April 10, 2007
Sorrento, Italy
Today has been a big travel day. We started with a late breakfast at the hotel, and quickly boarded the metro to get on a train, using another day in our Eurial passes, to get to Naples. ON the way Ambrice and I shared a compartment with an Italian family, a woman with two young sons, and had a fairly decent broken conversation with the young man, a kid that was 17 years old. Most of the time the conversation consisted of gesturing, multiple rewordings of phrases and exasperated silences, but we did manage to get across that we were students studying archaeology in Europe, and that we were visiting Italy for about four weeks. He was a kid going home after visiting family, I was assuming for the Easter holiday, and loved to watch soccer and cheer for his Milan team. He liked American rap music, including 50 cent and Eminem, and we both agreed that Shakira was a good singer and dancer. Upon finding out that we were going to Sorrento, he strongly recommended that we try the pizza. I asked about the pasta too, but he emphatically shook his head and said again: PIZZA. So I guess I’ll have to try it here.
Then at Naples we switched to a smaller train, for another few hours, and are now here, at a very nice hotel with large rooms and brightly colored bedspreads, happy to be settled for a few days while we see the surrounding sites, which include Herculaneum and Pompeii. I am looking forward to it…
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
The Pope
April 9, 2007
Rome, Italy
We have spent Easter in Rome, which has been one of the best break experiences of the trip so far, for me. We have been completely on our own for the past few days, seeing exactly what we have wanted to see, waking up and sleeping on our own schedule, and seeing the Pope! My friend Lily also came to visit me, which was really exciting, and I have finally had the chance to do some laundry. So, all and all, a very good break.
Italy is one of those cities that I can walk around in forever. Every few intersections there is a piazza, a square, with a fountain or a statue or some beautifully ornate church, and the roads keep winding around. It is a huge place but it does not seem very intimidating because barely any of the buildings are more than five stories tall, and the straight endless roads of a city like New York are always interrupted here by a twist and a turn, leaving me comfortable to just stroll around and see the sights without getting overwhelmed by them. I have done more walking in the past few days than we have in a long time on this trip, and although my feet are complaining, I have been happy to explore with a wonderful friend in such a lovely and inviting city.
The first day we arrived we had to hike all of our bags from the metro station at Bologna to our hotel, arriving panting and sweating from all of the up the stairs, down the stairs hassle, and then the long walk down the shady apartments until we saw the welcome sign to the Hotel Silva. Finally. We thought that the hotel had internet but it turned out that it was false advertising, so I walked as quickly as I could to pirate some and emailed to get in touch with Lily for our planned rendezvouz. Then I was free to return and enjoy the Roman night to my fullest extent. We were all starving by the time we were settled in the rooms, so Ambrice, Jess Bradshaw, Katie, Jess Eisenberg and myself all went out to dinner, at the restaurant in a complex right next to the hotel. The lighting, as Katie was quick to point out, was a wonderful peachy color and the table settings looked sophisticated and the food was delicious. Scott had his parents in town also and they ended up seated at a table very close to ours, and we all introduced ourselves, happy to finally be in Rome and eating fine Italian food.
Scott’s parents decided to be very nice and order us all a bottle of the chardonnay, and at the end of the dinner they gave us all an after dinner drink of Lemoncello, a uniquely Italian drink that tastes like a shooter with lemon in it. By the end of the night, we were talking really loudly and laughing really hard, and ended up walking a little shakily out of the restaurant and back to our hotel, which, luckily, was right next door. We were initially going to continue the night, we tried to badger some of our fellow CSAers to come along with us to a bar frequented by Americans called the Drunken Ship, but they all refused. It didn’t matter anyway, we all ended up falling asleep (clothes and all) by midnight.
The next morning was greeted with a nice croissant spread for breakfast and some very good cappuccinos, and Ambrice, Katie and Jess Eisenberg and I began our shopping excursion. We went to the Spanish Steps, the major shopping area of Rome, which grows out of a large flight of white steps, flanked on each side by a cascade of potted plants. It was early, but there was already a large crowd of people milling about, next to the stores of high fashion: Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, Prada, etc. We walked past window after window of hugely expensive clothing, bags, leather, until we reached some stores that we knew were in our price range, stores like Zara and United Colors of Benetton.
We spent a good deal of the morning shopping, or window shopping, going and trying on various outfits and laughing about how good or bad they looked. I saw a lot of things I liked but space and money are always a consideration on this trip and so I remained happy to just sit and watch, and absorb the fashion spree going on around me. The European women always astound me, they are incredibly well dressed all of the time. There is no room for a sweatpants day here, everything must be heeled and jacketed. I guess that will just be one of the mysteries of Europe. In any event, we enjoyed the experience, and stopped around midday to grab pizza at a local restaurant, the men at the counter took our garbled orders and shoved slices into wax paper, folding the cheesy sides together for a warm gooey sandwich.
Then it was onto more walking, with a break by stopping for some gelato (peach and mixed berry, yum!). After that, I got kind of shopped out, so I split off from the group and decided to do some wandering on my own. I ventured out away from the Spanish steps, with the intention of going to see the Piazza Navona, one of the largest public squares in Rome, complete with street performers, art sellers, and sidewalk chalkers. One of the funniest people we saw in our shopping excursion was a man drawing a reproduction of a Caravaggio on the sidewalk, his cup for change sitting next to him, and right beside the drawing, written in bright yellow chalk: “Directions for Lost Tourists”, pointing the way toward the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, and the nearest McDonald’s.
I never made it to the Piazza Navona that day, instead I ended up walking through some of the more remote areas of Rome, turning off of the side streets and going into what was formerly the Jewish Ghetto, densely packed buildings made with whatever stone was available, including the ruins of old monuments. I would look up the stuccoed walls and see bits and pieces of Roman architecture stuck in at random in to the walls—pieces of architrave, column capitals, even some relief sculpture. I passed by a small art gallery exhibiting lovely black and white photographs, but the exterior was made of restructured colonnades from a Doric type structure, and the inside had been bricked up in ancient times, leaving marks of construction and reconstruction between the columns.
I moved on, down to the ancient agora, to the arches of Titus and Constaintine, and the remains of brick arches and passageways, exposed to the open air, and then finally on to the Colosseum. The massive amphitheater was at first visible only from a distance, a series of piers and arches rising in three great rows above. It arched around, slinging bits of brick and stone around it as it went, an impressive and imposing building. I stood for a while and walked all around the outside, before finally at 5 pm jumping on the metro to return to the hotel, where I met up with some of my friends, went grocery shopping and killed time until Lily arrived.
And she did, coming in earlier than I thought she would, panting from the long walk to the hotel. We jumped in the air and shrieked and gave each other huge hugs. I was really really excited to see her, and I showed her the hotel room and introduced her to the folks that were on the trip, really briefly, before having a picnic lunch, it was late and neither of us wanted to go out. And we proceeded to talk and talk, late into the night. I told her, along with my roommate for the week, Katie, all about the trip and the people on it and some of the craziness that comes along with spending 4 months with just 20 people in 8 countries with one professor. By the end of the night she could give impressions of just about anyone, was very impressed at the lengths we went to get the internet, and the amount of clothes that we have to wash in the sink. But it’s the price that we pay for seeing as many countries as we do, in the amount of time that we have.
The next morning was Easter Sunday, and all of us had decided that we were going to wake up very early, scarf down some quick breakfast and take the metro to a stop close to St Peters. It was 7:45 am, and about 13 or 14 of us were chatting, Lily by my side, as we walked up and down the stairs, handled all of the people on the train, and then walked several blocks until we entered the vicinity of the church. The mass did not start until 10:30, but there were tons and tons of people there already, crowding the arms of St Peters as they reached out in their grand arcs to embrace us. There were rows of plastic seats set out, and we arrived early enough to snag a row, close enough so that we could see the platform of the mass without binoculars. The sun had not come out yet, but the fountains were already singing, and looking at the roofline of the colonnades many many statues could be seen. On the top of St Peters itself, Jesus stood in a magnificent contrapposto, holding the cross in one arm, crowned by a halo disc, the saints flanking him on either side. The façade of the building itself was in the classical tradition, large Corinthian columns spanning multiple stories in increasing intervals as they moved out from the central doorway. The windows were tall and crowned with elaborate moulding, and the entire thing was capped with a magnificent dome, not perfectly spherical like the mosques at Istanbul, but elongated along its vertical axis, so that it appeared to be reaching toward the sky.
We sat there for the better part of 2 hours, waiting for the service to begin as more and more people filled up the space. The place became noisier and noisier, people were waving flags and jabbering away in a multitude of languages. And then a half an hour before the mass was supposed to begin, we heard a fanfare of trumpets and in marched the swiss guard, up the arms of the outreaching collonade, now at our backs, and then up to the platform. There were so many people there that I could only see the tops of their hats, with black and red feathers, as they came marching in perfect unison. It almost felt like a parade, and people stood on their chairs and talked and pointed excitedly. And then it was time for the Pope to arrive, and he came flanked by robed figures and slowly ascended the steps leading up to the platform. All of the noise and movement ceased, as people felt the hush of the moment. We were seeing the Pope.
And then the service began, a long service that would last until past noon, in many many different languages. But I was impressed that everyone stayed perfectly quiet, the choir music ringing from the speakers in the vast throng of people, and at the passing of the peace I shook hands with people from all over the globe. It was a truly magical moment, one that I would not have missed for the world. Definitely worth getting up early for. I spoke with some people later about it and they all agreed that the passing of the peace was one of the coolest parts of the whole thing—in one of my math classes one year we talked about connectivity, and the degrees of separation between people. There is some statistic about the minimum number of handshakes it takes to shake hands indirectly with everyone in the globe, and I think the number was 6—6 degrees of separation between me and everyone else. I think I bridged that gap that day, at the Easter mass in Rome.
At the end of the service the Pope gave a long speech all in Italian, and I only managed to catch bits and pieces, but I think he was talking about all of the problems and war in the world, calling for peace world wide. I heard the names of Iraq, Darfur, the middle east, poverty, hunger, terrorism—the Pope was calling for an end to it all, and the brotherhood that I felt at the place was enough to give me hope—that maybe something could be done about it all. If all of us gathered there that morning could pardon our differences in the name of Easter then perhaps good could come in the world. I left the whole event feeling much better about humanity.
The whole thing was beautiful and moving, from the spectacular location to the brightening spring sky, which when the cloud cover burned off early in the mass turned into a brilliand cloud-dotted blue. And the magnificence of St. Peter’s itself is something that cannot be underestimated, it reached out and enfolded us all in its impressive stone arms, and at the front ascended to something higher, a masterpiece in stone.
At the end of the mass the Pope gave a blessing in every single language, and the people that spoke them cheered and waved their flags as they were each recognized in turn, and then Lily and I escaped, into the crush of people standing behind the seats, and out of the arms, and into the bright afternoon. We watched as the band marched along the streets, and wandered for a while in search of a restaurant, making our way back to another church, I think its called the church of St Angelo but I cannot be sure, until we reached the bridge over the Tiber river and an open air market filled with tents of vendors selling fake designer purses, belts, and another stand with dried fruit of every different type.
Lily and I filled our bags with dried kiwi and passionfruit, pineapple and chocolate dipped orange, before moving on along the waterfront, over the bridge and into a district with crowded streets, passing by a number of fanstastic neoclassical palaces topped with bronze statues and absolutely covered in ornament. Then we entered the narrow streets, where we saw a number of open air cafes and pizzerias, alive and bustling with activity. We stopped in one that looked incredibly busy, figuring that it was that way for a good reason, and found a small table where we ordered a nice salad and a Pizza Margerita, which we both split and ate with gusto. And we walked on, down to the Piazza Navona, which I really wanted to see.
The Piazza Navona is like every other square in Rome, except on a much larger scale. It a huge oblong space, the center occupied with a number of street performers and artisans, a few giant statues, and an obelisk that looked as though it was taken directly from Egypt and topped with a cross. Which it probably was. Istanbul clearly was not the only city to find Egyptian monuments attractive. We walked around the whole square, milling around the crowds of people, before finding a sign that directed us toward the Pantheon.
Of course, we had to go, so we walked with a crowd of people out of the Piazza, down a narrow side street and followed the general direction until the buildings opened up again, this time to frame a much smaller courtyard and the Pantheon itself, a majesty in brick and stone. It was a very round, fairly plain building from the outside, impressive for its sheer mass. The brick outside was straiated at intervals with bands of relief, straight up the curved walls and forming the lip where the domed top met the cylindrical base, the dome rising in a series of stepped intervals where it swelled into a shallow curve.
The porch of the pantheon was the most interesting, it looked like the front of a temple stuck onto the circular domed space, marked by its massive Corinthian columns and inscribed along the architrave with latin. The name of Marcus Agrippa was the only thing I could read. Lily and I did not go inside the building, but walked along the outside, feeling very very small and insignificant next to the majestic temple dedicated to all the gods.
And then we moved on, out through another narrow windy street and across a major road, winding our way to the Trevi Fountain, which was packed with tons and tons of tourists. This massive fountain stood three stories tall with shell-shaped niches and tall graceful columns topped with statues. The water spewed out of a huge bowl surrounded by prancing horses, with triton standing tall in the niche with his drapery swirling around him. The place was absolutely packed full of people, we had to push our way down to the water front, where we each threw in a coin or two in a promise to return to the city. I will be coming back in 10 days, and she threw in two, which, according to the saying, mean that she would come back a married lady. It was a wonderful sunny day, but it was too claustrophobic by the fountain, so we hurried away from there and continued on.
We walked down a huge wide boulevard past the brick fortresses crumbling away, the maze of walls rising on either side of the street, punctuated in places by a forlorn collonade here or there, capped with the remains of columns. And then, at the end of the street, the Colusseum rose in all of its majesty, cutting off the sightlines and standing in its raw power at the end of the street. Lily was amazed, and I was impressed yet again, and we stopped in the sunlight to people watch for a while before continuing on to stand underneath the massive arches that opened onto the bright sky. We walked around and around it, stopping occasionally to watch the crowds of people milling around us.
Finally, to exhausted and with our feet in some serious pain (we mistakenly wore cute shoes to the mass because we expected to go home immediately afterward, but ended walking for hours and hours), we boarded the metro and returned to the hotel, where we hung out and watched some Desperate Housewives (Lily has been deprived since she has been abroad) and hung out and talked again late into the night. We did not even feel like going out to dinner, so we finished some of the leftover food that I had bought a few days ago from the grocery store. We could have spent the entire night talking, but what with the early wake up and the long long day of walking, we ended up falling asleep around midnight.
The next morning was the last day that Lily was in town, so we woke up and had a breakfast with the group, before taking the metro down to Spagna, where the Spanish steps were, and then following the metro line to a place where four fountains met on the corners of the street, and a church on one corner, rising in scrolled beauty up to the morning sky. And then it was on to a huge plaza, where a huge hotel rolled out in a semi circular arc of windows and columns to embrace a humongous fountain that sprayed water in huge arcs. There was another fountain later, that had a muscle bound merman holding a huge conch shell up to his mouth, the water overflowing from the top and dripping down his upturned mouth and down his front, glistening in the sun. It was a wonderful morning, but upon reaching Termini it was time for Lily to go, so we got back on the metro to head back to Bologna, where our hotel was.
Along the way we passed a park that we had discovered early on was a good spot for wireless internet, so we stopped to chat for a while. It turned out that the night before, a group of CSAers went out to dinner to a Thai restaurant and were served bottomless bottles of wine, resulting in some very drunken stumbling on the street and a fall leading to a broken tooth. So it turns out that not everyone had as boring an easter night as we had, and now the girl was calling her parents on Skype to tell them that she was going to have to get a fake tooth in Rome.
We continued on, returning to our hotel and doing final packing, and I said goodbye to Lily as she boarded the metro to catch her flight back to Grenada. It was wonderful to see her and I was sad to have her go, but I desperately needed to register for classes and get some homework done.
The rest of the day was spent doing that, more or less. I called my parents, did some emailing and downloading on the wireless in the park, and went out to dinner later with Chris Vincoli, Scott, Sam and Anne, to one of the few restaurants open that Easter Monday. We all ordered Margerita Pizzas and split a nice bottle of red wine before returning to the hotel around midnight and turning in.
Rome, Italy
We have spent Easter in Rome, which has been one of the best break experiences of the trip so far, for me. We have been completely on our own for the past few days, seeing exactly what we have wanted to see, waking up and sleeping on our own schedule, and seeing the Pope! My friend Lily also came to visit me, which was really exciting, and I have finally had the chance to do some laundry. So, all and all, a very good break.
Italy is one of those cities that I can walk around in forever. Every few intersections there is a piazza, a square, with a fountain or a statue or some beautifully ornate church, and the roads keep winding around. It is a huge place but it does not seem very intimidating because barely any of the buildings are more than five stories tall, and the straight endless roads of a city like New York are always interrupted here by a twist and a turn, leaving me comfortable to just stroll around and see the sights without getting overwhelmed by them. I have done more walking in the past few days than we have in a long time on this trip, and although my feet are complaining, I have been happy to explore with a wonderful friend in such a lovely and inviting city.
The first day we arrived we had to hike all of our bags from the metro station at Bologna to our hotel, arriving panting and sweating from all of the up the stairs, down the stairs hassle, and then the long walk down the shady apartments until we saw the welcome sign to the Hotel Silva. Finally. We thought that the hotel had internet but it turned out that it was false advertising, so I walked as quickly as I could to pirate some and emailed to get in touch with Lily for our planned rendezvouz. Then I was free to return and enjoy the Roman night to my fullest extent. We were all starving by the time we were settled in the rooms, so Ambrice, Jess Bradshaw, Katie, Jess Eisenberg and myself all went out to dinner, at the restaurant in a complex right next to the hotel. The lighting, as Katie was quick to point out, was a wonderful peachy color and the table settings looked sophisticated and the food was delicious. Scott had his parents in town also and they ended up seated at a table very close to ours, and we all introduced ourselves, happy to finally be in Rome and eating fine Italian food.
Scott’s parents decided to be very nice and order us all a bottle of the chardonnay, and at the end of the dinner they gave us all an after dinner drink of Lemoncello, a uniquely Italian drink that tastes like a shooter with lemon in it. By the end of the night, we were talking really loudly and laughing really hard, and ended up walking a little shakily out of the restaurant and back to our hotel, which, luckily, was right next door. We were initially going to continue the night, we tried to badger some of our fellow CSAers to come along with us to a bar frequented by Americans called the Drunken Ship, but they all refused. It didn’t matter anyway, we all ended up falling asleep (clothes and all) by midnight.
The next morning was greeted with a nice croissant spread for breakfast and some very good cappuccinos, and Ambrice, Katie and Jess Eisenberg and I began our shopping excursion. We went to the Spanish Steps, the major shopping area of Rome, which grows out of a large flight of white steps, flanked on each side by a cascade of potted plants. It was early, but there was already a large crowd of people milling about, next to the stores of high fashion: Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, Prada, etc. We walked past window after window of hugely expensive clothing, bags, leather, until we reached some stores that we knew were in our price range, stores like Zara and United Colors of Benetton.
We spent a good deal of the morning shopping, or window shopping, going and trying on various outfits and laughing about how good or bad they looked. I saw a lot of things I liked but space and money are always a consideration on this trip and so I remained happy to just sit and watch, and absorb the fashion spree going on around me. The European women always astound me, they are incredibly well dressed all of the time. There is no room for a sweatpants day here, everything must be heeled and jacketed. I guess that will just be one of the mysteries of Europe. In any event, we enjoyed the experience, and stopped around midday to grab pizza at a local restaurant, the men at the counter took our garbled orders and shoved slices into wax paper, folding the cheesy sides together for a warm gooey sandwich.
Then it was onto more walking, with a break by stopping for some gelato (peach and mixed berry, yum!). After that, I got kind of shopped out, so I split off from the group and decided to do some wandering on my own. I ventured out away from the Spanish steps, with the intention of going to see the Piazza Navona, one of the largest public squares in Rome, complete with street performers, art sellers, and sidewalk chalkers. One of the funniest people we saw in our shopping excursion was a man drawing a reproduction of a Caravaggio on the sidewalk, his cup for change sitting next to him, and right beside the drawing, written in bright yellow chalk: “Directions for Lost Tourists”, pointing the way toward the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, and the nearest McDonald’s.
I never made it to the Piazza Navona that day, instead I ended up walking through some of the more remote areas of Rome, turning off of the side streets and going into what was formerly the Jewish Ghetto, densely packed buildings made with whatever stone was available, including the ruins of old monuments. I would look up the stuccoed walls and see bits and pieces of Roman architecture stuck in at random in to the walls—pieces of architrave, column capitals, even some relief sculpture. I passed by a small art gallery exhibiting lovely black and white photographs, but the exterior was made of restructured colonnades from a Doric type structure, and the inside had been bricked up in ancient times, leaving marks of construction and reconstruction between the columns.
I moved on, down to the ancient agora, to the arches of Titus and Constaintine, and the remains of brick arches and passageways, exposed to the open air, and then finally on to the Colosseum. The massive amphitheater was at first visible only from a distance, a series of piers and arches rising in three great rows above. It arched around, slinging bits of brick and stone around it as it went, an impressive and imposing building. I stood for a while and walked all around the outside, before finally at 5 pm jumping on the metro to return to the hotel, where I met up with some of my friends, went grocery shopping and killed time until Lily arrived.
And she did, coming in earlier than I thought she would, panting from the long walk to the hotel. We jumped in the air and shrieked and gave each other huge hugs. I was really really excited to see her, and I showed her the hotel room and introduced her to the folks that were on the trip, really briefly, before having a picnic lunch, it was late and neither of us wanted to go out. And we proceeded to talk and talk, late into the night. I told her, along with my roommate for the week, Katie, all about the trip and the people on it and some of the craziness that comes along with spending 4 months with just 20 people in 8 countries with one professor. By the end of the night she could give impressions of just about anyone, was very impressed at the lengths we went to get the internet, and the amount of clothes that we have to wash in the sink. But it’s the price that we pay for seeing as many countries as we do, in the amount of time that we have.
The next morning was Easter Sunday, and all of us had decided that we were going to wake up very early, scarf down some quick breakfast and take the metro to a stop close to St Peters. It was 7:45 am, and about 13 or 14 of us were chatting, Lily by my side, as we walked up and down the stairs, handled all of the people on the train, and then walked several blocks until we entered the vicinity of the church. The mass did not start until 10:30, but there were tons and tons of people there already, crowding the arms of St Peters as they reached out in their grand arcs to embrace us. There were rows of plastic seats set out, and we arrived early enough to snag a row, close enough so that we could see the platform of the mass without binoculars. The sun had not come out yet, but the fountains were already singing, and looking at the roofline of the colonnades many many statues could be seen. On the top of St Peters itself, Jesus stood in a magnificent contrapposto, holding the cross in one arm, crowned by a halo disc, the saints flanking him on either side. The façade of the building itself was in the classical tradition, large Corinthian columns spanning multiple stories in increasing intervals as they moved out from the central doorway. The windows were tall and crowned with elaborate moulding, and the entire thing was capped with a magnificent dome, not perfectly spherical like the mosques at Istanbul, but elongated along its vertical axis, so that it appeared to be reaching toward the sky.
We sat there for the better part of 2 hours, waiting for the service to begin as more and more people filled up the space. The place became noisier and noisier, people were waving flags and jabbering away in a multitude of languages. And then a half an hour before the mass was supposed to begin, we heard a fanfare of trumpets and in marched the swiss guard, up the arms of the outreaching collonade, now at our backs, and then up to the platform. There were so many people there that I could only see the tops of their hats, with black and red feathers, as they came marching in perfect unison. It almost felt like a parade, and people stood on their chairs and talked and pointed excitedly. And then it was time for the Pope to arrive, and he came flanked by robed figures and slowly ascended the steps leading up to the platform. All of the noise and movement ceased, as people felt the hush of the moment. We were seeing the Pope.
And then the service began, a long service that would last until past noon, in many many different languages. But I was impressed that everyone stayed perfectly quiet, the choir music ringing from the speakers in the vast throng of people, and at the passing of the peace I shook hands with people from all over the globe. It was a truly magical moment, one that I would not have missed for the world. Definitely worth getting up early for. I spoke with some people later about it and they all agreed that the passing of the peace was one of the coolest parts of the whole thing—in one of my math classes one year we talked about connectivity, and the degrees of separation between people. There is some statistic about the minimum number of handshakes it takes to shake hands indirectly with everyone in the globe, and I think the number was 6—6 degrees of separation between me and everyone else. I think I bridged that gap that day, at the Easter mass in Rome.
At the end of the service the Pope gave a long speech all in Italian, and I only managed to catch bits and pieces, but I think he was talking about all of the problems and war in the world, calling for peace world wide. I heard the names of Iraq, Darfur, the middle east, poverty, hunger, terrorism—the Pope was calling for an end to it all, and the brotherhood that I felt at the place was enough to give me hope—that maybe something could be done about it all. If all of us gathered there that morning could pardon our differences in the name of Easter then perhaps good could come in the world. I left the whole event feeling much better about humanity.
The whole thing was beautiful and moving, from the spectacular location to the brightening spring sky, which when the cloud cover burned off early in the mass turned into a brilliand cloud-dotted blue. And the magnificence of St. Peter’s itself is something that cannot be underestimated, it reached out and enfolded us all in its impressive stone arms, and at the front ascended to something higher, a masterpiece in stone.
At the end of the mass the Pope gave a blessing in every single language, and the people that spoke them cheered and waved their flags as they were each recognized in turn, and then Lily and I escaped, into the crush of people standing behind the seats, and out of the arms, and into the bright afternoon. We watched as the band marched along the streets, and wandered for a while in search of a restaurant, making our way back to another church, I think its called the church of St Angelo but I cannot be sure, until we reached the bridge over the Tiber river and an open air market filled with tents of vendors selling fake designer purses, belts, and another stand with dried fruit of every different type.
Lily and I filled our bags with dried kiwi and passionfruit, pineapple and chocolate dipped orange, before moving on along the waterfront, over the bridge and into a district with crowded streets, passing by a number of fanstastic neoclassical palaces topped with bronze statues and absolutely covered in ornament. Then we entered the narrow streets, where we saw a number of open air cafes and pizzerias, alive and bustling with activity. We stopped in one that looked incredibly busy, figuring that it was that way for a good reason, and found a small table where we ordered a nice salad and a Pizza Margerita, which we both split and ate with gusto. And we walked on, down to the Piazza Navona, which I really wanted to see.
The Piazza Navona is like every other square in Rome, except on a much larger scale. It a huge oblong space, the center occupied with a number of street performers and artisans, a few giant statues, and an obelisk that looked as though it was taken directly from Egypt and topped with a cross. Which it probably was. Istanbul clearly was not the only city to find Egyptian monuments attractive. We walked around the whole square, milling around the crowds of people, before finding a sign that directed us toward the Pantheon.
Of course, we had to go, so we walked with a crowd of people out of the Piazza, down a narrow side street and followed the general direction until the buildings opened up again, this time to frame a much smaller courtyard and the Pantheon itself, a majesty in brick and stone. It was a very round, fairly plain building from the outside, impressive for its sheer mass. The brick outside was straiated at intervals with bands of relief, straight up the curved walls and forming the lip where the domed top met the cylindrical base, the dome rising in a series of stepped intervals where it swelled into a shallow curve.
The porch of the pantheon was the most interesting, it looked like the front of a temple stuck onto the circular domed space, marked by its massive Corinthian columns and inscribed along the architrave with latin. The name of Marcus Agrippa was the only thing I could read. Lily and I did not go inside the building, but walked along the outside, feeling very very small and insignificant next to the majestic temple dedicated to all the gods.
And then we moved on, out through another narrow windy street and across a major road, winding our way to the Trevi Fountain, which was packed with tons and tons of tourists. This massive fountain stood three stories tall with shell-shaped niches and tall graceful columns topped with statues. The water spewed out of a huge bowl surrounded by prancing horses, with triton standing tall in the niche with his drapery swirling around him. The place was absolutely packed full of people, we had to push our way down to the water front, where we each threw in a coin or two in a promise to return to the city. I will be coming back in 10 days, and she threw in two, which, according to the saying, mean that she would come back a married lady. It was a wonderful sunny day, but it was too claustrophobic by the fountain, so we hurried away from there and continued on.
We walked down a huge wide boulevard past the brick fortresses crumbling away, the maze of walls rising on either side of the street, punctuated in places by a forlorn collonade here or there, capped with the remains of columns. And then, at the end of the street, the Colusseum rose in all of its majesty, cutting off the sightlines and standing in its raw power at the end of the street. Lily was amazed, and I was impressed yet again, and we stopped in the sunlight to people watch for a while before continuing on to stand underneath the massive arches that opened onto the bright sky. We walked around and around it, stopping occasionally to watch the crowds of people milling around us.
Finally, to exhausted and with our feet in some serious pain (we mistakenly wore cute shoes to the mass because we expected to go home immediately afterward, but ended walking for hours and hours), we boarded the metro and returned to the hotel, where we hung out and watched some Desperate Housewives (Lily has been deprived since she has been abroad) and hung out and talked again late into the night. We did not even feel like going out to dinner, so we finished some of the leftover food that I had bought a few days ago from the grocery store. We could have spent the entire night talking, but what with the early wake up and the long long day of walking, we ended up falling asleep around midnight.
The next morning was the last day that Lily was in town, so we woke up and had a breakfast with the group, before taking the metro down to Spagna, where the Spanish steps were, and then following the metro line to a place where four fountains met on the corners of the street, and a church on one corner, rising in scrolled beauty up to the morning sky. And then it was on to a huge plaza, where a huge hotel rolled out in a semi circular arc of windows and columns to embrace a humongous fountain that sprayed water in huge arcs. There was another fountain later, that had a muscle bound merman holding a huge conch shell up to his mouth, the water overflowing from the top and dripping down his upturned mouth and down his front, glistening in the sun. It was a wonderful morning, but upon reaching Termini it was time for Lily to go, so we got back on the metro to head back to Bologna, where our hotel was.
Along the way we passed a park that we had discovered early on was a good spot for wireless internet, so we stopped to chat for a while. It turned out that the night before, a group of CSAers went out to dinner to a Thai restaurant and were served bottomless bottles of wine, resulting in some very drunken stumbling on the street and a fall leading to a broken tooth. So it turns out that not everyone had as boring an easter night as we had, and now the girl was calling her parents on Skype to tell them that she was going to have to get a fake tooth in Rome.
We continued on, returning to our hotel and doing final packing, and I said goodbye to Lily as she boarded the metro to catch her flight back to Grenada. It was wonderful to see her and I was sad to have her go, but I desperately needed to register for classes and get some homework done.
The rest of the day was spent doing that, more or less. I called my parents, did some emailing and downloading on the wireless in the park, and went out to dinner later with Chris Vincoli, Scott, Sam and Anne, to one of the few restaurants open that Easter Monday. We all ordered Margerita Pizzas and split a nice bottle of red wine before returning to the hotel around midnight and turning in.
Monday, April 9, 2007
Almost to Rome
April 6, 2007
Palermo, Sicily, Italy
I am finally over my cold, I think, and we are now sitting in the airport waiting to go to Rome! I am very excited to finally be seeing the big city for myself, many of the people on this trip have been to Rome and have absolutely raved about how wonderful it has been. The past few days have been pretty exhausting, what with moving around every night, being sick, and having long days. We have seen more temples in the past few days than we saw throughout all of northern Greece, and toward the end all of them started to look alike.
On April 4, two days ago, we got up early as usual and went to Selinunte, a place famous for having tons and tons of temples. We got out into the blustery and cold day, and every time we returned to the bus we got wetter and wetter and wetter. We looked miserable, huddled against the rain, but we did manage to see the whole site.
The first part of Selinunte that we saw was the ancient fortifications—Selinunte is famous for being constructed on an orthogonal grid plan, and we walked around the walls, looking up the streets to where they intersected in wide boulevards, looking down over the grass to where the cliffs dropped off into the sea. Defining the crest of the hill stood a number of Temples, named according to the alphabet. We saw a Temple C, and a Temple G, and a number of others, all constructed out of the same brownish red colored stone. They all stood in various states of decay—some had colonnades braced with metal, and scaffolding, others stayed a jumbled mess of blocks in a rough rectangle laid out on the foundations of a once mighty giant. One of the giants, Temple G, consisted only of fallen columns and drums, massive blocks from a temple originally 55 x 155 meters in size. The columns themselves were an enormous tumbled mess, and we climbed up and over the rocks to survey the mess from above. We disappeared in and out of the ruins, emerging on a distant precipice of jumbled stone, standing tall against the grey sky. Luckily by then it had stopped raining, and we enjoyed ourselves as we explored. The temple was like a giant jungle gym and we all wanted to play.
We kept moving past the alphabet soup temples, to another one Temple F, one of the oldest, denoted by its squishy column capitals and having the unusual added characteristic of walls between its columns. This seems to have been an innovation that took place only in Magna Grecia, none of the temples on the Greek mainland have this feature. And then on, to another letter: Temple E, a well-preserved temple standing with almost a full collonade and aligned directly with the Temple F which preceeded it. It stood brown and tall, more classically proportioned than most of the others we have seen, with taller slenderer columns and a diminished architrave. We could walk inside of this one, so we ascended the metal ramps added to the front of the temple, and walked into the cella, stopping at the walls at the far end and looking at the sweep of yellow flowers that peeked at us from in between the columns. I even climbed up the very walls of the cella where they descended into nothingness and could look over the entirety of the temple interior, looking at the remains of foundation walls and the still standing columns as they imposed themselves upon the grey sky.
We returned from Selinunte and went on to spend the night in Marinella. Our hotel was out in the middle of nowhere, off of a once-paved but now overgrown road surrounded by abandoned looking houses that overlooked the water. But we got in early, around 2, so I decided to go for a run. I headed down toward the waterfront, where some stone piers thrust out in curves into the surf, protecting the brightly colored boats bobbing in the water. I ran out all of the way to the end of the farthest one, feeling the wind and spray on my face, before turning back toward what looked like the city center, an area with a few restaurants that looked open, then I turned and headed the other way, away from settlement and toward the stretch of coast that looked largely uninhabited.
I found myself on a limestone road that led to a series of wood stairs down to the beach, where the rolling hills on the mainland dissolved into scrubby trees and then a rich brown sand, that met the rolling green surf. The sun was getting lower in the sky, and the still gray clouds rolled across the horizon, backlit where the sun had found them. I ran on the beach for a while, the softer sand slowing down my steps, until I disappeared around a curve out of sight of all civilization and found myself all alone, the spread of the sky and sea before me. It was wonderful. I stopped for a while and stared at the surf as it rolled in and out, and then turned around to head home.
Dinner that night was at one of the restaurants in Marinella, a good 20 minute walk toward town, where we had a delicious dinner. I myself had my first taste of Italian pizza—mozzarella, sausage, tomato sauce, and spinach. Mmm. A big group of us went, and we stayed there for about 2 hours, laughing and talking. And then, when it was about time to ask for the check, the skies opened up and the rain started drumming upon the roof. It sounded almost like the roof was going to fall down, like it was pounding on hapless aluminum with no insulation, and we all decided to opt for some dessert to pass the time until the rain subsided. I had a chocolate pastry, and Katie had a really good Italian ice—lemon ice stuffed into the interior of a bona fide lemon. We got served a type of dessert wine that was very sweet and the perfect preparation for our venture out into the wet. And then, when we heard a break in the storm, we paid quickly and bolted, the rain turning the streets into small rivers of water, the slick illumined by the amber light of street lamps.
We came back to find Chris Vincoli glued to the TV, watching Roma play Manchester United, a big game between two very big soccer teams, and stayed and chatted and looked at pictures as Roma continued to score. Eventually a full out brawl broke out on screen, the police degenerating into chaos as they swung indiscriminately at the crowd, an organized sporting event turned into something so much more emotional…
We hung out for a while, talking and hanging out, until it grew too late and we went to bed.
The next morning it was on the road again, this time to the Cava di Cusa, the site where the huge blocks for Temple G at Selinunte were excavated. The broken pieces still sit in their stone beds, huge pillars of stone with narrow passageways in between where the workers would hammer and hammer to get at the limestone. We walked in between the tall curved surfaces, looking up to the narrow sliver of sky and past it to our fellow CSA mates who stood and looked down from their high perches above. The day was lovely, with a brilliant blue sky and no clouds, and warm. I basked in it.
The site was relatively small, so after observing the sleeping giants for a while we went on to our next stop, the more spectacular of the two that day, to Segesta. We were moving slowly closer and closer to Palermo, but stopped along the way here, at a remote but picturesque spot framed by mountains and the cloudy blue sky. At Segesta, a simple peristyle of columns stood against the sky. This temple had never been finished in antiquity, whether due to lack of finances or a desire to impress the Athenian representatives which the Segestans were courting for military aid, and stands as is, without a single set of erect walls. The peristyle of columns is fully complete, however, and is open to the sky, a skeleton of a temple. From between the temple walls we could see fields of wildflowers as they stretched up and out away from us and over into the rising mountains.
We were able to walk inside of the temple’s hollow shell, so we picked our way up the column steps and into the open space, the world around us segmented off by the bars of limestone that ascended to meet over our heads. All of the limestone was a curious reddish brown color, and each of the blocks had straiations like tree rings that added a depth and a texture to the stone; this temple was clearly worn by time and by the elements. Then we continued up the hill, a few kilometers until we reached the theater at Segesta, a big arch of limestone set into the hillside and overlooking, as Greek temples tend to do, a valley and a stream, the landscape providing the perfect background for the plays produced.
Although much of the stage building that partially obscured the view is now gone, all of the steps remain in their perfect curving arcs. We sat in the sun and enjoyed the weather, exhausted and ready for Easter break. It could not come too soon.
Then it was back to the hotel where we were pleased to find Palermo a very welcoming, large city complete with a good shopping district. Ambrice and I could not resist, so grabbing Katie and a few other friends toured the district, made our stops at Zara and Mango, and talked a good deal. We stopped at a restaurant to find that we were the early bird customers, apparently Italian restaurants do not even open until 7:30, so I am sure that when we strolled in at 7 pm we looked pretty silly. Luckily the Italians seemed to take some pity upon us obviously lost Americans, and gave us some bread to munch on as we sat and waited for them to get the restaurant ready to serve. But we did manage to have a very nice meal of pizza and salad and pasta before heading back out into the Palermo evening, where we found a good spot for wifi next to a foot locker, and endured the strange looks of the locals as we checked our emails and did our skyping by the side of the road.
The next morning we were all very excited! We would be in Rome by that evening and we were all looking forward to having a couple of days off, and I could not wait to see my best friend Lily, who was studying abroad in Grenada and had a few days off to meet me in Rome. We were all completely impatient to get out of Sicily and into the big town, where we would have more freedom to explore, and would no longer remain cooped up in little tiny hotels in the middle of these small towns with nothing significant to see. We knew that we were going to see big things in Rome.
Consequently, when we went to the Palermo museum the morning before our flight, we did not actually end up paying much attention at all to the things we were seeing, and spent a good deal of the morning in a kind of daze, just waiting until we had the opportunity to be on BREAK. However, the museum did contain a number of interesting finds, a sarcophagi that almost looked Egyptian, a number of very interesting statues by Greek sculptors, one of Hercules straddling a ferocious looking stag, holding an antler in each hand, muscles rippling. There were also a number of metopes from the temples at Selinunte, some of the earliest examples of Greeks sculpture that we have seen so far, and probably will see for the rest of the trip.
The thick meaty figures are crammed together in their frames, their hair plaited into elaborate designs. Some of the very early metopes showed the beheading of Medusa and the subsequent birth of Bellerophon. Others showed more obscure adventures of Heracles. On another temple’s metopes, there was a picture of Zeus and Hera’s wedding, himself seated on a massive throne, twisting his body in an awkward fashion characteristic of the early classical style (this temple was much later than the other), as he reaches up to take her hand; she disdainfully places her hand in his… something we had never seen before. Other scenes familiar from mythology sprung from the stone—Hercules and the Amazon queen in tense battle, both bodies leaning and lunching as they struggle to vanquish the other. And another, of Actaion, the poor youth who spotted Artemis bathing and was punished by getting turned into a stag and being attacked by his own hunting dogs. He looked down as they lunged up to his body, mouths open and teeth bared. They were fabulous to look at.
But our attentions were wandering, and it wasn’t before long that we walked back to the hotel to kill more time around Palermo, before loading the Sicily bus for the last time, and heading to ROME.
Palermo, Sicily, Italy
I am finally over my cold, I think, and we are now sitting in the airport waiting to go to Rome! I am very excited to finally be seeing the big city for myself, many of the people on this trip have been to Rome and have absolutely raved about how wonderful it has been. The past few days have been pretty exhausting, what with moving around every night, being sick, and having long days. We have seen more temples in the past few days than we saw throughout all of northern Greece, and toward the end all of them started to look alike.
On April 4, two days ago, we got up early as usual and went to Selinunte, a place famous for having tons and tons of temples. We got out into the blustery and cold day, and every time we returned to the bus we got wetter and wetter and wetter. We looked miserable, huddled against the rain, but we did manage to see the whole site.
The first part of Selinunte that we saw was the ancient fortifications—Selinunte is famous for being constructed on an orthogonal grid plan, and we walked around the walls, looking up the streets to where they intersected in wide boulevards, looking down over the grass to where the cliffs dropped off into the sea. Defining the crest of the hill stood a number of Temples, named according to the alphabet. We saw a Temple C, and a Temple G, and a number of others, all constructed out of the same brownish red colored stone. They all stood in various states of decay—some had colonnades braced with metal, and scaffolding, others stayed a jumbled mess of blocks in a rough rectangle laid out on the foundations of a once mighty giant. One of the giants, Temple G, consisted only of fallen columns and drums, massive blocks from a temple originally 55 x 155 meters in size. The columns themselves were an enormous tumbled mess, and we climbed up and over the rocks to survey the mess from above. We disappeared in and out of the ruins, emerging on a distant precipice of jumbled stone, standing tall against the grey sky. Luckily by then it had stopped raining, and we enjoyed ourselves as we explored. The temple was like a giant jungle gym and we all wanted to play.
We kept moving past the alphabet soup temples, to another one Temple F, one of the oldest, denoted by its squishy column capitals and having the unusual added characteristic of walls between its columns. This seems to have been an innovation that took place only in Magna Grecia, none of the temples on the Greek mainland have this feature. And then on, to another letter: Temple E, a well-preserved temple standing with almost a full collonade and aligned directly with the Temple F which preceeded it. It stood brown and tall, more classically proportioned than most of the others we have seen, with taller slenderer columns and a diminished architrave. We could walk inside of this one, so we ascended the metal ramps added to the front of the temple, and walked into the cella, stopping at the walls at the far end and looking at the sweep of yellow flowers that peeked at us from in between the columns. I even climbed up the very walls of the cella where they descended into nothingness and could look over the entirety of the temple interior, looking at the remains of foundation walls and the still standing columns as they imposed themselves upon the grey sky.
We returned from Selinunte and went on to spend the night in Marinella. Our hotel was out in the middle of nowhere, off of a once-paved but now overgrown road surrounded by abandoned looking houses that overlooked the water. But we got in early, around 2, so I decided to go for a run. I headed down toward the waterfront, where some stone piers thrust out in curves into the surf, protecting the brightly colored boats bobbing in the water. I ran out all of the way to the end of the farthest one, feeling the wind and spray on my face, before turning back toward what looked like the city center, an area with a few restaurants that looked open, then I turned and headed the other way, away from settlement and toward the stretch of coast that looked largely uninhabited.
I found myself on a limestone road that led to a series of wood stairs down to the beach, where the rolling hills on the mainland dissolved into scrubby trees and then a rich brown sand, that met the rolling green surf. The sun was getting lower in the sky, and the still gray clouds rolled across the horizon, backlit where the sun had found them. I ran on the beach for a while, the softer sand slowing down my steps, until I disappeared around a curve out of sight of all civilization and found myself all alone, the spread of the sky and sea before me. It was wonderful. I stopped for a while and stared at the surf as it rolled in and out, and then turned around to head home.
Dinner that night was at one of the restaurants in Marinella, a good 20 minute walk toward town, where we had a delicious dinner. I myself had my first taste of Italian pizza—mozzarella, sausage, tomato sauce, and spinach. Mmm. A big group of us went, and we stayed there for about 2 hours, laughing and talking. And then, when it was about time to ask for the check, the skies opened up and the rain started drumming upon the roof. It sounded almost like the roof was going to fall down, like it was pounding on hapless aluminum with no insulation, and we all decided to opt for some dessert to pass the time until the rain subsided. I had a chocolate pastry, and Katie had a really good Italian ice—lemon ice stuffed into the interior of a bona fide lemon. We got served a type of dessert wine that was very sweet and the perfect preparation for our venture out into the wet. And then, when we heard a break in the storm, we paid quickly and bolted, the rain turning the streets into small rivers of water, the slick illumined by the amber light of street lamps.
We came back to find Chris Vincoli glued to the TV, watching Roma play Manchester United, a big game between two very big soccer teams, and stayed and chatted and looked at pictures as Roma continued to score. Eventually a full out brawl broke out on screen, the police degenerating into chaos as they swung indiscriminately at the crowd, an organized sporting event turned into something so much more emotional…
We hung out for a while, talking and hanging out, until it grew too late and we went to bed.
The next morning it was on the road again, this time to the Cava di Cusa, the site where the huge blocks for Temple G at Selinunte were excavated. The broken pieces still sit in their stone beds, huge pillars of stone with narrow passageways in between where the workers would hammer and hammer to get at the limestone. We walked in between the tall curved surfaces, looking up to the narrow sliver of sky and past it to our fellow CSA mates who stood and looked down from their high perches above. The day was lovely, with a brilliant blue sky and no clouds, and warm. I basked in it.
The site was relatively small, so after observing the sleeping giants for a while we went on to our next stop, the more spectacular of the two that day, to Segesta. We were moving slowly closer and closer to Palermo, but stopped along the way here, at a remote but picturesque spot framed by mountains and the cloudy blue sky. At Segesta, a simple peristyle of columns stood against the sky. This temple had never been finished in antiquity, whether due to lack of finances or a desire to impress the Athenian representatives which the Segestans were courting for military aid, and stands as is, without a single set of erect walls. The peristyle of columns is fully complete, however, and is open to the sky, a skeleton of a temple. From between the temple walls we could see fields of wildflowers as they stretched up and out away from us and over into the rising mountains.
We were able to walk inside of the temple’s hollow shell, so we picked our way up the column steps and into the open space, the world around us segmented off by the bars of limestone that ascended to meet over our heads. All of the limestone was a curious reddish brown color, and each of the blocks had straiations like tree rings that added a depth and a texture to the stone; this temple was clearly worn by time and by the elements. Then we continued up the hill, a few kilometers until we reached the theater at Segesta, a big arch of limestone set into the hillside and overlooking, as Greek temples tend to do, a valley and a stream, the landscape providing the perfect background for the plays produced.
Although much of the stage building that partially obscured the view is now gone, all of the steps remain in their perfect curving arcs. We sat in the sun and enjoyed the weather, exhausted and ready for Easter break. It could not come too soon.
Then it was back to the hotel where we were pleased to find Palermo a very welcoming, large city complete with a good shopping district. Ambrice and I could not resist, so grabbing Katie and a few other friends toured the district, made our stops at Zara and Mango, and talked a good deal. We stopped at a restaurant to find that we were the early bird customers, apparently Italian restaurants do not even open until 7:30, so I am sure that when we strolled in at 7 pm we looked pretty silly. Luckily the Italians seemed to take some pity upon us obviously lost Americans, and gave us some bread to munch on as we sat and waited for them to get the restaurant ready to serve. But we did manage to have a very nice meal of pizza and salad and pasta before heading back out into the Palermo evening, where we found a good spot for wifi next to a foot locker, and endured the strange looks of the locals as we checked our emails and did our skyping by the side of the road.
The next morning we were all very excited! We would be in Rome by that evening and we were all looking forward to having a couple of days off, and I could not wait to see my best friend Lily, who was studying abroad in Grenada and had a few days off to meet me in Rome. We were all completely impatient to get out of Sicily and into the big town, where we would have more freedom to explore, and would no longer remain cooped up in little tiny hotels in the middle of these small towns with nothing significant to see. We knew that we were going to see big things in Rome.
Consequently, when we went to the Palermo museum the morning before our flight, we did not actually end up paying much attention at all to the things we were seeing, and spent a good deal of the morning in a kind of daze, just waiting until we had the opportunity to be on BREAK. However, the museum did contain a number of interesting finds, a sarcophagi that almost looked Egyptian, a number of very interesting statues by Greek sculptors, one of Hercules straddling a ferocious looking stag, holding an antler in each hand, muscles rippling. There were also a number of metopes from the temples at Selinunte, some of the earliest examples of Greeks sculpture that we have seen so far, and probably will see for the rest of the trip.
The thick meaty figures are crammed together in their frames, their hair plaited into elaborate designs. Some of the very early metopes showed the beheading of Medusa and the subsequent birth of Bellerophon. Others showed more obscure adventures of Heracles. On another temple’s metopes, there was a picture of Zeus and Hera’s wedding, himself seated on a massive throne, twisting his body in an awkward fashion characteristic of the early classical style (this temple was much later than the other), as he reaches up to take her hand; she disdainfully places her hand in his… something we had never seen before. Other scenes familiar from mythology sprung from the stone—Hercules and the Amazon queen in tense battle, both bodies leaning and lunching as they struggle to vanquish the other. And another, of Actaion, the poor youth who spotted Artemis bathing and was punished by getting turned into a stag and being attacked by his own hunting dogs. He looked down as they lunged up to his body, mouths open and teeth bared. They were fabulous to look at.
But our attentions were wandering, and it wasn’t before long that we walked back to the hotel to kill more time around Palermo, before loading the Sicily bus for the last time, and heading to ROME.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Syracuse
April 1, 2007
Syracuse, Italy
Today was a great day, and the only thing that marred my experience of Syracuse is a nasty head cold that I have been nursing ever since we have been Italy. There are several of us on the trip that are hacking and coughing, and with the close quarters and constant travel it has been impossible not to communicate germs. So all day today I have been coughing and sneezing, and the wonderful Italian food has been rather tasteless because my tastebuds have been clogged with mucus. I only hope that I can get better before we get to Rome, I don’t want my whole experience to be colored with thoughts of my sore throat.
Today we had a nice breakfast, albeit lacking the custom order coffee, and hopped on the bus to go downtown in Syracuse. Syracuse was one of the largest colonies in the Greek world, established by Corinth, although Greek activity in Italy dates back as far as Homer, and even as far back as the Mycenean period. Syracuse itself is notable for its involvement in the Sicilian expedition undertaken by Athens in 415-413 BC, near the end of the Peloponnesian war, during which the Athenian navy was firmly routed, effectively marking the beginning of the end of Athenian dominance. The first place that we went was the Castello Euryalo, established during the period when Syracuse was ruled by tyrants. The study walls of the Castello line the edge of the peninsula that overlooks the old part of the town, on a peninsula that thrusts out into the sparkling water. We moved around the place, which had a number of stairs and passages cut into the limestone rock.
We moved back from the peninsula and walked down the passages, going into a dark passage and emerging amidst towering walls, punctuated by carved holes and staircases, a labyrinth in and out of the sunlight. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, a strange riddle set forth by a sorceress that needs to be solved, but the passages run into each other or lead nowhere or turn around and lead back to the entrance, and we had fun playing peekaboo with each other as we popped in and out of the holes.
Then it was onto the bus and to the archaeological park of Syracuse, the site of a number of ancient ruins including a theater, a ampitheater, and rock quarries. The theater was again, one of the largest in the Greek world and the largest in Sicily, with a diameter of 140 meters. Although like many other theaters it was originally simply incorporated into the slope and hill of the landscape, the Romans with their desire for earthworks and structure took over and added stone seating. Because Syracuse itself was such a prominent site in the Greek world many playwrights including Aeschylus journeyed here to perform their plays, including Aeschylus who performed The Persians. The bowl of the cavea stood bleached white and open to the bright spring sky, and at the top a ring of stone led to a recess with a burbling fountain, in front of which we all took pictures, and then looked down the rows of seats to the treeline, with the harbor of Syracuse slightly visible in the distance, through the pine needles.
Then we descended from the top of the theater and continued our jaunt, around to the rock quarries. This is a place where the limestone has been excavated since the time of Homer, and the cliffs have been stripped away in a regular manner, leaving a series of terraced walls. The bottom of the quarry has since been allowed to green from the silt that has washed down from above—lemon and mangrove trees line the shady walks, and the lemons hung ripe for picking. Tomazou even climbed into a tree to get us some, surprising a crowd of German tourists.
But the quarries were not always pleasant. This was the place where, after the Sicilian expedition, a number of Athenians were held captive and died from heat and exhaustion and lack of food after being captured by the Syracusans, the groves that now ring with the sound of birds must originally have been torn with the groans of shattered and dying men. At the far end of the quarry is a place that looks like the pointed arch on a gothic building, a cave that descends deep into the cliff from a tear at the mountain face. Called the “ear of Dionysus”, the cave was visited and written about by Caravaggio during the Italian renaissance. We went inside, journeying down the echoing passage, dwarfed by the immense cavity above us, until the passage turned out of sight of the entrance, and 65 meters into the rock terminated at a dead end, the pointed top of the chamber rounding out into a hollow high above our heads. It was a spooky place.
We reemerged into the blinding sun and exited the park, making our way to a nearby site that contained a Roman Amphitheater, the first we have seen on the trip. This particular one is notable for its unusual method of constructions—instead of being built up in a series of arched vaulting a la the Colisseum in Rome, this was carved down out of the limestone in the manner of the Greeks. However, it is clearly Roman—arched vaulting poked its way out of the crumbling seats—an entire vaulted passage circumnavigated the arena floor, allowing for the entrance of the gladiators, perhaps. The arena in general did not have a single entrance, but two major ones at the North and South ends where the halves of the amphitheater came together, surmounted by a big arched passageway. However, there was evidence in the eroded stones for multiple entrances, arches led from the outside of the arena almost all of the way down to the dividing wall that separated the spectators from the blood sports going on in the sandy circle. Already there is a level of organization that is not present in the Greek theater, down to the multiple entrances and the arched tunnel that led to the arena floor. In the center, a pit supported by columns looked like it may have allowed performers or beasts to rise up from the center to surprise the audience. Roman spectacle at its finest… Toumazou told us that we were going to see a large number of amphitheaters from here on out, so he did not give us very much information about this particular one.
From there, we walked back in the sun to the bus to head toward the very center of the old town, located on what was once an island that has been subsequently silted up and now is separated from the mainland only by a series of canals and bridges. We stopped the bus outside—it would never survive the tight crowded streets, and walked over the bridge and into a piazza with the hunkered down columns of a temple fenced in the center, and shops and restaurants around the outside. Several of us, Chris, Jess, Ambrice and I had brought our lunches, so we settled ourselves on a bench in the middle of the square and people watched. I stopped in at a local café, grabbing a caffe latte and bringing it back into the sun where tourists in their khaki vests and Italians with their high boots and leather jackets walked past. We had spotted a Versace store on the way in, so Ambrice dragged me inside. I felt like a big intruder in my hiking shoes, patched pants, and tshirt but the employees were nice and allowed us to look at the clothes, stopping only to gawk at the price tags.
Then it was on with the day—the temple that stood in the middle of the square was a temple to Apollo, dated to 570 BC, a squat temple of the Doric order with fat columns and bulging capitals. Although only a few of the columns remained standing, a reconstructed plan showed a massive entablature; the area above the columns was about as high as the columns themselves, which made the building look like it was ready to fall forward onto its face. Moving around to the side of the temple, we could see places where the cella walls had been punctured to make room for the entrances to a church, now removed, and other ghosts of the temple’s former incarnations. It was really cool to see this, a distinctly Greek building, dropped down in the middle of a modern Italian city, and I stopped to admire the juxtaposition between this and a tall scrolled venetian-looking catholic church that sat right next door, Mary looking down out of her sculptural niche at us. Masculine and feminine sat side by side, the old and the new, that which came before and that which followed.
Then we moved on, up a narrow street with balconies that hung right above our heads to the center of a piazza with a wonderful neoclassical fountain, the water throwing up diamonds into the sky and letting them cascade down over the nymphs and figures that paraded around the bottom. Horses stood at attention, all facing the central figure of a beautiful woman, that stood serenely over the scene. The sky was blue and the surrounding buildings all had an air of stateliness that proclaimed that we were there! We were in Italy.
For the last stop of the day we came to the site of another of the Sicilian temples of the early period, this one in particular was dated to 480 BC, when Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse, built it in celebration to his victory over the Carthaginians following the battle of Himera. Originally containing six columns on the front side and 14 along the sides, it has been embedded into the fabric of a catholic church. From the outside, we could see the fluting and the capitals of the columns protruding from the stone walls that surrounded the temple. On the entrance of the church, the austerity of the Doric abruptly changed, to the flowery Corinthian capitals and the volutes that laced their way up the façade to the top, surmounted by a big cross and filled with classicizing sculptures of saints and the virgin, as always, occupying a place in the center niche. The front contained the broken and recessed architraves characteristic of post-Greek experimentation with temple orders, creating a sense of rhythm and a pattern of light and dark in the strong afternoon sunshine.
We walked under the flying cherubims and past a column snaked with floral tracery and into the church itself. It was beautiful, not in an overwhelmingly gilded and painted way as in the orthodox churches, but in a simple yet elegant manner, with strong vertical lines surmounted by a dark wood open raftered ceiling. Opulence was reserved for the stained glass windows in the upper clerestory, that contained brilliantly colored portraits of saints, and at the apse, where a white and gilded altar stood, framing the dark oil portraits of Mary and John, and Jesus occupying the center oval. Above, a slender dome rose in white simplicity, pierced by one round window with bright stained glass. From the ceiling hung circular chandeliers, heavy with iron rings, that resided low over our heads, in between the spaces where cella of the temple had been carved away to form three aisles, and the outer walls had the other halves of the Doric columns, breaking up the stark regularity of the otherwise unadorned stone walls.
It was a quiet, hallowed place. The church has been continuously used for worship since its establishment so many thousands of years ago, and I could practically hear the echoes of the many prayers as I moved among the dim lights of the church and listened to the pregnant silence.
Then it was out to the bright sunlight and the sounds of accordions in the piazza, where people enjoyed a late lunch in the open air cafes or sat and played guitar on the steps of the church. By that point, however, I was exhausted and feeling really ill, so we walked along the waterfront to the remains of the Spring of Arethusa, where according to mythology a nymph pursued by Altheus was transformed into a spring in order to escape his attentions. The spring was right on the waterfront, and the sun glittered off the water, dotted with a sailboat or two and tinted a brilliant blue. We walked along the waterfront and into a shady park with trees that had spiral trunks and whose branches hung low over the ground. In between these fantastic and venerable trees, date palms rose, competing for the sunlight, loaded down with their fruit.
We rested for a while, and then took the bus back to our hotel, where I had a long long nap, woke and picnicked, checked our email standing by the side of the road outside the hotel, and then promptly fell asleep again. I was feeling pretty bad so I was happy to sleep early.
Syracuse, Italy
Today was a great day, and the only thing that marred my experience of Syracuse is a nasty head cold that I have been nursing ever since we have been Italy. There are several of us on the trip that are hacking and coughing, and with the close quarters and constant travel it has been impossible not to communicate germs. So all day today I have been coughing and sneezing, and the wonderful Italian food has been rather tasteless because my tastebuds have been clogged with mucus. I only hope that I can get better before we get to Rome, I don’t want my whole experience to be colored with thoughts of my sore throat.
Today we had a nice breakfast, albeit lacking the custom order coffee, and hopped on the bus to go downtown in Syracuse. Syracuse was one of the largest colonies in the Greek world, established by Corinth, although Greek activity in Italy dates back as far as Homer, and even as far back as the Mycenean period. Syracuse itself is notable for its involvement in the Sicilian expedition undertaken by Athens in 415-413 BC, near the end of the Peloponnesian war, during which the Athenian navy was firmly routed, effectively marking the beginning of the end of Athenian dominance. The first place that we went was the Castello Euryalo, established during the period when Syracuse was ruled by tyrants. The study walls of the Castello line the edge of the peninsula that overlooks the old part of the town, on a peninsula that thrusts out into the sparkling water. We moved around the place, which had a number of stairs and passages cut into the limestone rock.
We moved back from the peninsula and walked down the passages, going into a dark passage and emerging amidst towering walls, punctuated by carved holes and staircases, a labyrinth in and out of the sunlight. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, a strange riddle set forth by a sorceress that needs to be solved, but the passages run into each other or lead nowhere or turn around and lead back to the entrance, and we had fun playing peekaboo with each other as we popped in and out of the holes.
Then it was onto the bus and to the archaeological park of Syracuse, the site of a number of ancient ruins including a theater, a ampitheater, and rock quarries. The theater was again, one of the largest in the Greek world and the largest in Sicily, with a diameter of 140 meters. Although like many other theaters it was originally simply incorporated into the slope and hill of the landscape, the Romans with their desire for earthworks and structure took over and added stone seating. Because Syracuse itself was such a prominent site in the Greek world many playwrights including Aeschylus journeyed here to perform their plays, including Aeschylus who performed The Persians. The bowl of the cavea stood bleached white and open to the bright spring sky, and at the top a ring of stone led to a recess with a burbling fountain, in front of which we all took pictures, and then looked down the rows of seats to the treeline, with the harbor of Syracuse slightly visible in the distance, through the pine needles.
Then we descended from the top of the theater and continued our jaunt, around to the rock quarries. This is a place where the limestone has been excavated since the time of Homer, and the cliffs have been stripped away in a regular manner, leaving a series of terraced walls. The bottom of the quarry has since been allowed to green from the silt that has washed down from above—lemon and mangrove trees line the shady walks, and the lemons hung ripe for picking. Tomazou even climbed into a tree to get us some, surprising a crowd of German tourists.
But the quarries were not always pleasant. This was the place where, after the Sicilian expedition, a number of Athenians were held captive and died from heat and exhaustion and lack of food after being captured by the Syracusans, the groves that now ring with the sound of birds must originally have been torn with the groans of shattered and dying men. At the far end of the quarry is a place that looks like the pointed arch on a gothic building, a cave that descends deep into the cliff from a tear at the mountain face. Called the “ear of Dionysus”, the cave was visited and written about by Caravaggio during the Italian renaissance. We went inside, journeying down the echoing passage, dwarfed by the immense cavity above us, until the passage turned out of sight of the entrance, and 65 meters into the rock terminated at a dead end, the pointed top of the chamber rounding out into a hollow high above our heads. It was a spooky place.
We reemerged into the blinding sun and exited the park, making our way to a nearby site that contained a Roman Amphitheater, the first we have seen on the trip. This particular one is notable for its unusual method of constructions—instead of being built up in a series of arched vaulting a la the Colisseum in Rome, this was carved down out of the limestone in the manner of the Greeks. However, it is clearly Roman—arched vaulting poked its way out of the crumbling seats—an entire vaulted passage circumnavigated the arena floor, allowing for the entrance of the gladiators, perhaps. The arena in general did not have a single entrance, but two major ones at the North and South ends where the halves of the amphitheater came together, surmounted by a big arched passageway. However, there was evidence in the eroded stones for multiple entrances, arches led from the outside of the arena almost all of the way down to the dividing wall that separated the spectators from the blood sports going on in the sandy circle. Already there is a level of organization that is not present in the Greek theater, down to the multiple entrances and the arched tunnel that led to the arena floor. In the center, a pit supported by columns looked like it may have allowed performers or beasts to rise up from the center to surprise the audience. Roman spectacle at its finest… Toumazou told us that we were going to see a large number of amphitheaters from here on out, so he did not give us very much information about this particular one.
From there, we walked back in the sun to the bus to head toward the very center of the old town, located on what was once an island that has been subsequently silted up and now is separated from the mainland only by a series of canals and bridges. We stopped the bus outside—it would never survive the tight crowded streets, and walked over the bridge and into a piazza with the hunkered down columns of a temple fenced in the center, and shops and restaurants around the outside. Several of us, Chris, Jess, Ambrice and I had brought our lunches, so we settled ourselves on a bench in the middle of the square and people watched. I stopped in at a local café, grabbing a caffe latte and bringing it back into the sun where tourists in their khaki vests and Italians with their high boots and leather jackets walked past. We had spotted a Versace store on the way in, so Ambrice dragged me inside. I felt like a big intruder in my hiking shoes, patched pants, and tshirt but the employees were nice and allowed us to look at the clothes, stopping only to gawk at the price tags.
Then it was on with the day—the temple that stood in the middle of the square was a temple to Apollo, dated to 570 BC, a squat temple of the Doric order with fat columns and bulging capitals. Although only a few of the columns remained standing, a reconstructed plan showed a massive entablature; the area above the columns was about as high as the columns themselves, which made the building look like it was ready to fall forward onto its face. Moving around to the side of the temple, we could see places where the cella walls had been punctured to make room for the entrances to a church, now removed, and other ghosts of the temple’s former incarnations. It was really cool to see this, a distinctly Greek building, dropped down in the middle of a modern Italian city, and I stopped to admire the juxtaposition between this and a tall scrolled venetian-looking catholic church that sat right next door, Mary looking down out of her sculptural niche at us. Masculine and feminine sat side by side, the old and the new, that which came before and that which followed.
Then we moved on, up a narrow street with balconies that hung right above our heads to the center of a piazza with a wonderful neoclassical fountain, the water throwing up diamonds into the sky and letting them cascade down over the nymphs and figures that paraded around the bottom. Horses stood at attention, all facing the central figure of a beautiful woman, that stood serenely over the scene. The sky was blue and the surrounding buildings all had an air of stateliness that proclaimed that we were there! We were in Italy.
For the last stop of the day we came to the site of another of the Sicilian temples of the early period, this one in particular was dated to 480 BC, when Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse, built it in celebration to his victory over the Carthaginians following the battle of Himera. Originally containing six columns on the front side and 14 along the sides, it has been embedded into the fabric of a catholic church. From the outside, we could see the fluting and the capitals of the columns protruding from the stone walls that surrounded the temple. On the entrance of the church, the austerity of the Doric abruptly changed, to the flowery Corinthian capitals and the volutes that laced their way up the façade to the top, surmounted by a big cross and filled with classicizing sculptures of saints and the virgin, as always, occupying a place in the center niche. The front contained the broken and recessed architraves characteristic of post-Greek experimentation with temple orders, creating a sense of rhythm and a pattern of light and dark in the strong afternoon sunshine.
We walked under the flying cherubims and past a column snaked with floral tracery and into the church itself. It was beautiful, not in an overwhelmingly gilded and painted way as in the orthodox churches, but in a simple yet elegant manner, with strong vertical lines surmounted by a dark wood open raftered ceiling. Opulence was reserved for the stained glass windows in the upper clerestory, that contained brilliantly colored portraits of saints, and at the apse, where a white and gilded altar stood, framing the dark oil portraits of Mary and John, and Jesus occupying the center oval. Above, a slender dome rose in white simplicity, pierced by one round window with bright stained glass. From the ceiling hung circular chandeliers, heavy with iron rings, that resided low over our heads, in between the spaces where cella of the temple had been carved away to form three aisles, and the outer walls had the other halves of the Doric columns, breaking up the stark regularity of the otherwise unadorned stone walls.
It was a quiet, hallowed place. The church has been continuously used for worship since its establishment so many thousands of years ago, and I could practically hear the echoes of the many prayers as I moved among the dim lights of the church and listened to the pregnant silence.
Then it was out to the bright sunlight and the sounds of accordions in the piazza, where people enjoyed a late lunch in the open air cafes or sat and played guitar on the steps of the church. By that point, however, I was exhausted and feeling really ill, so we walked along the waterfront to the remains of the Spring of Arethusa, where according to mythology a nymph pursued by Altheus was transformed into a spring in order to escape his attentions. The spring was right on the waterfront, and the sun glittered off the water, dotted with a sailboat or two and tinted a brilliant blue. We walked along the waterfront and into a shady park with trees that had spiral trunks and whose branches hung low over the ground. In between these fantastic and venerable trees, date palms rose, competing for the sunlight, loaded down with their fruit.
We rested for a while, and then took the bus back to our hotel, where I had a long long nap, woke and picnicked, checked our email standing by the side of the road outside the hotel, and then promptly fell asleep again. I was feeling pretty bad so I was happy to sleep early.
Agrigento
April 3, 2007
Agrigento, Sicily, Italy
The past few days have been pretty busy and tiring and in my getting-over-a-cold state I have not had the proper mindset to properly appreciate all of the things we have seen. Luckily, I think I am beginning to get over the cold, so things hopefully will begin to improve. Plus, at the end of the week we will be in Rome, where I will meet up with my high school best friend Lily, and have a few days off for easter! I cannot wait! The past few hotels that we have been at have been located out in the middle of nowhere and it leaves us really hungering for things to do in the evenings, besides watching movies on the laptops. And internet has been really difficult, so we cannot even download new things to see, so we just end up watching the same things over and over again.
Anyway, yesterday we woke up very early and had a long bus ride to the middle of the island, where amidst tons of fields of olives and orchards full of blood oranges, we reached the Piazza Armerina, a Roman villa chock full of mosaics. The day was cool, and we walked down through a series of booths to reach a wooded park covered in an odd type of metal and glass scaffolding, below which the walls of the villa stood a foot or two high in the dust.
Unlike most of the Greco-Roman buildings we have seen so far, this building violates almost every law of traditional classicism in its floorplan and construction. It is non-axial, the entrance hall does not have clear sight lines with the rest of the building. The main hall is an appendage on the main courtyard, a rectangular building with a large semiapsidal pool in the center. Arranged around the sides are a series of small rooms, placed unevenly around the outside. On the back side of the courtyard, a series of apsidal rooms, one of which is called a “basilica”, project themselves out from the main complex. The villa complex also contains a public bath complex, with oddly shaped rooms in a series of rounded shells, which is accessible both from the inside and the outside of the villa complex. To the south, another courtyard shaped like a truncated oval, a very strange shape for classical construction, may have been added later in an effort to expand the villa’s shape. It is a hodgepodge of shape and line, nothing is perfectly aligned with each other, and even the central courtyard that forms the foundation of the entire complex is slightly off-square.
We entered the Piazza up a series of glass-floored walkways, so that we could see the mosaics from above, and survey the walls as if from a god’s perspective, giving us a bird’s eye view of the entire complex. The mosaics present there are really quite impressive. In the smaller and more highly trafficked areas the mosaics are of a geometric type—interlacing braids, lines, and florals. They parade around and intersect one another in a well thought out yet complex pattern. Around the central courtyard are a series of medallions inscribed with animal’s heads, boldly staring forward at the viewer. In one of the major hallways leading to the “basilica,” shaped like the transcept of a church, was a scene called the “great hunt.” In the scene, lions and elephants and other exotic beasts are in the process of being captured in order to be placed in the gladiatorial arena. In another part of the villa, cupids sun themselves and fish on small boats, Polyphemus gets blinded by Odysseus, Hercules fights giants and becomes a god, and chariots race around the Circus Maximus. The most interesting scene, to me, was one famouly called the “bikini girls”—women with their breasts wrapped and in small bathing suit bottoms lift weights and run around. No one is sure whether this is evidence for female athletics, but it certainly can be interpreted as such, and I enjoyed entertaining the notion.
We spent several hours at the site, walking up and down the walkways, over the walls, taking pictures and listening to Jarrett lecture to us about the method of mosaic construction. We noticed that the place gradually filled up with a bunch of European kids in their black ripped tight pants and their puffy coats and oddly colored hair; we generally tried to avoid the crowds of them where possible but by 11:00 am it was impossible, they were choking the narrow hallways and when we saw a man in Roman soldier dress leading a crowd of tourists, we decided that we had quite enough of the Piazza Armerina, and turned tail and headed back to the bus, where we had a hurried lunch and continued on to the next place. I did enjoy the mosaics, however. Most of the stuff we have seen prior to the Piazza Armerina have been mosaics of the late Roman/early Christian period, and they have a quality of stiffness and formality that is lacking in these, they have a clarity of movement and depiction of weight gone in the portraits of rulers like Justinian at Ravenna, for example, where he appears to be hovering like a puppet above the ground. The picture of Polyphemus is probably the most telling, his bulging musculature and the veracity with which he tears the cattle apart, Odysseus readying his spear in the background contrast greatly with the portraiture of the Byzantine rulers. Jarrett, however, seemed to indicate that this was the beginning of decline for mosaic production, promising us even better ones.
The bus headed down out of the hills and toward the ocean, out of the hills. The air grew warmer and the land grew greener, and we stopped at the site of Gela to see the museum and a number of the nearby sites. The Gela museum was a small affair, completely dominated with vases, red figure and black figure, and they opened up a special wing of the museum to us that was under renovation in order to showcase their finds. The upper part of the museum contained finds from the nearby acropolis, terracotta heads and figurines. But it was late in the day, after a really long bus ride, and we were all starting to go a little bit crazy, so we ran around a bit in the sun before stepping on the bus again.
And then off the bus again, to see the fortifications. They were constructed out of mudbrick and towered over the countryside, dotted with funny flowering trees that opened onto the water. We walked down a clay path to watch the bricks loom before us, completely awed with both the age and the size of the fortifications, picking flowers along the way and talking and laughing. But before long, it was on the bus again.
The bus ride was long, but it felt short because our part of the bus got into a huge discussion about athletes and steroids, the tour de france, and marriage customs. By the time we had arrived, we had completely exhausted all of the sports updates we knew of, were eagerly awaiting the results of the NCAA Basketball game, because Florida was in the championship and there was no telling when we would be able to get internet.
We finally arrived at the hotel to discover non-existent internet, but big rooms and a good lobby, so we grabbed some food at the grocery store and settled down for a big picnic. There was quite a crowd at the picnic, we ate our shared food and talked a bunch and settled in after dinner to watch Gladiator, again, before falling asleep during the movie. Luckily Chris Vincoli was smart enough to turn off the movie, and Katie Eastland and I awoke to find the room deserted. We shrugged, and turned back over, and kept snoozing.
This morning, I woke up to a late alarm, and had a decent breakfast with a caffe latte before heading out to the Valley of the Temples. Located in Agrigento, these series of temples were all built within about 100 years of each other, in an effort to showcase the wealth and majesty of the city state. Looking at the temples gives an excellent opportunity to examine the development of temple architecture in Sicily, which differs somewhat from that on the mainland. It took Greek architects a while to arrive at the “ideal classical proportions” and some of these temples look like funhouse versions of the ideal, spun just enough out of proportion to look a little bit strange.
However, the sight of bunch after bunch of brown red columns stacked along a steep ridgeline overlooking the city did its job: I was incredibly impressed at the resources that the Agrigentans were able to pool in order to construct so many buildings so quickly. Agrigento was another colony, established by Gela in the sixth century BC, but it wasn’t until the 5th century that it embarked on the massive building program that resulted in the string of temples along the ridge—over ten in the city, strung out like beads on a necklace.
The first temple we saw happened to be dedicated to Hera, and it was the easternmost of the temples and dated to 450 BC, contemporary with the Parthenon. Looking at it, however, betrays its colonial origins because unlike the Parthenon, it is made out of local brown limestone. This is the youngest of the temples that we have seen so far, but there were plenty of other temples to be seen along our trek, we would see by the end of the day the whole spectrum of temple development. It was like a history lesson laid out on the land. The day was grey and the temple sat surveying the vast sweep of land from the red cliffs that defined the edge of Agrigento down to the spread of land all of the way to the sea.
We moved along the top of the ridge on an east to west hike, coming to the next temple, the so-called Concord Temple, constructed 20-25 years later than the temple of Hera, and one of the best preserved temples in the ancient Greek world. This temple is considered to be the pinnacle of Doric architectural development in Magna Grecia, and contains all of the optical refinements that can be found on the mainland- the swelling of the columns, corner contraction, curvature of the temple platform—changes all designed to counteract the tendency for straight lines to appear to converge. This temple has none of the awkwardness of the others, and seems to be pretty indistinguishable from the others on the mainland. We stopped here and walked around, taking pictures and looking out over the grey-tinted land below us. The skies had not opened up at all and it was looking greyer and more depressing.
But we soldiered on, moving past this temple to another one dedicated to Hercules, older than the previous two and appearing generally more bulgy, like a person whose flesh settles as they reach old age. This one sat, stout and imposing, sending its two remaining columns upward into the sky. And then it was on, down the slope to the remains of a massive temple modeled on some of the ones that we saw in Turkey. The temple itself is a jumbled mess—column capitals embedded in little hills, the blocks scattered about, blending into the surrounding stone of the hilltop. The temple of Olympian Zeus lives up to the status of its god, it is 113 meters long, longer than a football field and originally held columns that were at least 14 meters high. However, this was no ordinary temple.
Instead of the usual peristyle of columns marching in their even rows around the outside of the cella, this temple contained for walls with engaged half columns, forming a single huge enclosed space. It also unusually had 7 columns in the front, which did not allow an axial entrance, instead it was achieved by going in one of two entrances on the corners of the east side of the temple. It was really more of a tall fence than anything else, and inside, again instead of a cella wall with an interior collonade, the temple again had engaged pilasters (square columns) that essentially divided the interior space into three long and narrow aisles. Around the outside of the walls, in between the columns, massie stone figures that looked more Egyptian than anything else stood and held the lintel of the temple up over their heads. They were called atlantes, after Atlas, the giant who at the straits of Gibraltar holds up the heavens, his punishment for trying to fight the Olympian gods.
Not much of this odd yet imposing temple remain, just the tumbled down blocks and the massive limestone platform, eroded into eddies and currents by the relentless movement of water. We clambered all over the rocks, even managing to fit three of us at the top of a massive fallen half-capital. I walked the length of it, stopping to admire a fallen atlas, who lay stretched out on his back in the muddy earth.
Then it was on, to the next temple, a small one dedicated to the Dioskouroi: Castor and Pollux, the two sons of Leda, mother also to the infamous Helen, who are worshipped here in a small temple, of which only a corner of the peristyle remains standing. By then my eyes were starting to glaze over, all of the temples were made of the same brown stone and they all looked very similar unless the minute evolution of the column capital and proportions are examined, and I was tired. The overcast atmosphere was gradually sucking our energy away, and we were quite happy to return to a small café where we lunched and people watched before heading on to the next activity. As always.
The next stop was the museum, which had more of the same types of stuff as all of the museums before, tons of pottery, some terracotta figurines, and most notably an Atlas from the temple, which stood massive and imposing in the central room of the museum. It was huge, and all of its facial features and detailing had been eroded away, leaving blocks in the shape of a man that stood like the colossi of Memnon, staring through its absent eyes ahead, its arms straining with the effort to hold up the roof. We were all really tired by then, so we wandered rather aimlessly through the hallways, stopping to look at this or that, but most of it we had seen some vague place before, and so we mostly waited to finish the tour so that we could return to our beds and rest.
But after the museum we were on to another small site, the domestic quarters of ancient Agrigento, where block upon block of walls sat low over the sloping ground. There were tons of houses here, punctuated occasionally by the reconstructed column that stood much higher than the rest. We stepped like giants over the low walls and walked in and out of rooms as if we were ghosts. Then finally it was back home, to the hotel.
I collapsed on to my bed as soon as I got there and caught up on some reading and blew off some steam with Ambrice. We hung out and talked as a group for a bit before a large number of us headed downstairs to the hotel restaurant, where we all feasted on some very good pasta. Then it was back to Stewart’s room, where we all listened to Dane Cook, the comedian, on someone’s computer and talked until fairly late into the night. There was another group of Americans, high schoolers from West Virginia, staying in the hotel and one of them stopped to ask who had won the championship. When we told her we did not know she did some scouting around and discovered that the GATORS HAD WON! This is the third championship in a row for Florida, and I was super excited—I wished I had internet so I could Skype my parents and see how Gainesville was handling the craziness that I got to witness when only a few months ago the football team won. Hopefully at the next hotel we can get some…. Until then it was some chatting with Jarrett, Stewart, Chris and Sam and Ambrice, more blogging, and bed.
Agrigento, Sicily, Italy
The past few days have been pretty busy and tiring and in my getting-over-a-cold state I have not had the proper mindset to properly appreciate all of the things we have seen. Luckily, I think I am beginning to get over the cold, so things hopefully will begin to improve. Plus, at the end of the week we will be in Rome, where I will meet up with my high school best friend Lily, and have a few days off for easter! I cannot wait! The past few hotels that we have been at have been located out in the middle of nowhere and it leaves us really hungering for things to do in the evenings, besides watching movies on the laptops. And internet has been really difficult, so we cannot even download new things to see, so we just end up watching the same things over and over again.
Anyway, yesterday we woke up very early and had a long bus ride to the middle of the island, where amidst tons of fields of olives and orchards full of blood oranges, we reached the Piazza Armerina, a Roman villa chock full of mosaics. The day was cool, and we walked down through a series of booths to reach a wooded park covered in an odd type of metal and glass scaffolding, below which the walls of the villa stood a foot or two high in the dust.
Unlike most of the Greco-Roman buildings we have seen so far, this building violates almost every law of traditional classicism in its floorplan and construction. It is non-axial, the entrance hall does not have clear sight lines with the rest of the building. The main hall is an appendage on the main courtyard, a rectangular building with a large semiapsidal pool in the center. Arranged around the sides are a series of small rooms, placed unevenly around the outside. On the back side of the courtyard, a series of apsidal rooms, one of which is called a “basilica”, project themselves out from the main complex. The villa complex also contains a public bath complex, with oddly shaped rooms in a series of rounded shells, which is accessible both from the inside and the outside of the villa complex. To the south, another courtyard shaped like a truncated oval, a very strange shape for classical construction, may have been added later in an effort to expand the villa’s shape. It is a hodgepodge of shape and line, nothing is perfectly aligned with each other, and even the central courtyard that forms the foundation of the entire complex is slightly off-square.
We entered the Piazza up a series of glass-floored walkways, so that we could see the mosaics from above, and survey the walls as if from a god’s perspective, giving us a bird’s eye view of the entire complex. The mosaics present there are really quite impressive. In the smaller and more highly trafficked areas the mosaics are of a geometric type—interlacing braids, lines, and florals. They parade around and intersect one another in a well thought out yet complex pattern. Around the central courtyard are a series of medallions inscribed with animal’s heads, boldly staring forward at the viewer. In one of the major hallways leading to the “basilica,” shaped like the transcept of a church, was a scene called the “great hunt.” In the scene, lions and elephants and other exotic beasts are in the process of being captured in order to be placed in the gladiatorial arena. In another part of the villa, cupids sun themselves and fish on small boats, Polyphemus gets blinded by Odysseus, Hercules fights giants and becomes a god, and chariots race around the Circus Maximus. The most interesting scene, to me, was one famouly called the “bikini girls”—women with their breasts wrapped and in small bathing suit bottoms lift weights and run around. No one is sure whether this is evidence for female athletics, but it certainly can be interpreted as such, and I enjoyed entertaining the notion.
We spent several hours at the site, walking up and down the walkways, over the walls, taking pictures and listening to Jarrett lecture to us about the method of mosaic construction. We noticed that the place gradually filled up with a bunch of European kids in their black ripped tight pants and their puffy coats and oddly colored hair; we generally tried to avoid the crowds of them where possible but by 11:00 am it was impossible, they were choking the narrow hallways and when we saw a man in Roman soldier dress leading a crowd of tourists, we decided that we had quite enough of the Piazza Armerina, and turned tail and headed back to the bus, where we had a hurried lunch and continued on to the next place. I did enjoy the mosaics, however. Most of the stuff we have seen prior to the Piazza Armerina have been mosaics of the late Roman/early Christian period, and they have a quality of stiffness and formality that is lacking in these, they have a clarity of movement and depiction of weight gone in the portraits of rulers like Justinian at Ravenna, for example, where he appears to be hovering like a puppet above the ground. The picture of Polyphemus is probably the most telling, his bulging musculature and the veracity with which he tears the cattle apart, Odysseus readying his spear in the background contrast greatly with the portraiture of the Byzantine rulers. Jarrett, however, seemed to indicate that this was the beginning of decline for mosaic production, promising us even better ones.
The bus headed down out of the hills and toward the ocean, out of the hills. The air grew warmer and the land grew greener, and we stopped at the site of Gela to see the museum and a number of the nearby sites. The Gela museum was a small affair, completely dominated with vases, red figure and black figure, and they opened up a special wing of the museum to us that was under renovation in order to showcase their finds. The upper part of the museum contained finds from the nearby acropolis, terracotta heads and figurines. But it was late in the day, after a really long bus ride, and we were all starting to go a little bit crazy, so we ran around a bit in the sun before stepping on the bus again.
And then off the bus again, to see the fortifications. They were constructed out of mudbrick and towered over the countryside, dotted with funny flowering trees that opened onto the water. We walked down a clay path to watch the bricks loom before us, completely awed with both the age and the size of the fortifications, picking flowers along the way and talking and laughing. But before long, it was on the bus again.
The bus ride was long, but it felt short because our part of the bus got into a huge discussion about athletes and steroids, the tour de france, and marriage customs. By the time we had arrived, we had completely exhausted all of the sports updates we knew of, were eagerly awaiting the results of the NCAA Basketball game, because Florida was in the championship and there was no telling when we would be able to get internet.
We finally arrived at the hotel to discover non-existent internet, but big rooms and a good lobby, so we grabbed some food at the grocery store and settled down for a big picnic. There was quite a crowd at the picnic, we ate our shared food and talked a bunch and settled in after dinner to watch Gladiator, again, before falling asleep during the movie. Luckily Chris Vincoli was smart enough to turn off the movie, and Katie Eastland and I awoke to find the room deserted. We shrugged, and turned back over, and kept snoozing.
This morning, I woke up to a late alarm, and had a decent breakfast with a caffe latte before heading out to the Valley of the Temples. Located in Agrigento, these series of temples were all built within about 100 years of each other, in an effort to showcase the wealth and majesty of the city state. Looking at the temples gives an excellent opportunity to examine the development of temple architecture in Sicily, which differs somewhat from that on the mainland. It took Greek architects a while to arrive at the “ideal classical proportions” and some of these temples look like funhouse versions of the ideal, spun just enough out of proportion to look a little bit strange.
However, the sight of bunch after bunch of brown red columns stacked along a steep ridgeline overlooking the city did its job: I was incredibly impressed at the resources that the Agrigentans were able to pool in order to construct so many buildings so quickly. Agrigento was another colony, established by Gela in the sixth century BC, but it wasn’t until the 5th century that it embarked on the massive building program that resulted in the string of temples along the ridge—over ten in the city, strung out like beads on a necklace.
The first temple we saw happened to be dedicated to Hera, and it was the easternmost of the temples and dated to 450 BC, contemporary with the Parthenon. Looking at it, however, betrays its colonial origins because unlike the Parthenon, it is made out of local brown limestone. This is the youngest of the temples that we have seen so far, but there were plenty of other temples to be seen along our trek, we would see by the end of the day the whole spectrum of temple development. It was like a history lesson laid out on the land. The day was grey and the temple sat surveying the vast sweep of land from the red cliffs that defined the edge of Agrigento down to the spread of land all of the way to the sea.
We moved along the top of the ridge on an east to west hike, coming to the next temple, the so-called Concord Temple, constructed 20-25 years later than the temple of Hera, and one of the best preserved temples in the ancient Greek world. This temple is considered to be the pinnacle of Doric architectural development in Magna Grecia, and contains all of the optical refinements that can be found on the mainland- the swelling of the columns, corner contraction, curvature of the temple platform—changes all designed to counteract the tendency for straight lines to appear to converge. This temple has none of the awkwardness of the others, and seems to be pretty indistinguishable from the others on the mainland. We stopped here and walked around, taking pictures and looking out over the grey-tinted land below us. The skies had not opened up at all and it was looking greyer and more depressing.
But we soldiered on, moving past this temple to another one dedicated to Hercules, older than the previous two and appearing generally more bulgy, like a person whose flesh settles as they reach old age. This one sat, stout and imposing, sending its two remaining columns upward into the sky. And then it was on, down the slope to the remains of a massive temple modeled on some of the ones that we saw in Turkey. The temple itself is a jumbled mess—column capitals embedded in little hills, the blocks scattered about, blending into the surrounding stone of the hilltop. The temple of Olympian Zeus lives up to the status of its god, it is 113 meters long, longer than a football field and originally held columns that were at least 14 meters high. However, this was no ordinary temple.
Instead of the usual peristyle of columns marching in their even rows around the outside of the cella, this temple contained for walls with engaged half columns, forming a single huge enclosed space. It also unusually had 7 columns in the front, which did not allow an axial entrance, instead it was achieved by going in one of two entrances on the corners of the east side of the temple. It was really more of a tall fence than anything else, and inside, again instead of a cella wall with an interior collonade, the temple again had engaged pilasters (square columns) that essentially divided the interior space into three long and narrow aisles. Around the outside of the walls, in between the columns, massie stone figures that looked more Egyptian than anything else stood and held the lintel of the temple up over their heads. They were called atlantes, after Atlas, the giant who at the straits of Gibraltar holds up the heavens, his punishment for trying to fight the Olympian gods.
Not much of this odd yet imposing temple remain, just the tumbled down blocks and the massive limestone platform, eroded into eddies and currents by the relentless movement of water. We clambered all over the rocks, even managing to fit three of us at the top of a massive fallen half-capital. I walked the length of it, stopping to admire a fallen atlas, who lay stretched out on his back in the muddy earth.
Then it was on, to the next temple, a small one dedicated to the Dioskouroi: Castor and Pollux, the two sons of Leda, mother also to the infamous Helen, who are worshipped here in a small temple, of which only a corner of the peristyle remains standing. By then my eyes were starting to glaze over, all of the temples were made of the same brown stone and they all looked very similar unless the minute evolution of the column capital and proportions are examined, and I was tired. The overcast atmosphere was gradually sucking our energy away, and we were quite happy to return to a small café where we lunched and people watched before heading on to the next activity. As always.
The next stop was the museum, which had more of the same types of stuff as all of the museums before, tons of pottery, some terracotta figurines, and most notably an Atlas from the temple, which stood massive and imposing in the central room of the museum. It was huge, and all of its facial features and detailing had been eroded away, leaving blocks in the shape of a man that stood like the colossi of Memnon, staring through its absent eyes ahead, its arms straining with the effort to hold up the roof. We were all really tired by then, so we wandered rather aimlessly through the hallways, stopping to look at this or that, but most of it we had seen some vague place before, and so we mostly waited to finish the tour so that we could return to our beds and rest.
But after the museum we were on to another small site, the domestic quarters of ancient Agrigento, where block upon block of walls sat low over the sloping ground. There were tons of houses here, punctuated occasionally by the reconstructed column that stood much higher than the rest. We stepped like giants over the low walls and walked in and out of rooms as if we were ghosts. Then finally it was back home, to the hotel.
I collapsed on to my bed as soon as I got there and caught up on some reading and blew off some steam with Ambrice. We hung out and talked as a group for a bit before a large number of us headed downstairs to the hotel restaurant, where we all feasted on some very good pasta. Then it was back to Stewart’s room, where we all listened to Dane Cook, the comedian, on someone’s computer and talked until fairly late into the night. There was another group of Americans, high schoolers from West Virginia, staying in the hotel and one of them stopped to ask who had won the championship. When we told her we did not know she did some scouting around and discovered that the GATORS HAD WON! This is the third championship in a row for Florida, and I was super excited—I wished I had internet so I could Skype my parents and see how Gainesville was handling the craziness that I got to witness when only a few months ago the football team won. Hopefully at the next hotel we can get some…. Until then it was some chatting with Jarrett, Stewart, Chris and Sam and Ambrice, more blogging, and bed.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Ciao, Italia!
March 31, 2007
Syracuse, Italy
The past few days have been a huge blur as we have spent so much time on the road traveling and seeing very little. I feel like I have spent practically my whole life in a chair watching the world roll by outside the window. Today has been the first real day that I have felt like I am truly in Italy, and so far it seems amazing! I had my first taste of Italian Gelato yesterday, and it was positively wonderful!
The first day we spent traveling—a long afternoon of sitting around in the ferry station to finally late at night board the ferry that would take us to the port city of Brindisi, on the east side of Italy. The place was cramped but we found ample space in the lobbies to drink the last of the Greek wine before cleansing our palates to prepare for the delights that were to await us in Italy. Jarrett told us that it would be a sacriliege for Grecian beverages to make its way past the sight of the Greek land, so I dutifully downed the last of the Retsina I had bought a few nights back and sat talking with the group until I went to bed, in my tiny top bunk of the cabin, a “Let’s Learn Italian” podcast playing in my ears.
We awoke at 6 am to the noise of an announcement declaring the imminent arrival of the boat at the dock, and hustled out of our beds to watch the lights of Italy emerge from the mists of the morning. We hauled our bags down the stairs and onto Italian soil, tired and sleepy but glad for a change of pace. We had no idea what the rest of the day would bring.
It turns out we had a very long train ride ahead of us, from the port city of Brindisi all of the way to the southern tip of Italy at the city of Reggio de Calabria. But since there was no train that ran straight from one city to the next, we had to board a total of four trains, each with a duration of an hour or two before a short layover. But each stop we had to switch tracks, and that meant dragging our luggage in a subway underneath the platform we had arrived upon, and back up to the other side where we would have to haul it onto the train, store it in a small compartment, usually taking two people to lift it high above our heads in storage, and then repeating the process over and over again. By the end of the day I was nearly crazy from sitting down for so long and so tired of hauling my bags up and down so many flights of stairs that I was ready to wear the clothes on my back for the rest of the trip and throw my luggage off of the moving train. One pair of underwear cannot be THAT bad, can it? But my better judgment got the best of me and I kept on slogging my stuff around, until we reached the train station at Reggio and could put it safely in the hands of the cab drivers.
As if that weren’t bad enough, we arrived at the hotel to discover that the reservations for our group had not been made by the travel agency. Instead, we were left sitting in the lobby for a good hour while Toumazou and Jarrett got on the phone with the powers that be and figured out where we would actually be staying, a good few miles farther outside the city, and a hotel with no heat or hot water. Fun. Luckily we were only staying two nights.
The next morning we awoke to what I have discovered is the typical Italian breakfast: a croissant and a caffe latte, loaded up with sugar to disguise the taste of the coffee. Compared to the Grecian thick thick yogurt, the site of this small breakfast was kind of disheartening, especially considering that with Toumazou we were never sure when lunch was coming. But we ate it up and it was surprisingly filling, and then walked out into the lovely day to go to the museum at Reggio.
Because we were so far from town we took a public bus, a smelly and crowded but relatively efficient affair, before we were dropped off in what looked like the town center—a square with the museum on one side and a statue, surrounded by a number of shops, and pasticceries, and pizzerias.
The Reggio museum is small but well done, and most of the finds were things we had seen before, the ever-present Minyan Ware, tons of Attic black and red figure pottery. The unusual objects in the museum included some terracotta relief plaques depicting Dionysus and Demeter, two gods associated both with death and with the harvest. They sat stiffly side by side in an archaic style, holding the symbols of their reign before them—the drinking cup and the wheat, and remain suspended from the ceiling contemplating the edge of their terracotta world for all of eternity. Or until they are broken—we saw a number of incomprehensible or barely reconstructed bits.
The wow moment of this museum came when we went downstairs to the basement and confronted two huge figures of Greek nude heroicism—The Riace Bronzes, so called because of their place of discovery. Deposited mysteriously in the sandy beaches off of the coast, in about 8 meters of water, no trace of shipwreck, they were found by a snorkeler who mistook the upraised hand of one of the Bronzes as a victim of mob violence. Realizing that the flesh was instead bronze, he contacted the authorities and two of the dozen or so of original Greek bronze lifesize statues was unearthed from the muck.
There they stand, side by side in the typical contrapposto. One of their arms is bent to lean upon a now lost spear, the other drifts casually at the side as the body sways to the weight hung on the broad bronze musculature. They are the pinnacle of the ideal Greek athlete, heavily muscled with curling beards and a straight aquiline nose. They look very similar in pose and in stature, except one of them has a helmet, like the helmet seen on the famous bust of Pericles, while the other’s remains bare. And only one of the original ivory inset eyes remains, leaving this Riace with an odd expression, where as the other stares vacantly out of empty eye sockets. Although there is some controversy to their date, most people accept that they are bronze originals from the classical period, sometime around 450 BC, slightly later than the Artemesion Zeus/Poseidon that we saw in the Athens Museum. They are stunning pieces—Ambrice and I immediately busted out our sketchbooks and furiously did some figure studies.
There was another interesting bronze head—one of a pair called the Portocello bronzes, known as a philosopher because of his absurdly long beard and crooked nose, that looks like a kind of portraiture, highly unusual because the Greeks tended to do idealistic studies of heroes, and not the real flesh and blood of a frail man.
After that, early in the afternoon, we were free to go. Not wanting to return to the hotel so early, we wandered around Reggio, a town with a whole street set aside for shopping. The cars were blocked off and the European women with their tall boots and skinny jeans were out in full force, with their moderately disdainful looks and their huge bug eyed sunglasses and their huge hair. We stood out like sore thumbs—dressed in bright colors, with our boat shoes and camera cases and the perpetual look of awe. But looking in all of the shops was a pleasant enough experience. The European fashions seem to be much more dressed up and concerned with brights and darks in color, not the pairing of pastels that is the norm at Davidson. After window shopping for a while, we stopped in at a store to ask where the nearest food was; we had only seen coffee shops so far and were getting pretty hungry.
The clerk knew almost no English, but with my phrasebook Italian and Ambrice and I’s knowledge of Spanish we managed to understand each other enough to get directions to a local panini shop, with the helpful addtion of Jess’s mangere from French to substitute for our Spanish comer. Then the directions for left and right and straight were simple enough to follow, she wrote down the name and off we went. We did manage to find it, a small hole in the wall with a huge list of sandwich varieties, completely in Italian. With the help of some local teenagers that were in line behind us that laughed at our incompetence with the menu, we figured out what went into and how to say (como se dice) the food we wanted before we sat down to our first genuine Italian food since entering the country. Of course, it was delicious.
It was quickly followed by a dessert of gelato, what else, which I actually managed to order almost completely in Italian, except for the fact that I didn’t know the word for “scoops”. I just said “two” and hoped that he got the hint, which he did, and I asked the price, understood the answer he gave, and paid him in exact change. Kudos for me! An entire Italian experience.
Then we had to take the bus back to our hotel, which was all of the way across town. We ended up getting on the wrong bus line, and headed the wrong direction all of the way to the end of the line where the driver forced us to get out, but thanks to our Spanish skills once again we loaded another bus, and after switching buses a few times and asking questions in our spangalian we finally managed to get home. I went to my room for an afternoon siesta, and awoke just in time to go grocery shopping for the picinic of the night: a wonderful fruit salad with yogurt and gnutella (what else?).
But, not wanting to return to our work, Ambrice, Jess, Chris, Sam, Anne and I stayed in Ambrice’s room and had a four hour conversation, that lasted well into the night and covered such diverse topics as Davidson vs Ivy league work load, scary movie plots that we retold to those who hadn’t seen given movie, good books, the new president of Davidson, course schedules, nostalgia for things of the late 80s/early 90s which included: Little Shop of Horrors, Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, The Chronicles of Narnia, giga pets, Mario, and all those things that we thought were SO COOL in elementary and middle school and could laugh about now. The VH1 show I love the 80’s is a perfect summary of our childhoods, and we reenacted it story after story. But right about when we were exhausting our retelling of movie plots one of Ambrice’s roommates returned home and sent us all to bed, which was probably a good idea anyway. I fell asleep with the noise of a local discotec thumping in my ears.
This morning came early, but it was greeted by another Caffe Latte—which I decided I am starting to like, a croissant marmalata, and another packing-and-hauling of bags down to the taxis and off to the port, where we were to catch an early morning ferry from Reggio to Sicily, and from there take a bus, stopping along the way but finally coming to rest in Syracuse.
The first place that we stopped was called Taormina, the site of an ancient Greco-Roman theater. The bus stopped in a stark looking bus parking lot just outside of the city, where we loaded another bus to the inner part of the city. THE sun was shining and the sky was a bright blue. All of the buildings had a creamy tan wash, with scrolls of iron adorning the balconies of the upper levels. Our bus trundled into the city and we ventured out into the Italian day. We lunched in the square, a bunch of open air cafés and trees with benches demarcated the area where a number of roads met. At the far corner a booth selling gelato stood and sold its cool tasty treats to us. We had a long time for lunch, so we walked into some small shops that sold a number of highly priced purses and shoes, watches and even painted ceramics. We continued down to a region where a grand church stood on a plateau overlooking the water. The church rose up, a white building with Corinthian columns and volutes arching its way up the front, surmounted by a big cross, the ave maria in a niche above the entrance, looking down upon us all.
I looked over the green rugged countryside and back into the city, where the winding roads with their iron scrolled balconies hung heavy with potted plants and the sounds of accordions and the smells of pasta cooking. Italy looked like the female consort to the rugged Greece, an older lady with good taste that always smells faintly of spice and bread, compared to the grizzled Greece with his fresh vegetable breath and retsina. The architecture more ornate, compared to the stark white sides of the Greek buildings, with its volutes and echanthus leaves and tapering silhouette. The heavily ornate Byzantine and Greek orthodox churches contrast with the white colonnaded interiors of the Catholic buildings, stark except for the windows and the altar where the nave is filled with lifelike paintings of Christ and crosses with and leaves gilded only at the edges.
We surveyed the town and then moved our way back through the shops to reach the center of the town, were Jarrett led us to the Theater. The second largest in Sicily, this theater had a capacity of about 15,000, with the Roman modifications in mudbrick stacked upon the bowl carved by the Greeks. The columns and arches on the stage building stand in stark contrast to the bright blue sky, and the proud snow covered Mt Etna rose and put its head in the clouds at the distance. The seats have crumbled but have been covered metal and wood scaffolding, and we went halfway up the cavea to hear our lecture. When it was done, we moved to the very top of the theater, where moving past the seats we could see down the other side of the mountain and out to the water.
The rolling green hills dotted with terracotta roofs folded down into the azure water, that glowed bright in the afternoon sun. Clouds marched along the tops of the hills, crowning them, and the entire scene was framed by the upstanding brick walls of the theater. We all loved the day and the place and took tons of pictures, before descending back down into the town and loading the bus to stop at Syracuse.
We got to Syracuse very late into the day, but the hotel had wonderful big rooms, a refrigerator, and a downtown area that we watched slide by from the bus window and then out to our hotel, an American type that had a large number of school groups. We spent most of the evening checking up on our email, camping out by the side of the road and enduring the strange looks by the Italians, went grocery shopping and had a great dinner before reading and going to sleep.
Syracuse, Italy
The past few days have been a huge blur as we have spent so much time on the road traveling and seeing very little. I feel like I have spent practically my whole life in a chair watching the world roll by outside the window. Today has been the first real day that I have felt like I am truly in Italy, and so far it seems amazing! I had my first taste of Italian Gelato yesterday, and it was positively wonderful!
The first day we spent traveling—a long afternoon of sitting around in the ferry station to finally late at night board the ferry that would take us to the port city of Brindisi, on the east side of Italy. The place was cramped but we found ample space in the lobbies to drink the last of the Greek wine before cleansing our palates to prepare for the delights that were to await us in Italy. Jarrett told us that it would be a sacriliege for Grecian beverages to make its way past the sight of the Greek land, so I dutifully downed the last of the Retsina I had bought a few nights back and sat talking with the group until I went to bed, in my tiny top bunk of the cabin, a “Let’s Learn Italian” podcast playing in my ears.
We awoke at 6 am to the noise of an announcement declaring the imminent arrival of the boat at the dock, and hustled out of our beds to watch the lights of Italy emerge from the mists of the morning. We hauled our bags down the stairs and onto Italian soil, tired and sleepy but glad for a change of pace. We had no idea what the rest of the day would bring.
It turns out we had a very long train ride ahead of us, from the port city of Brindisi all of the way to the southern tip of Italy at the city of Reggio de Calabria. But since there was no train that ran straight from one city to the next, we had to board a total of four trains, each with a duration of an hour or two before a short layover. But each stop we had to switch tracks, and that meant dragging our luggage in a subway underneath the platform we had arrived upon, and back up to the other side where we would have to haul it onto the train, store it in a small compartment, usually taking two people to lift it high above our heads in storage, and then repeating the process over and over again. By the end of the day I was nearly crazy from sitting down for so long and so tired of hauling my bags up and down so many flights of stairs that I was ready to wear the clothes on my back for the rest of the trip and throw my luggage off of the moving train. One pair of underwear cannot be THAT bad, can it? But my better judgment got the best of me and I kept on slogging my stuff around, until we reached the train station at Reggio and could put it safely in the hands of the cab drivers.
As if that weren’t bad enough, we arrived at the hotel to discover that the reservations for our group had not been made by the travel agency. Instead, we were left sitting in the lobby for a good hour while Toumazou and Jarrett got on the phone with the powers that be and figured out where we would actually be staying, a good few miles farther outside the city, and a hotel with no heat or hot water. Fun. Luckily we were only staying two nights.
The next morning we awoke to what I have discovered is the typical Italian breakfast: a croissant and a caffe latte, loaded up with sugar to disguise the taste of the coffee. Compared to the Grecian thick thick yogurt, the site of this small breakfast was kind of disheartening, especially considering that with Toumazou we were never sure when lunch was coming. But we ate it up and it was surprisingly filling, and then walked out into the lovely day to go to the museum at Reggio.
Because we were so far from town we took a public bus, a smelly and crowded but relatively efficient affair, before we were dropped off in what looked like the town center—a square with the museum on one side and a statue, surrounded by a number of shops, and pasticceries, and pizzerias.
The Reggio museum is small but well done, and most of the finds were things we had seen before, the ever-present Minyan Ware, tons of Attic black and red figure pottery. The unusual objects in the museum included some terracotta relief plaques depicting Dionysus and Demeter, two gods associated both with death and with the harvest. They sat stiffly side by side in an archaic style, holding the symbols of their reign before them—the drinking cup and the wheat, and remain suspended from the ceiling contemplating the edge of their terracotta world for all of eternity. Or until they are broken—we saw a number of incomprehensible or barely reconstructed bits.
The wow moment of this museum came when we went downstairs to the basement and confronted two huge figures of Greek nude heroicism—The Riace Bronzes, so called because of their place of discovery. Deposited mysteriously in the sandy beaches off of the coast, in about 8 meters of water, no trace of shipwreck, they were found by a snorkeler who mistook the upraised hand of one of the Bronzes as a victim of mob violence. Realizing that the flesh was instead bronze, he contacted the authorities and two of the dozen or so of original Greek bronze lifesize statues was unearthed from the muck.
There they stand, side by side in the typical contrapposto. One of their arms is bent to lean upon a now lost spear, the other drifts casually at the side as the body sways to the weight hung on the broad bronze musculature. They are the pinnacle of the ideal Greek athlete, heavily muscled with curling beards and a straight aquiline nose. They look very similar in pose and in stature, except one of them has a helmet, like the helmet seen on the famous bust of Pericles, while the other’s remains bare. And only one of the original ivory inset eyes remains, leaving this Riace with an odd expression, where as the other stares vacantly out of empty eye sockets. Although there is some controversy to their date, most people accept that they are bronze originals from the classical period, sometime around 450 BC, slightly later than the Artemesion Zeus/Poseidon that we saw in the Athens Museum. They are stunning pieces—Ambrice and I immediately busted out our sketchbooks and furiously did some figure studies.
There was another interesting bronze head—one of a pair called the Portocello bronzes, known as a philosopher because of his absurdly long beard and crooked nose, that looks like a kind of portraiture, highly unusual because the Greeks tended to do idealistic studies of heroes, and not the real flesh and blood of a frail man.
After that, early in the afternoon, we were free to go. Not wanting to return to the hotel so early, we wandered around Reggio, a town with a whole street set aside for shopping. The cars were blocked off and the European women with their tall boots and skinny jeans were out in full force, with their moderately disdainful looks and their huge bug eyed sunglasses and their huge hair. We stood out like sore thumbs—dressed in bright colors, with our boat shoes and camera cases and the perpetual look of awe. But looking in all of the shops was a pleasant enough experience. The European fashions seem to be much more dressed up and concerned with brights and darks in color, not the pairing of pastels that is the norm at Davidson. After window shopping for a while, we stopped in at a store to ask where the nearest food was; we had only seen coffee shops so far and were getting pretty hungry.
The clerk knew almost no English, but with my phrasebook Italian and Ambrice and I’s knowledge of Spanish we managed to understand each other enough to get directions to a local panini shop, with the helpful addtion of Jess’s mangere from French to substitute for our Spanish comer. Then the directions for left and right and straight were simple enough to follow, she wrote down the name and off we went. We did manage to find it, a small hole in the wall with a huge list of sandwich varieties, completely in Italian. With the help of some local teenagers that were in line behind us that laughed at our incompetence with the menu, we figured out what went into and how to say (como se dice) the food we wanted before we sat down to our first genuine Italian food since entering the country. Of course, it was delicious.
It was quickly followed by a dessert of gelato, what else, which I actually managed to order almost completely in Italian, except for the fact that I didn’t know the word for “scoops”. I just said “two” and hoped that he got the hint, which he did, and I asked the price, understood the answer he gave, and paid him in exact change. Kudos for me! An entire Italian experience.
Then we had to take the bus back to our hotel, which was all of the way across town. We ended up getting on the wrong bus line, and headed the wrong direction all of the way to the end of the line where the driver forced us to get out, but thanks to our Spanish skills once again we loaded another bus, and after switching buses a few times and asking questions in our spangalian we finally managed to get home. I went to my room for an afternoon siesta, and awoke just in time to go grocery shopping for the picinic of the night: a wonderful fruit salad with yogurt and gnutella (what else?).
But, not wanting to return to our work, Ambrice, Jess, Chris, Sam, Anne and I stayed in Ambrice’s room and had a four hour conversation, that lasted well into the night and covered such diverse topics as Davidson vs Ivy league work load, scary movie plots that we retold to those who hadn’t seen given movie, good books, the new president of Davidson, course schedules, nostalgia for things of the late 80s/early 90s which included: Little Shop of Horrors, Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, The Chronicles of Narnia, giga pets, Mario, and all those things that we thought were SO COOL in elementary and middle school and could laugh about now. The VH1 show I love the 80’s is a perfect summary of our childhoods, and we reenacted it story after story. But right about when we were exhausting our retelling of movie plots one of Ambrice’s roommates returned home and sent us all to bed, which was probably a good idea anyway. I fell asleep with the noise of a local discotec thumping in my ears.
This morning came early, but it was greeted by another Caffe Latte—which I decided I am starting to like, a croissant marmalata, and another packing-and-hauling of bags down to the taxis and off to the port, where we were to catch an early morning ferry from Reggio to Sicily, and from there take a bus, stopping along the way but finally coming to rest in Syracuse.
The first place that we stopped was called Taormina, the site of an ancient Greco-Roman theater. The bus stopped in a stark looking bus parking lot just outside of the city, where we loaded another bus to the inner part of the city. THE sun was shining and the sky was a bright blue. All of the buildings had a creamy tan wash, with scrolls of iron adorning the balconies of the upper levels. Our bus trundled into the city and we ventured out into the Italian day. We lunched in the square, a bunch of open air cafés and trees with benches demarcated the area where a number of roads met. At the far corner a booth selling gelato stood and sold its cool tasty treats to us. We had a long time for lunch, so we walked into some small shops that sold a number of highly priced purses and shoes, watches and even painted ceramics. We continued down to a region where a grand church stood on a plateau overlooking the water. The church rose up, a white building with Corinthian columns and volutes arching its way up the front, surmounted by a big cross, the ave maria in a niche above the entrance, looking down upon us all.
I looked over the green rugged countryside and back into the city, where the winding roads with their iron scrolled balconies hung heavy with potted plants and the sounds of accordions and the smells of pasta cooking. Italy looked like the female consort to the rugged Greece, an older lady with good taste that always smells faintly of spice and bread, compared to the grizzled Greece with his fresh vegetable breath and retsina. The architecture more ornate, compared to the stark white sides of the Greek buildings, with its volutes and echanthus leaves and tapering silhouette. The heavily ornate Byzantine and Greek orthodox churches contrast with the white colonnaded interiors of the Catholic buildings, stark except for the windows and the altar where the nave is filled with lifelike paintings of Christ and crosses with and leaves gilded only at the edges.
We surveyed the town and then moved our way back through the shops to reach the center of the town, were Jarrett led us to the Theater. The second largest in Sicily, this theater had a capacity of about 15,000, with the Roman modifications in mudbrick stacked upon the bowl carved by the Greeks. The columns and arches on the stage building stand in stark contrast to the bright blue sky, and the proud snow covered Mt Etna rose and put its head in the clouds at the distance. The seats have crumbled but have been covered metal and wood scaffolding, and we went halfway up the cavea to hear our lecture. When it was done, we moved to the very top of the theater, where moving past the seats we could see down the other side of the mountain and out to the water.
The rolling green hills dotted with terracotta roofs folded down into the azure water, that glowed bright in the afternoon sun. Clouds marched along the tops of the hills, crowning them, and the entire scene was framed by the upstanding brick walls of the theater. We all loved the day and the place and took tons of pictures, before descending back down into the town and loading the bus to stop at Syracuse.
We got to Syracuse very late into the day, but the hotel had wonderful big rooms, a refrigerator, and a downtown area that we watched slide by from the bus window and then out to our hotel, an American type that had a large number of school groups. We spent most of the evening checking up on our email, camping out by the side of the road and enduring the strange looks by the Italians, went grocery shopping and had a great dinner before reading and going to sleep.
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