually passed the reins of the journal over to one of our very own, Umbra Institute’s Assistant Director of the Food Studies program Zach Nowak, who Brad suggests has for years—ever since explaining that fermentation was a result of “yeast farts” —been a close mentor and friend.)

These days, Brad’s career has come full circle. He combines his love of specialty cheese, his enthusiasm for thinking critically about food, and his passion to make a difference by directing the efforts of the Cheese of Choice Coalition, an international non-profit advocacy group that promotes awareness and appreciation of traditional food. When he’s not saving the world one cheese at a time, Brad splits his energies serving on the board of directors of Boston’s Slow Food chapter, writing a book about his documentary roadtrip, and seeking out the best food produced by local artisans.

If, as WB Yeats once said, “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire” then Brad Jones’ fire burns bright. Kindled from a passion sparked in a classroom in Perugia.