Alex's RMST Blog

Welcome to my final blog. This past week has been a little crazy with it being the end of the semester, my scooter being stolen on campus (If you took it, I will find you), spring football camp coming up, and trying to sublet my apartment (2 bed, 1 bath, full kitchen, on campus) for the summer (If anyone needs a place to live on campus from May-August contact me alexlavecchia@icloud.com) Please don't mind my elite marketing skills via this blog post. If I get a few bites from this, I may have to take talents into real estate. Anyway, I'll shift gears from realtor to student..  13 weeks and 12 blogs later this is finally the last hoorah. This was overall a very interesting class, and the layout of it is so unique with the contract system, something that I've never seen before and I found it cool. Coming into the class and signing up for "romantic studies' I assumed we would be reading "Romeo and Juliet" and maybe even dive into a few rom-com movies (which ...

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante may be my favorite of the course. The main reason being that of my Italian roots, and how similar the storytelling resembles my grandparents' stories of their childhoods in Italy. My grandparents born and raised in small Italian villages, immigrated from Italy to Canada in the late 1960s, meaning they spent their childhoods in Italy at the same time Elena and Lila would have. I found a couple of correlations in Elena's upbringing to my grandfather, who grew up in a gang-controlled town in Central Italy. Both my grandfather and Elena realized that education was their way out of their town. I also found some personality similarities between Lila to my grandmother, in that they are very stubborn and strong ladies (in a good way). I found myself getting distracted and zoning out while reading this book as a lot of the terminology brought me back to listening to stories of my grandparents, and it often didn't take much, such as "neighbo...