During the afternoon I worked on my Friday Institute lesson for a good while. I'm translating a Powerpoint presentation from my old Seminary lessons, on chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, and a few of the quotes were difficult to convey well; e.g., there is no word for "subconsciousness" in Italian. Fortunately, Oscar used to work for the church translation department, so he helped me with the difficult parts by morphing the sentences a bit. Translation is such a challenging art! It's interesting that, in a number of cases, the Italian bible translation (Luzzi) seems to have "broken" the chiasm structure present in the original Hebrew by reordering the elements, which will make for some good discussion Friday. Jack Welch, who discovered chiasmus in the Book of Mormon fifty years ago, says that, in new BofM versions, they now instruct translators to carefully preserve the known chiasms.
We had choir this evening with Lorenzo. It's odd: we had three tenors, two basses (including me), and one alto (Dee). Usually choirs have plenty of women and not enough men, but it's the opposite at our Institute. It's difficult to practice without the melody part. I also gave Lorenzo a copy of one of our favorite Christmas songs, "Star Bright", written from the perspective of Nephites at Zarahemla waiting for the signs of Christ's birth. The song was originally composed in English and Spanish about 60 years ago. Lorenzo will translate it into Italian for us, as he has capably done with a number of other American hynns/carols. Not sure if we will get it in time to use this Christmas, but it will be nice to have at some point.
After choir was the online Institute class via Zoom. Ugo is up in Milano for work this week, so he ran things from there, while I used my laptop to log the kids here into the class. There are probably 20+ locations around the country online, and it's quite impressive to see that many live video streams up on the big screen. He will still be out of town Friday, which is why I'm teaching the class then. Friday is a major Italian holiday, the Immacolata, celebrating the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Apparently that's the day many families put up their Christmas tree. We weren't sure how many kids we'd have at our class due to the holiday, but it seems like most of them will be there.
My wife drove to work Tuesday morning, and I drove home. Our new cell phone holder for the car is really nice, far more rugged and stable than the old one. Amazon is wonderful, even in Italy. Usually we have packages delivered to the mission office and the Balzottis bring them home to us in the evening, but we have also had a few small packages (from both eBay.it and Amazon.it) delivered to our apartment via the doorman, Paolo. Our apartment tower is locked, so they can't deliver it to us or our mailbox, but Paolo takes good care of us. We just use our address with "in care of the doorman", and it works well.
On Saturday we're planning on going sightseeing in Naples for the day on the train with several other senior missionary couples. Anziano Knies is getting the train tickets for us all, since he does that a lot for transfers and knows the ropes. Italy now has very fast Freccia trains that go between many major cities, which take less time than driving and are generally reliable in terms of schedule, neither of which was the case back in the 1970s.