Bologna continua

Well I have now moved into my new room, and at last have unpacked all my things. I can walk into the palaeography department in about ten or fifteen minutes, almost all under portici so I don't need an umbrella, and most of the way along the ancient Roman Via Emilia. After some very foggy days it's suddenly really sunny and beautiful, and I think I shall spend the afternoon exploring. Apparently I need to buy a journal called "Bologna spettacolo!". They have a free newspaper here like the ones in London, but today's headline seems to say that the salads of the lazy are making prices soar, which is either about how people buy prepackaged salad these days or it's something I'm really not getting in Italian. I've had three lessons now, two and a half hours each, and it's beginning to seem like hard work, but I can only imagine how gruelling it is for the teacher, who does five hours a day of complete beginners.

The two girls I live with are very nice and helpful. Figaro the cat has developed a game where he pushes my door open, leaps onto my desk, pats the pens until one falls on the floor, and then chases it round and round until it disappears under the sofa. Then he lies there going "miao" in a small sad voice. He's not a terribly vocal cat, which is probably good, because it makes him easy to ignore when I feel like it. It's nice to have a pet again though, even if only at second hand and temporarily.

They have very formal book launches here. I went to one yesterday for the new volume of the department's library catalogue (specifically of the older books) and the Professor, who is very nice, introduced to me to lots of important people, at whom I smiled inanely and said "piacere". Then we all sat down and lots of men gave speeches. (Our professor was the only woman on the stage, and reference was made at least once to her charmingness in a rather depressing, but very familiar, way.) By the time Francesca and I gave up and sneaked out the seventh such speech was going on, we'd been there for an hour and forty minutes, and there were still people up there waiting to talk. I couldn't follow it much, partly because the microphones distorted the sounds a bit, but someone said there were too many libraries and someone else said there weren't. But the room we were in is amazing; a huge hall with a raised dais at one end, with high vaulted ceilings decorated with beautiful and quite simple floral designs. Behind the speakers was the most immense fresco of some subject I couldn't identify, perhaps the court of King Herod, I'd guess seventeenth century but possibly later. The palazzo which houses all the historical subjects used to be the nunnery of San Giovanni in monte -- the monte is a Cambridge-style hill, i.e. a slight slope, but it's just up from the Gerusalemme church and to pilgrims represented the Mount of Olives, apparently. Then until the 1980s the building served as a jail, possibly the poshest jail in the world.

I probably ought to start doing some of the work I'm here to do... I originally allowed myself a week to settle in but then I decided to extend it because of the hassle of having to find my own place. Maybe on Friday...?