This section of the famille.site is intended to provide access to "notes from the field" from Kelly Humphries, who spent the fall of 1997 traveling Italy in search of knowledge as part of the University of Washington School of Art, Studio Art Program in Rome. This page (or at least the first week's worth of writing) represents a first stab, draft, temporary "don't hold me to this" and "don't show this to me later and laugh" attempt to get this information from Kelly, who had limited e-mail access but amazingly still e-mailed nearly every day to the rest of the family. Here goes!

Kelly here... I figgered I'd take this chance to also tell you what this page is not ... while I was one of two dozen University of Washington students living this Italian experience, this journal is not a character study, and I am not a novelist. You will not necessarily find gripping action, intense plot twists, or crisp dialogue between two characters torn by a life-or-death decision. Because life isn't like the movies, okay? I lived life in Rome for three months and got college credit for it. We worked hard. We had fun hard. But we are not going to be seen in a major motion picture at a theater near you anytime soon. I also have a bad habit of slipping from present tense first-person into past tense-third person, or vice-versa, and of using the passive voice more often than politicians dodging scandal. So sue me. Mistakes may have been made. We don't care. ;-)

Just think of this as a combination letter to home, historical record, "dear diary", class notebook, and travel brochure all rolled up together in one convenient ad-free website. If you look at the words I've written and the images I've scanned here, hopefully you'll get an idea of what it was like for us, and maybe <hint, hint> you'll want to do it yourself. I'm glad we could clear that up.

If you don't see color behind the text in the above two paragraphs, consider upgrading your browser to a more recent version that supports stylesheets. Also, if your browser supports stylesheets, the active links in the itinerary list (at the bottom of the page) should NOT be underlined, unless your cursor "hovers" on top of the link. Or, unless you're using Netscape. Sheesh. Even the recent versions of IE and Communicator have spotty support for stylesheets, and differing methods of displaying certain styles. This is in itself contradictory to the whole idea of Cascading Style Sheets, but someday browser makers will catch on, and in the meantime, onward through the fog we charge....