By going in a group we avoided the line that stretched around the block, but alas we had Alberto the Galloping and Incomprehensible Gourmet, whose sense of pacing was so spectacularly bad that Jay and I convinced him to finish up early, before he could blast through to the Basilica of St Peters,
and turn us loose after returning the headsets through which he regaled us. This photo outside the other St Peters (in chains I think) illustrates both his gripping effect on the students, and his sense of timing: he spent a full 15 minutes yarning in front of this photograph of Moses, since he couldn't yak inside the church. Yikes.
But even the crowds and the guide couldn't ruin this place for me. I saw some stuff in the Raphaels and in the Sistine that I hadn't seen last year (partly because I was helping Amelie ride herd on that noted 10-year-old art connoisseur Alexander), and I actually did let Jay take the students to St Peter's basilica after lunch, so that I could go home, caffeinate, and blast through a buttload of bluebook in-class journal entries that I was chronically behind on. My goal is to turn those back Thursday (penultimate class) and thus lighten my suitcase considerably. 
I know the segue for this must be "something up my sleeve," but no--I really don' know what the hell this photograph detail really means. It just struck me as interesting. That said, I am also planning a delightful exercise as well, before they do their evaluations of me / the program: I am going to have them self-assess their own participation and "citizenship" component, explaining just why they deserve a particular grade based on the quantity and quality of their contributions, and the number and seriousness of their screwups in the lateness / kvetching sweepstakes; the other task on that same piece of paper will be to articulate positive contributions by at least three other people, concretely and specifically articulating what they did and why it was important for the trip. That way I keep it from being a snark-fest, but maybe I can triangulate in on some interesting perspectives on the group dynamic. And I get to see how out of touch a couple of my ducklings truly are.
It was fun to hang out with Jay, pictured here in the Egyptian section, whom I don't spend much time with in Davis, but who is pretty good if crotchety company here.
He and I had dinner in a nearby trattoria after I did another dynamite run along the river a bunch of bridges, with the lack of traffic making up for the hardness of the marble or cobble surface as I boomed along below the Lungoteveres on what I guess was sort of a towpath or quai, dodging bankside tent-bars in places and slaloming around defunct houseboatish obstructions in others. Then it was back to St Johns to read a few more papes, blearily, before checking e-mail and seeing how the do-your-other-job-by-remote-control thing was going. More on that anon. Or maybe not. But it IS weird to be so immersed in this experience that when requests come in for writing workshops, I have to think twice before recalling who else is on the workshop team with me....
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