Sapienza lecture poster

…is the Italian school of architecture – with a building just north of Piazza del Popolo (whose suggestive nature from certain points of view was recently pointed out by my friend John) which I biked down to this warm sunny morning via Passeggiata del Gianicolo (in just 20 minutes!) – where I gave a two and a half hour lecture on my recent thoughts and activities entitled “Cultivating the City and Welcoming the Wild” (you can see the slideshow here) in Italian – which was a special point of pride given my fixation on spoken language skills, attempting to enter into Italian life, culture and society as much as possible, removing linguistic conversational barriers as best as I can, since first living here 20 years ago, when I experienced a revelatory and surprising interest in language beyond the fixed system of grammar and vocabulary, rather the part that is alive (which I now see as presaging later similarly living and social interests such as gardens and wildlife, dance and movement, salons and educational environments), the spoken word, the living tongue, performative communication involving pronunciation, accent, dialect, gesture, slang, figure of speech and infinite subtlety that can not be understood in a strictly academic way – especially fun in a country where much of the communication comes not from what you say but how you say it.