Hello! I'm Elisa!

Hello everyone!
My name is Elisa, I'm 23 and I live in Conselve, a small town in the countryside not far from Padua. I studied "Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne" here in Padua as my three-year course, and now I'm attending the second year of the Specialistica in class 42.

I'm sorry, I'm late...I've only joined you this week!

Have you seen the beautiful dawn on the mountains in the photo?
When I was a little girl my family used to spend their holidays on the mountains. We went to Recoaro Terme for many years, and my grandparents came, as well. Then, when my sisters and I grew up, my family began to go to South Tirol together with some friends of ours, in a beautiful valley called Valle Aurina: the mountains were much higher there!
When I was twelve, I started going camping with other boys and girls of my age in the summertime. It was wonderful to be away from home with my friends, to stay awake till late at night, to share the same room with my bestfriends...
We took long walks up and down the mountains; actually, it was hard, but nothing on earth is worth the satisfaction you feel when you reach the top and watch down, the world laying at your feet...You do get the impression of touching the sky with your fingertips!
And dawns and sunsets are special on the mountains, because there they have colours they don't have anywhere else...

Another passion of mine is reading, both prose and poetry. I love the XX century novel: some of my favourite writers are Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Joseph Conrad and George Orwell.
However, there's something I adore reading more than anything else: that's fairy tales, ancient myths and legends, especially old Germanic and Northern European ones, and that's why my favourite book is The Lord of the Rings.
Somebody think that fairy tales are unuseful because they are distant from reality.On the contrary, I believe they represent human life and history, and this is is the reason why I like them so much.

Lately, I've been busy with the bibliographical research for my final dissertation, so I've spent a lot of time on the Internet searching books and periodicals, and I've discovered an online library which I think can be very useful to anybody starting to work on their dissertation: it is called LION, that is LIterature ONline. It searches different online bibliographies at the same time: for example, Annual Bibliography and MLA International Bibliography. It is possible to search it by subject and by keyword, and, of course, by author and title, as well, and it is updated monthly. All these things together make LION very reliable, in the sense that you are quite sure to find a lot of what has been written on the topic you are interested in. Moreover, it provides many articles in full-text!

I must say I have been quite unfortunate with my search, because only a few of the periodicals I need are here in Padua: actually, some of them are in Bologna, some in Milan, some in Turin, some in Florence, some in Rome, two or three of them are in Pisa, two in Naples, two in Salerno, two in Bari...When I discovered it I almost burst into tears! Then I calmed down and decided to search the online catalogues of some British and Irish university libraries, and I was so lucky to find almost all the periodicals and books I need at the University College of Dublin!!! So...I'll leave on 12th November for Dublin, and I'll be back a week later!
I give you the URL of UCD, the University College of Dublin, in case you should find yourselves in such a desperate situation as mine, but I have to warn you that two friends of mine searched their periodicals there, as well, but only found few...(however, don't be sorry for them: the truth is that they found A LOT of material in Bologna and Milan!)

I've already talked—sorry, written too much...as usual!

Kisses

Elisa