GL 350: How does the piazza provide a lense into italian culture?

When wondering through the many streets of and Italian city, Rome especially, you can find almost anything in any of the piazzas you find. These piazzas provide more than fresh food, cappuccino, and selfie stick men. They provide a deep look into Italian culture.

First, the piazzas are known to be a place for meeting. Whether it be for a lunch in the open air or to listen to some live music or a common meeting groud before shopping, you can almost always find groups of people in the piazza. This could be due to the fact that their homes are very compact so meeting more than a couple people in their home may get crammed. They would rather enjoy lunch at an outdoor café.

Another way these piazzas show Italian culture is through the history behind the statues and fountains. If you go to almost any piazza there will be a statue, fountain, or both. If we take Piazza del Popelo for example, there is a large obelisk in the center that was taken from Egypt and placed there along with the two fountains on either side representing different gods of the time. And thats just one piazza, There a murder sites and chariot race sites all in a different piazza. In Barzini, he says "Fear is the fourth evil spirit. it is the offspring of the others, of poverty, ignorance and injustice." When you think about some of the reasons people where killed seems so confusing to us now, such as Bruno getting burned at the stake for believing that the world was not flat. Citizens were afraid of these types of answers and were too ignorant to think that anything else you told them was wrong because of pure ignorance. 

The last things that you can find in nearly all piazzas and that i can tell is very important for Italian culture is places of worship. There are so many churches from the twin churches in Piazza del Popelo to the Pantheon which used to be a church near Piazza Navona. Catholicism is such an important part of learning about this culture.