art at the villa

my gosh, i survived a whole night coughing! ali's sore-throat worsened, or maybe never got any better. today she's still coughing like mad, so i better get prepared for another white night. home remedies aren't working, i gave her some emergency cortison. what a nightmare! if she doens't improve within tomorrow, it's time to visit the ped. maybe she caught too much cold yesterday in codroipo. it was snowing to a mild level but it didn't seem that bad. yuck!

we had an interesting afternoon yesterday at villa manin. it's the 17th century country house of the wealthy and powerful manin family. it's a maginificent ensemble formed by a central block, which was the family residence, and several service quarters built at a right angle to the main building, where agricultural activities were performed. 

yep, alice appears in most of the pics hehehe the central block hosted an exhibition of 120 masterpieces coming from museums all over the world to show the impact that the french school of the 1800's had on europe. manet, monet, renoir, degas, van gogh and many others were compared with the main painters of central and eastern europe. heaven! the only negative thing was the nearly 2 hours queue for it. since it was the last weekend that the villa was holding the exhibit, probably people wanted to make the most of it. they were also  totally disorganized, cameras and bags weren't allowed inside and still, you had to go back and leave them at the wardrobe, which was beforethe ticket office. but well, we managed. 

i enjoy these cultural events, and i always take my baby with me. they studied some of the artists exposed here, like van gogh and monet, so alice was already prepared on what to expect. she was particularly fascinated by the portraits, and i was explaining to her how they were commissioned by the well-off society to have memories, in times when cameras still had to be invented.

'you know, they had to pose for the artist long hours, in order to obtain a good result, and they had to do it for many days because it was impossible to finish them in one day'.

'wow, what a boring thing to do! fortunately posing for your pics only takes a few seconds, mom!'.

you see? and i was so naive to think she enjoyed posing for me! LOL