News and Blog

Yesterday was the follow-up to the first Coffee Safari, one of the workshops the Umbra Institute student services team offers. The workshop started out like the first coffee safari – a round ofPerugia’s center with explanations of the “personalities” of each of the cafés (intellectual, blue-collar, etc.), followed by a talk about coffee’s history and botany, and finally a tasting of several different kinds of coffee. But the discussion ended with an impromptu and rather lively debate about Starbucks and its popularity. Elon student Erika Furman got the ball rolling by giving a mini-exposé about the chain’s coffee, whereupon other students debated the source of Starbuck’s success. 

If it wasn’t great coffee, what is it? The bohemian image? The comfy couches? The I-won’t-get-great-coffee-but-I-won’t-get-surprises effect? Or is it that Americans lack a common space, one which Italians can find in their piazza and so don’t need in their cafés?It was another example of the intellectual ferment that every school would like to propagate, and which Umbra (and Perugia) seems to foster.

Recently a group of Umbra students made their way to the Vitivinicola Chiorri vineyard for a wine-tasting. The Chiorri family has a long tradition of winemaking, and their English-speaking son-in-law hammed it up as a tourguide, leading the group around and explaining the winemaking process. Americans have the idea that Italians make wine by hiking up skirts and pants and crushing grapes with their feet, a là “I Love Lucy,” but almost all commercial vineyards use modern processes. This particular vineyard, however, processes the grapes naturally,
 using only the natural yeast on the grapes’ skins for fermentation, without addinganything else. Chiorri vineyards have seven different types, and the students tried a red, a white, and a rosè. Also included was lunch and a history of the family – bravi!

Believe it or not, Italians have names for every wind. There’s the scirocco, a hot wind that comes out of Africa and carries red dust (from the Sahara) that it drops with rain to coat everything with a red film, usually in the summer. Then there’s the levante, a crisp humid wind from the Eastern Mediterranean that brings fog and rain. But Perugia now is in the grips of the appropriately-named tramontana, literally the “between- mountain.”

This frigid wind whistles down from the north, through the Alps, and because it’s dry, brings clear skies but bitter cold. Students at the Umbra Institute, therefore, are enjoying beautiful blue skies, but wrapped up in three layers. Put on your hat, we say!

Last week Umbra students gathered in the cozy Caffé Cinastik to participate in the first Symposium, a new academic initiative designed to prompt lively intellectual conversation in a relaxed environment. In an arched room lit by charming candles tucked in tiny nooks, a small group of students met with Journalism professor Marie Bongiovanni to discuss the predetermined topic, a “sense of place”. Why students had chosen to study in Perugia and what their experiences had been like thus far took center stage during the dialogue.

Symposium will meet once each month, and will be facilitated by an Umbra Institute professor, who will select a topic based on his or her own academic expertise.

Auguri to Elon Hirsch-Bliden from Elon University for his winning photo entitled “Assisi on the Edge.” Elon will enjoy a free meal from Quattro Passi Pizzeria.

Perugia has always been on the avant-garde of public transport. In the early eighties the city built a series of parking lots around the base of the hill on whichPerugia stands, where people could leave their cars and go up on escalators.Perugia’s newest innovation is the MiniMetrò, a light rail system that extends from the valley below the city, past the train station, and on up to the center. The MiniMetrò was inaugurated on 29 January, the feast day of the most important of Perugia’s three patron saints, San Costanzo. It was a marvelously sunny day, the normal January weather, and everyone was in good spirits. The light rail was free for the day and many citizens and many “temporary citizens” (like the Umbra students) had a ride and even a free piece of San Costanzo cake (a fruitcake called torcolo). One of the stations is right below Umbra’s Via dei Priori building, so students can go right down the escalators and off to the train station!

One in a series of food adventures, the Coffee Safari, took place last week.Coffee is not only a drink inItaly, it’s a passion…and Italians have a series of cultural “rules” about how to drink it. After a brief tutorial on the botany, history, and economics of coffee, students were taken on a roundabout tour of Perugia’s many cafés. The tour ended at the Caffè di Roma, where the waiters brought out a variety of different coffees, whose significances in Italian culture were explained. For example, the cappuccino, which Americans consider the hallmark Italian coffee, is only drunk in Italy until eleven o’clock, and then only with a croissant. Hopefully students went away with a better sense of their favorite morning drinks!

Umbra inaugurated its new “season” of the Tandem language-exchange program with a double-header of mixer and aperitivo. The first part of the night’s program took place in Umbra’s Via Marzia facility, where American and Italian students met each other and broke up into groups where relaxed conversation drifted from Italian to Englilsh and back to Italian again, depending on the subject. After the mixer both groups of students were invited to a local restaurant, Eden, to eat an abundant before-dinner apertif, though students claimed that the abundant portions of spelt-salad, oven-roasted potatoes, prosciutto, and Umbrian cheeses and salami were plenty for their evening meal. The Tandem program will have its next meeting on Wednesday, January 30.

In photo: Umbra students gather for the first TANDEM language exchange program. In photo, at left, is visiting University of Perugia student and current Umbra intern, Marijana Gudelj.