My wife and I are signed up to go on a trip to Rome next year. My parents will be going as well. I’m trying to do what I always do when I know I’ll be traveling to a foreign country; I’m trying to learn some of the language. Italian is a beautiful language. It helps that it is a Romance language, so some of the words are similar to Spanish or have close approximations in English since English incorporated a bunch of different languages into its vocabulary, such as Latinate words. I’ve read that until Dante wrote The Divide Comedy in Italian that Italian was considered a vulgar language and far inferior to Latin. Dante proved that Italian is a beautiful, musical language.

I felt a little foolish sitting in traffic this morning mouthing the words in Italian. I’ve listened to the first few tracks of the CD enough now that the new words and phrases are starting to sink in. If I keep at it I should be in good shape for the trip in the spring.

Since I am watching Rome on HBO and enjoying it thoroughly, this adds to my excitement about going to Rome next year. I’m very interested in learning more about the Romans and seeing the Sistine Chapel, the Pantheon, the Coliseum, etc. I’m also looking forward to all the great food!

I have a poetry coach session on Sunday. I’ll be curious to see what she thinks of my three-section poem. I think it has its merits and a lot of potential, but it is kind of comic bookish and may have an air of the cliché in it. We will also be discussing another long poem. This time the poem is The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth. It’s a clever book written in sonnets. Even the contents page and author notes are written as a sonnet. I haven’t finished it yet, so I need to get cracking on that.