Working on a Speech

On Tuesday I have to give a presentation in Italian with the subject my own choice. I am pretty sure I am going to talk about Lucca, the city where I will be going in September.

Ok, this is what I want to include:

1. Lucca is a city west of Florence in Tuscany. It is a city with medieval walls still intact. The walls have eleven gates. Visitors and the people of Lucca walk along the tops of the walls. Each section of the wall has different trees planted for the enjoyment of the walkers
2. In the walled cental part of the city, very few cars are allowed. The people walk or ride bicycles.There is much to see in Lucca. It is the birthplace of Puccini and there is a museum I want to visit {I have also found references to textile museums which sound interesting–more research needed.}
3. Talk briefly about Tuscan food and especially about the specialities of Lucca.{Tortelli lucchese and ?
4. The city is called the city of 100 churches and I look forward to seeing as many of many of them as I can because I like churches. In the Cathedral of St. Martin, there is a crucifix called the Volto Santo which means Holy Face– which was supposed to be carved by Nicodemus and is also supposed to be a true likeness of Jesus. {I need to flesh this paragraph out with reference to another church.}
5. I chose to speak about Lucca because in September I cam going there for six weeks. {Talk a bit about the school and point it put on the map. Talk about why I am going.}

So, there you have it. I have got numbers 1 and 2 pretty well straight in my mind. Number 4 will be easy. I will work on Number 3 this afternoon. This has to be a speech so no reading it from a paper. We can have cards. What I found from last semester that works well for me, is to have the points I want to make listed in English and the Italian words I need, especially the ones I had to look up like "La cittadinanza"–the inhabitants of a city–written on the card, too. Hmmm, actually, perhaps I don’t need to write down "La cittadinanza" because I am retaining it pretty well.

This morning I got up, put the ingredients for a loaf in the machine and then made some fresh scones. Using the oven thermometer that I bought the other day, we are finding that, as we thought, the settings on the oven are NOT accurate so they have to be set higher than the recipe calls for. For example. the recipe for scones says preheat the oven to 400 degrees and check on the scones after 12 minutes. I set the temperature to 415 degrees and check on them after 17 minutes which seems to work out pretty well.

Ok, off to work on "Lucca, la città delle chiesi centi."

QUOTATIONS: Courage does not always roar. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the

end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow".

– – Mary Anne Radmacher-Hershey

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Ci vedo dopo…. see you later…