III.v. Protest, Part II

"Protest, evasion, merry distrust, and a delight in mockery are symptoms of health."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

I left Siena Sunday night because I assumed, quite rightly I think, that I was to have class Monday morning. This turned out to be a false assumption, as it was now the professors' turn to protest by not attending classes. More accurately, it was the ricercatore, a type of senior lecturer, that was protesting the Moretti reforms this week. It was unclear as to whether my other classes (as only one, the Semiotics of Art, was taught by a ricercatore), would be held. I arrived at my nine o'clock class to find it was empty. It looked like professor Lenzi, with all her decades of seniority, understood the cause of the researchers. Our class, already diminished after the American students, deciding they had better things to do three days a week, decided to lodge a protest of their own by no longer attending the class. At this point, there were only about twelve of us hangers on, and none of us minded excessively that the class was cancelled.
    My afternoon class did indeed go ahead, though with a hugely diminished cohort. My evening class, with the glamorous professor Corrain (actually a ricercatore, I assumed would be cancelled, but I went to it all the same. Most of the class was there, but Lucia Corrain never showed up, and we all eventually dispersed back into the sheets of cascading rain that have lately been falling on this city.