Language class and thunderstorms

(This is part of our series of posts from our six-week Road Scholar Independent Living and Learning in Florence trip to Italy in Spring 2025. We have an index to all the posts from that trip here.)

This morning we started our second week of language classes. The Road Scholar program theme this week is Italian food and cooking. Cheryl’s teacher was supposed to take her class to the historic Mercato Sant’Ambrogio to learn the Italian words for the plethora of fruits, vegetables and other goods they have available, but Florence had Texas-intensity rain and thunderstorms much of the day (although without tornadoes, fortunately), so their trip got postponed.

In the classic language program that I’m taking, we have 90 minutes of grammar instruction, followed by a 30-minute break (enough time to walk to the coffee shop down the street for a cappuccino), and then 90 minutes of conversation practice. Today, we had a substitute teacher who had our group play two games to practice the most common (but probably most difficult) Italian past tense, called passato prossimo. Its conjugations have rules, exceptions to the rules, and then exceptions to the exceptions, plus lots of irregular endings, so it’s quite a challenge, but Francesco made it fun.

In this dominoes-style game, each paper “domino” had a question and an unrelated partial answer on it. We had to read the question, determine who had the “domino” with the corresponding partial answer, then that person had to say a complete sentence changing the tense to passato prossimo. Oh, did I mention that we speak only Italian in the classroom, so it took us all a while to understand the instructions for the game?

The second game was a simple “chutes and ladders” type board with little pictures on it. We worked in teams of two for this one. We’d roll a die, move the specified number of spaces on the board, and then have to make up and say a short story, all in past tense, based on the picture we landed on. The partners traded off phrases (“Yesterday, John read the newspaper, had breakfast, and then…”), so some of the stories were kind of silly.

After our classes, we came back to the apartment to meet the property manager and some workers who came to replace the dripping faucet on our kitchen sink and fix our wifi, which had been out for the last several days. But during a break in the rain–or so I thought–I went out to the hardware/housewares store for a few things, and got caught in another downpour near the Ponte Vecchio. The tourists (some of whom didn’t have raincoats or umbrellas) huddled under the awnings, while the locals just pressed on with their business.

After I got home, we made dinner, and then it was time for homework and studying! We had an unexpected treat late tonight, though, with a short (1 minute) fireworks display across the river at Santa Croce Basilica. Not sure what the occasion was, but it was cool to see and hear them from our living room window!