Day 4: First round of interviews

Part of a series on my journalism faculty-led program through Italy and Greece.

Today we went out onto the streets and started looking for people to talk to. Ideally we were looking for people to talk to us on video, but we knew that everyone would not be comfortable with that.

We have two interviews planned for later this week, which should hopefully give us some good content. We struck out a few times when people said no to us - but after we stopped trying, that's when we got the good stuff.

We started to give up and just shoot some b-roll so the day would not be a full failure, when one of the musicians in the University square walked in front of our camera and started playing for a full minute.

And then when we went to lunch, we found an empty pizzaria, ordered, and noticed that the chef was making the pizzas right in front of us. We quickly set up the tripod and started recording. And after we finished and paid, we asked if he'd be willing to do a quick interview, and his son translated for us. All of his responses are in Italian so we're going to have to translate and subtitle them before being able to publish it.

Later in the day we went to Siracusa and Noto for some touristy activities. Both were just incredible. Every time I go and see anything that old, the question in my head always is "What have I done that will last that long?"

My favorite place was the Ear of Dionysius. We played some music (Shake It Off of course) to try and get the acoustics to work, but couldn't. I don't think my phone speaker was loud enough to get it started. It was at this point that other people in my group were disapointed by the guidebook they paid a few euros for, while the Wikipedia articles I was reading had answers to all of their questions. Yay for free knowledge :-)

On Mastodon (h/t Greg) I saw that the Italian Minister of the Interior had called for the registration of all Roma people in Italy, which really saddened me. Coincidentally, tomorrow is the World Refugee Day, and we'll be going to some event for that.