This week I started my Italian classes. My art history classes will start next week.

My class is in the late afternoon. Not an ideal time for me to exercise my memory.

My walk to school takes me past Piazza Navona where I haven’t walked this trip but will now become part of my route.

The school is in Piazza dell’Orologio. Orologio means clock.

There is metro work going on in the block behind the Piazza so the fountain basin that was on Corso Vittorio Emanuele, which we looked at across the building where we stayed in 2023/24, has been moved in front of the school—but no water connection to operate the fountain.

There are 12 people in my class. More from Switzerland than any other country, one from Austria, Germany, Mexico, France, Japan, China, USA and a young guy from Canada who spent a lot of the class looking at his phone. I think I’m the oldest person in the room.

I am placed at B1 level, just starting congiuntivo. Congiuntivo is the subjunctive tense, or more correctly, mood, in English which is very little used but used quite a bit in Italian (as well as French and Spanish). For Italian, it marks whether you speak correctly or not. This is the third time I’ve worked on congiuntivo in the present tense.

We’re working in the middle of the small textbook so I expect I should move on to other texts before I finish grammar classes.

It’s dark by the time I leave class. But staying in the centro storico where it is heaving with tourists means that in the dark of the early evening, it is still heaving with tourists. The streets feel quite safe.