A Visit to Tuscany and a Medical Conference
Dear readers (now including former Bernardians of spring 2008),
As promised, I wanted to share a little bit of my travels after my time at Bernardi in Rome. Immediately after finals, even while the group was still in the airplane, I began my plans for a study break in the Tuscan region. So with a little planning on my part, and a lot of generosity on the parts of others, I found myself for 4 days in a small apartment in the city of Castagneto Carducci which was just a short walk from the ocean. I have to say, the pace of the trip was quite slow and focused more on leisurely reading on the beach than it did of sight-seeing, but I did get to tour the vineyard of Michele Satta who makes some of the regions finest Bolgheri wines.
Tuscany has some of the beautiful countryside I have ever seen in my life, with a sunset where the green rolling hills and the pinks in the sky crash together and fall over the horizon of the Mediterranean in a way which no doubt inspired the poetry of Carducci. The Tuscan region is full of small cities which are off the beaten track which was a nice break from the tourist hubbub of Rome. The break had appeared long enough on the calendar, but in reality passed all too quickly.
Finishing my time in Rome, I attended the American Academy of Fertility Care Professionals (AAFCP), a Catholic medical conference focusing on novel fertility treatments and surgeries which are in line with the teachings of the Catholic Church and the encyclical Humanae Vitae, material I had studied in my Catholic Studies courses that very semester. For me, the conference was a breath of fresh air, both because it provided concrete procedures in medicine grounded in Church teaching and because the conference stimulated the synopsizes containing my previous biochemistry studies which had gone dormant. The conference helped me realize how much of love the sciences, but also, how valuable this semester has been by providing an education which will shape both the way in which I will do medical school and the way I hope to practice medicine. (*Future Rome student tip: If you are interested in double majoring with Catholic studies, start planning early, especially if your other major is not going have many overlapping classes, as is the case is most sciences).
Goodbye everyone and stay tuned for my next, and probably final, post from London, England where I will be shadowing a surgeon for a few days and hopefully seeing a little bit of London. Ciao, ciao.
