I am a summer school on visual sociology run by the International Visual Sociology Association and the University of Bertinoro. After the absolute nightmare of getting from a smallish town in Scotland to a remote village in Italy yesterady, the first day has been an interesting one. There is a wide mix of people from many places, though the 2 main groups seem to be Italy (as expected) and Americans. To me it is fascinating to see how different cultures intepret things, and here we have a greta mix in a small environment for an intensive period. Should be very intriguing. Already I am seeing how my culture can really blind me to seeing certain things. It's all about the codes and back to semiotics I guess. How have we been taught to decode certain things?

Out fieldwork is based in Bertinoro, which I think is a little unfair to the locals - they'll be "specimens" for 6 different groups of researchers, poor them. We are just skating along the surface of their culture and there is an objectification in that which I feel uncomfortable with. On the other hand, it is nice in that even with my ropey Italian I have managed to strike up conversations with people, and I like being able to do that. We're doing work in groups and our group is looking at social gathering spaces in Bertinoro.

Time is different in Italy to in Britain or even Australia. Things are more laid back and it takes a while to get used to. Like many mediterranean cultures there is a siesta time in the afternoon and at night the village becomes more alive. This means for my group our fieldwork will be done more often in the evenings. I quite enjoyed this evening's fieldwork in a local bar....

There is a football match on, Italy v Netherlands, so this was a key reason to be out. Though my observations were that the activity was fairly mail dominated - being football I guess this is hardly surprising, but I liked looking at what the women who were out were doing. There was a cafe/ bar that had been set up for everyone to watch the TV. It wasn't like in the UK where it is fairly ad hoc and people sit around talking. All the seats had been set up to face the televison and everyone was very orderly and well behaved. But note in the picture (left) the audience is mostly men and most of them older. 

In the images here  I have focused on the 2 main women in the scene. 

The woman in the window is clearly not interested in the football and is reading a paper. The woman with her partner leans over to speak to him, but his is involved in watching the game. All the men's attention is very intent. We have to note that this was just this place. Two of use broke away from the main group, feeling we were less intrusive as a twosome, and found out where the younger locals were haning out. From the outside one never would have guessed it was a bar - it looked like someone's home, but there was alot of activitiy going and and it behaviour was more distracted. Since everyone was speaking Italian, and it DID look like someone's home we felt rather intrusive so didn't go in, but gathering from the subdued dissapation of the group soon after, we assumed that Italy lost.