Il Cenocolo

As the time in Milan dwindles, the classes are beginning to end. Last week I finished off a semantics class (study of meaning) and a neuroscience class. I am very happy to be finished with both. I loved the topic of neuroscience, but our professor is so incredibly frustrating that I'm thrilled to be done with him. At least, for now. Out of all of the supervisors for my thesis, he is the one who I would like to work with since his research is the most interesting. But I'm avoiding thinking about that for now. Semantics is a nice topic, but incredibly complex. I didn't like the theory we learned for the class, or the way the professor taught it. The theory revolves around truth-- it says that you know the meaning of a sentence if you know in what situation it is true. So "snow is white" is true if snow is white. Everything is circular and logical, but it doesn't (in my opinion) reflect language use and is therefore dumb.
But they're over, so now we have 3 classes to go! Statistics will go out with a bang this week -- a written test, an oral exam and a final paper. I'm planning on staying in this weekend to study, but we'll see how that goes.




Today I had the great fortune of seeing il Cenocolo (the Last Supper) painting by Leonardo DaVinci. The painting is located in a museum, which is built in the refectory of the church, Santa Maria della Grazie, which was my favorite church to date. The refectory has been a stable, a prison, a home to soldiers, and was bombed during World War II. The painting has made it through much distress, but only with several restorations along the way. Part of the painting is gone, due to a "foolish man" who cut a door into the wall of the painting, getting rid of the portion with Jesus' feet. It really is an amazing work of art-- DaVinci was a genius.