Rome is home

Rome comes to grow on me, and I feel like it is home at times.  I know all the streets, and even gave some Italians directions in Italian the other day on how to get to a certain piazza.  I know the good places to eat, and I am learning more and more about the history, and ordering principles of the organization of the city.  I can link all the piazzas together in the mental map of the city, as well as figure out why the piazzas work so well as they do.  I do feel like we are learning so much here, multitudes more than in normal school.  I feel like traveling abroad particularly in search of architectural understanding should be a must for any such architecture student.  All those who skip it in their learning, are missing out on so much, seeing as how this trip is still just another stone in the learning of the world around us, a necessary help to letting us explore the rest of the world with such an inquisitive and discerning eye. 

The drawings have become of great importance to me and they process of doing them, truly brings you to that place.  Now whenever I look back in my sketchbook, it truly places me directly back in the place.  What the eye sees only goes so far, but what the eye sees, and the hand puts down in pen on paper, the mind can never forget.  I have been working on my methods of drawing, and it goes to show that it takes so much practice to get into your true style of drawing, because even now, I feel completely lost.  To learn how to take down in drawing the essence of the place, and the bare essentials of what make it what it is such a hard lens to see through, that I just see parts of it now and then.  I am getting there, the drawings come so much more freely now, and in looking at places and buildings, I see through the decoration and noise to what is guiding them and can start to just depict that.  Geometries start to map themselves onto buildings, and they explain themselves to me.  Also, the practice of putting pen to paper every day makes one become more and more accustomed to drawing everything one sees.  All of a sudden, you want to draw everything, not just the buildings, but the glasses on the table, and statues, and everything.