April 17, 2007
Rome, Italy
Today was our first real academic day in Rome, and we spent all of it walking archaeological sites, and going around the Captoline Museum, one of the most famous museums in the city, second only to the Vatican. It was a long day, but the sun was shining and we were all happy to finally be seeing all of the monuments that we had explored over Easter Break.
The first thing we did was to go to the Roman Forum. Jarrett gave us a lecture about the archaic sites in Rome, places that were now buried under as many as 9 meters of accretions. The forum is an incredible mess of buildings, columns in marble, arches and valleys of brick, huge flagstones big enough to accidentally fit a whole foot into, and everything was of monumental proportions, even if it was broken down in its old age.
We stopped and looked at the bases of things, looking at the lowest levels for the oldest of the old, but most of it was built over by new temples with newer shapes and designs, in shiny white marble. We did manage to see the Reglia, or what was left of it, pavestones in the patches of grass. This building was in continuous use for a thousand years and after a few experiments with its layout and plan, it settled into the shape of a broad triangle, very little of which remains besides the low lying stones in the grass. This may have been an administrative storeroom, but not much besides that is known.
Continuing on, we walked all of the way down to the far edge of the forum, right where the back of the Capitoline Museum overlooked the maze of slumped brick, to a place called the lapis niger—a black stone set several feet down into the pavement of the forum and surrounded by a protective wall of stones. Although lots of other stuff is buried underneath the pavement, including the remains of an altar and possibly a shrine to Vulcan, later Roman forgot the original buildings underneath and began to regard the area as a spot of bad luck, and possibly the burial site of Romulus Faustilius, the grandfather of one of the early dynasties in Rome. And we moved on, avoiding some of the larger remains that we would see the following day, and going out of the forum and up, to where underneath a large yellow colored building we could see the corner of smaller foundations sticking out, like a stack of giant books ill aligned.
These rough blocks constituted another once important huge building, called the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, or the Jupiter-who-was-really-really-cool. Lots of buildings in Rome are like this, built upon the shadows of their ancient predecessors, this one is no different. The next set of temples we saw were much the same—walking up over the hill we came down and the road swing and we saw the Temples under St. Omobono, a catholic church that partially obscures the low temple foundations underneath. Not much is known about these temples at all except for the fact that they do exist, and the foundations give a little bit of clues to their plan and orientation. Other than that they just formed little shadows in the grassy enclosure that surrounded them, leaving nothing but a few reminders of their presence.
The next temples we saw, however, had luckily been turned into churches, instead of being built over, and sat in a grassy area within view of the Tiber river, surving in its green swollenness in the stone lined banks, and bounded by many different aged bridges. This was the sight of the former Forum Boarium, the so-called cattle market, which was also home to two spectacularly well preserved Roman temples. They stand next to each other, both in their white austerity, one a circular type now roofed with an odd looking wooden roofed, peaked like a very shallow party hat, and the other a long rectangle of the so-called Italic type, with a few full columns on the deep front porch and the rest built into the walls of the cella itself.
The round one, called the Temple of Nesta, is missing above the column capitals, but what is visible is elaborate scrollwork of Corinthian capitals in fine sparkline white marble, and all of the interior walls are still there. In the bright light of the morning the flutes played in light and shade, and the temple sat in its abruptly truncated splendor in front of a roaring modern street, with the scrolled triangular façade of Catholic churches right across the street. Its juxtapositions like this that we found all over the city.
The rectangular temple nearby was stained dark with pollution, but was preserved all of the way up to the rafters and stood on its high platform, calmly surveying the zooming street in front of it. The temple was beautiful, and the top contained an elaborate frieze of florals, running right above the scrolling capitals. Right across the bridge, we came to yet another site, the Tiber island, one of the few places where the Tiber itself can be crossed. The island was made from the constant deposits of silt made by the Tiber itself slinging around a curve and depositing sand deposit after sand deposit in the same place. Its not very big, but it has been growing every year and over time the Romans decided to use it to house a cult that was imported from Greece after a disastrous plague struck in 291 BC. According to legend, the oracle told the Romans to import the cult of Asklepius, a healing god, whose temple is now obscured by St Bartholomew’s church and a hospital—clearly everyone following these early Romans decided that the island would make a good healing center also.
The island is also the site of two of the oldest bridges over the Tiber. One is the oldest standing bridge, with a single arch in the middle of the rushing water, and another arch that goes from the island to the far bank, which is called the Pons Fubricus and is the oldest functional bridge in Rome, dating to 62 BC. Because the two spans of the bridges come out from the sides of the long and narrow island, the ancient Romans thought the island itself looked like a big ship, and carved the tip of the island into the shape of a prow, complete with the snakes of Asklepius on the prow as a part of the figurehead. The prow has subsequently been topped with a police station, and has been silted in with the gradual build up of sand, but walking down near the shoreline we could see the clean lines in the Travertine stone.
But the day was not even close to being over, and after stopping to enjoy the brilliant sunlight and a view down the Tiber and through the old arches of the bridges, we moved on, up back across the river to see our next set of temples.
These temples were arranged in a grand set of three—victory temples each constructed by a different general promising that if he won a certain battle he would construct a temple in thanks to his favorite god. Rome was expanding, and won a good deal of battles in the 4th and 3rd Centuries BC, and so many of the generals came back victorious. Sometimes they would erect a couple of temples side by side, expanding from a victory temple to an entire unified complex, which is exactly what happened in this complex of three that have been incorporated into the modern church of St Nicholas.
The outer colonnades of the outer two temples have been incorporated into the church walls, emerging like an exoskeleton from the flesh of the church walls. The central temple has been completely incorporated, and the rest of the flanking temples sit exposed, like wings extending on each side from the body of the church and left to dry in the sun. The other three walls of the outer temples have suffered from time—they stand in broken colonnades and short foundation walls, sticking up out of the sea of wildflowers that surround the church. However, the inside of the church has places where the stucco has been removed, revealing the inside edges of the temple colonnades, supporting the newer building. Other than that, the interior of the church looked rather normal—three aisles separated by columns pillaged from other buildings; mismatched columns parading down to the aspe and the altar at the far end. The entire inside was gilded and painted, not all over in panels of blue like the Byzantine churches, but edged at the lines of the building and curved in the dome of the apse, where frescoes showed scenes of the divine family with flowing garments picked out in gold edging.
Nearing the apse, we walked down to right in front of the altar and descended a narrow staircase underneath the church floor, emerging in the dark and cramped aisles of the subterranean passages. A woman from the church led us on the tour, pointing out in her sing-song accented English “here you see the temple of Juno, 194 years Before Christ, columns Corinthian and foundations here….” We wandered around, following her song as we watched the walls of the church rise up out of the bases of the old temples, vaulted and segmented in brick arches. We wandered around for a good while, as we entered the bodies of each of the temples and stepped into the imaginary space in between now covered with the floor of the church, before moving onto the next temple, in and out of the shadows of history all around us.
And then it was back into the light of the sun and onto our next stop, the theater of Marcellus, embedded into the walls of a nearby apartment complex, part of a building that originally held 20,000 people and now is full of extra walls and floors to make it a place for people. The modern windows poke out of the top of the curved arch substructure, faced with travertine and resembling in form and construction the Colosseum. Next to it, standing all alone, are three reconstructed columns from the original temple of Apollo Medicus Sogianus, which were moved by Mussolini as a part of a “lets showcase Rome” project. This is part of some of the most extravagant building periods in Rome, when the columns had fluting of alternating sizes, elaborate scrolls in the column capitals and bases, and a superstructure of every different type of floral imaginable. The corner stands, what is left of it, proud to be where it is, and boldly indifferent to the fact that it is completely out of its original location. We stood and took pictures, and then marched on in the heat of the early afternoon.
Then it was a lunch break, once we had reached the place of the Largo Argentina, a piazza with the central feature of not one, but four temple platforms sitting side by side in the pavement. We sat in a bench by the sun and had our sandwiches, and a gust of wind brought a local newspaper flying our way. We picked it up; another nuisance a big city, and were about to throw it away when I noticed the front page. It was a huge picture of police carrying out a person with bloodstained legs and the headline which read something about shooting and the USA. It was Virginia Tech, splashed across the front pages of the newspapers. We were more than a little unsettled that it had made it as far as the front pages of the free newspapers that they hand out on the way to the metro, but there it was, plain as day.
We all clustered around Vincoli as he tried to read the Italian article, and while it basically repeated everything that we had learned the night before in our frantic attempt to receive any news, it still unsettled us. We had a brief lecture about the four temples, which were much of the same—temples vowed to be built if the god were to be kind enough to let the general win the given battle he is fighting. If the general did win, the spoils of war were used to construct a temple befitting thanks to that particular god. In this instance, 4 different gods of unknown name were thanked by various generals, resulting in a complex of 3 rectangular and one circular temple, all dedicated and built at different times but later incorporated into one complex.
By this time, however, we were all incredibly tired and ready to go, so we did not spend much time looking at the ancient ruins of foundations here… we walked out of the square and kept going toward one of the most famous museums in Rome, the Capitoline Museums. The entire complex was designed and modified by Michelangelo, with a wide and shallow flight of steps leading up to three Renaissance looking gold buildings surrounding a wide plaza with the grand statue of Marcus Aurelius in the center. Rathen impressive. There were throngs and throngs of people milling around but we were ready to go see the inside of the museum.
This museum contains some of the best finds from around the Greek and Roman world, statues such as the Dying Gaul, a young barbarian distinguished by the massive torc around his neck and his thick thatch of hair, in a state of utter exhaustion, his fallen weapons and shield scattered undearneath him. Elsewhere were the fragments of a colossal statue of Constantine, of which the head and arm are the only thing still in existence, sitting in a wall in the courtyard, surveying our liliputian group as we walked around, barely coming up to the great head’s nostrils. Other great works in the museum included an Aphrodite coming out of the bath, modestly covering herself with her hands as she emerged from the water. The museum was huge, filled to the brim with marble statuary.
We wandered throughout the tall, echoing halls and drawing bits and pieces of the bronzes and the marbles. The walls were not left blank either—they were filled with huge renaissance era paintings depicting scenes both mythological and biblical. Some people went back early, but I stayed for hours and hours, walking among familiar and unfamiliar sculpture. As I was walking from one wing of the museum down underground to the next, I heard a tremendous crash outside and a boom. Emerging out of the back of the museum, I came to the part where the Capitoline Museum overlooked the Forum, and saw a tremendous hailstorm coming down upon the ruins, pinging off of the ancient brick and marble structures. It was a spectacular sight—the magnificence of nature and the old glories of the ancient city, merged in a single shining moment that I could view safely from the wings of the museum. It was positively wonderful, and I sat and watched it for a long time, as the small balls of ice pinging down.
We finally emerged from the museum at 6:00, utterly tired but exhilarated by what we had seen, coming back to the hotel to eat, do some reading and sleep. We had another long day ahead of us.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Capri
April 16, 2007
Rome, Italy
Yesterday was the last free day on the classics trip. Now we have ahead of us 30 whole days of exploration without a single break, until we have exams and are free to go. I did enjoy having time to myself without being dragged to an archeological site, but knowing that it was the last one made the whole experience kind of bittersweet. From now on, its just go go go!
We woke up early, our bodies will not let us sleep in anymore, even if we wanted to, and had breakfast before heading out into the bright Sorrento morning and boarding the ferry to the nearby island of Capri. This place is famous for its beautiful rocky beaches, lovely little villas set into the cliffsides, and majestic clear blue water, that skirts the island in a brilliant wash of blue color. We stepped off of the ferry and into what looked like a movie set. All around us were tourists in brightly colored shirts, street vendors hawked their wares, and little white rowboats stood at the ready in the narrow stretch of the bay. However, according to Ambrice, the best part of Capri was the view from the top, which was only accessible by taking what looked like an elaborate skilift up the mountainside and into the other part of the island.
We bought tickets and waited in line for a while before stepping into what looked like a short subway car that had been stretched in photoshop so that its parallels were all out of wack. Nothing was at right angles at all—we stood on a level floor but the windows, and ceiling all had a crazy slant to conform with the slope of the hillside. And with a jerk, we were off, moving out of the station and up over the slopes filled with lemon groves and the clusters of white houses that shone in the late morning sunlight. And past the craggy steep cliffs, the ocean glowed in the distance. It was absolutely breathtaking, and I was so happy to be there. This was one of the few days that the Classics Trip has felt like a vacation…
We stepped out of the station and into the little town at the top of the cliffs and into a square packed with cream and yellow covered buildings, decorated with intricate scrollwork at the top and packed with designer stores at the bottom. Over the terrace, Capri stretched below us in all of its Hollywood glory, and ahead of us in the streets stretched all of Italy’s upscale fashion. Within five minutes we had spotted a Prada, Gucci and Dolce and Gabbana were not much farther away.
The streets were tightly packed, and hung with awnings of white and dotted here and there with a stand selling gelato or lemony ice drinks, and we wandered around and around for hours, stopping in at this or that ridiculously unaffordable shop. After a while, I grew tired of it, and the only place I was truly excited about visiting was a (still rather upscale) specialty bookshop that contained antique volumes and original pieces of art but along one wall contained a number of history books dealing with Capri and its origins. I saw one very unusual book called Venus in the Kitchen, a collection of recipes put together by an eccentric European who had lived on Capri for a number of years and published a good deal of travel/adventure novels taking place on the island. This, his last work, was a cookbook with recipes ranging from the mundane to the highly impractical, all designed to aid in the procurement of love. It was written in both Italian and English, and sometimes at the bottom of the recipe the old gentleman would add a comment like “my good friend Mr.-So-and-so tried this a few years ago, and he swore it made him feel 10 years younger!” I decided that such an unusual book would be worth the weight it added to my suitcase, and bought it.
I enjoyed the morning, but after a long and expensive sit down lunch I really wanted to see the beaches and the water that Capri is so famous for. Unfortunately, I never got the chance—the girls I was with wanted to keep shopping at the designer stores and with no other recourse at my hand I followed them until at the last 5 minutes I could see the water on the way to the ferry. Kind of disappointing. I think if I got the chance I would avoid that upper town on Capri entirely, and devote my whole day to hiking, seeing the famous blue grotto—a cave filled with limestone that reflects the blue in the water all around the walls, making the whole place glow (I did not see it in person, but the pictures looked wonderful), and a natural arch of limestone that arcs down over the water. Hopefully I will get the chance to return and rectify my mistake.
We returned to Sorrento in the late afternoon, and I came to the hotel room and stayed just long enough to put on my running clothes, and venture out into the town. Moving away from the coast this time, I headed back toward the cliffs and out, away from the bustle of the shops and the people and into a more remote neighborhood. Gradually the crowds cleared away and the streets faded into smaller roads, and then I finally came to what looked like the end: a hotel perched on the edge of the mountainside, and the road curved around and headed back toward town, on the right a small path continued down into a park. I went down here for a while, but the path to the park faded into a crowded residential district so I headed back up, reaching the hotel again.
I noticed on the left hand side a staircase leading up into the mountain, a sign in Italian spitting out a lot of text, all of it indecipherable, but the sign itself was topped by a cross, and looking above I could see a small turret, so I guessed that the staircase must lead up to the church. It seemed like as good a place to run as any, and was utterly without any people to gawk at the crazy American actually exercising, so I started up the stairs. The stairs turned into a rough stone-paved path that swtichbacked all of the way up the mountain. At each of the turns on the path was a small ceramic shrine, painted with depictions of the stages of the cross—Jesus in each carrying it, stumbling, falling, getting picked up, being crucified, etc. And at each of the turns in the trail, in the steep ascent, the buildings stopped obscuring the view and I could look over Sorrento itself—the straight but narrow streets and peach and cream colored buildings dotted with trees, and then in the distance the sweep of mountains and that wonderful colored ocean.
I reached the church, stopping briefly to stop and savor the view. I could now see the whole city almost in its entirety, and was halfway up the mountain. The church itself was really more of an open chapel—statues of Mary filled niches to the left and right, and in the center, now closed with an iron gate, a crucifix stood, honored by lit candles and watched by a row of empty wooden chairs.
And then I noticed to the side of the church the winding path continued on, up and up, where the stairs faded out and I entered a narrow road, wide enough for only one car to pass and flanked on each side by orange and lemon groves and small houses. I continued up the steep path, huffing and puffing as I slowly passed villa after villa, until I reached what looked like a good stopping point and turned around to head back down the mountain. It took half as long to get to the bottom as it did to labor all of the way up to the top, but the view was just as good going down. I headed back to the noise and bustle of the city, returning to the room for a good hot shower.
That night we had dinner on the patio of one of the rooms. Scott and I split a salad we made with my newly decorated bowl, a good one with tuna and fresh fruits and vegetables, and we watched as the sun stained the clouds a bright orange and the light faded from the sky. Chris Vincoli brought out his laptop for music, and we ate and talked until it grew dark. It was a wonderful end to the freeday, a nice dinner on a patio with some of my favorite people on the trip—Jess Bradshaw, eating a peanut butter and jelly and banana sandwich, Vincoli with yogurt and cereal, Dan reading the Anead and Scott and I sharing a salad. We talked about our favorite books, and languages, and the craziness that is the Classics Trip until we all realized that we still had a lot of work to do and reatreated, reluctantly, to our own rooms to do our work, pack, and sleep. On to Rome in the morning.
Today we spent the whole day on the train, traveling to Rome, hauling our stuff up the stairs and down the stairs, through the heat and the noise and the bustle before we finally go to the familiar hotel Silva. We were going to go out to see some of Archaic Rome that day but it looked like rain and there wasn’t that much to see so Jarrett just gave us a lecture on the patio of the hotel, and we took notes there. Just at the end of his lecture, the skies opened up and the rain poured down, leaving us very happy that we did not venture out into the forum. Instead, Katie and I hung out in the room for a while, we all had a picnic dinner.
Then, when we were all about to do work, Chris Vincoli came in the room with a strange bit of news—he had seen Italian headlines featuring a shooting at Virginia Tech. We didn’t know what to make of it, or how serious it was, until Stewart checked her email and the details started to come out—many many students had been injured, and her sister had been witnesses to the ambulances coming into to survey the scene. We all sat in stunned silence, and suddenly everyone sprang into action, bringing the computers out and calling friends and relatives to make sure everyone was ok.
We stayed glued to the computer and email for the rest of the night, checking and talking about the horrors we were uncovering. 50 people shot, and 30 dead, by some crazed gunman apparently on a quest to avenge some perceived slight by his girlfriend. We all thought school was a safe place, and VT could have been any college campus. It could have happened. It was us out there, getting shot—college students put in a position that no college student should have to face. Katie knew someone in the classroom who played dead and was the only one to get out alive. A kid our age, in a school just like ours. I think we will all remember exactly how we found this out… where we were, and what will unfold in the coming weeks. This hits too close to home for all of us for it to be any other way, even when we are all of the way over here in Europe. I just cannot believe that it happened.
We all went to bed tonight with a feeling of unease; feeling a little bit sick to our stomachs.
Rome, Italy
Yesterday was the last free day on the classics trip. Now we have ahead of us 30 whole days of exploration without a single break, until we have exams and are free to go. I did enjoy having time to myself without being dragged to an archeological site, but knowing that it was the last one made the whole experience kind of bittersweet. From now on, its just go go go!
We woke up early, our bodies will not let us sleep in anymore, even if we wanted to, and had breakfast before heading out into the bright Sorrento morning and boarding the ferry to the nearby island of Capri. This place is famous for its beautiful rocky beaches, lovely little villas set into the cliffsides, and majestic clear blue water, that skirts the island in a brilliant wash of blue color. We stepped off of the ferry and into what looked like a movie set. All around us were tourists in brightly colored shirts, street vendors hawked their wares, and little white rowboats stood at the ready in the narrow stretch of the bay. However, according to Ambrice, the best part of Capri was the view from the top, which was only accessible by taking what looked like an elaborate skilift up the mountainside and into the other part of the island.
We bought tickets and waited in line for a while before stepping into what looked like a short subway car that had been stretched in photoshop so that its parallels were all out of wack. Nothing was at right angles at all—we stood on a level floor but the windows, and ceiling all had a crazy slant to conform with the slope of the hillside. And with a jerk, we were off, moving out of the station and up over the slopes filled with lemon groves and the clusters of white houses that shone in the late morning sunlight. And past the craggy steep cliffs, the ocean glowed in the distance. It was absolutely breathtaking, and I was so happy to be there. This was one of the few days that the Classics Trip has felt like a vacation…
We stepped out of the station and into the little town at the top of the cliffs and into a square packed with cream and yellow covered buildings, decorated with intricate scrollwork at the top and packed with designer stores at the bottom. Over the terrace, Capri stretched below us in all of its Hollywood glory, and ahead of us in the streets stretched all of Italy’s upscale fashion. Within five minutes we had spotted a Prada, Gucci and Dolce and Gabbana were not much farther away.
The streets were tightly packed, and hung with awnings of white and dotted here and there with a stand selling gelato or lemony ice drinks, and we wandered around and around for hours, stopping in at this or that ridiculously unaffordable shop. After a while, I grew tired of it, and the only place I was truly excited about visiting was a (still rather upscale) specialty bookshop that contained antique volumes and original pieces of art but along one wall contained a number of history books dealing with Capri and its origins. I saw one very unusual book called Venus in the Kitchen, a collection of recipes put together by an eccentric European who had lived on Capri for a number of years and published a good deal of travel/adventure novels taking place on the island. This, his last work, was a cookbook with recipes ranging from the mundane to the highly impractical, all designed to aid in the procurement of love. It was written in both Italian and English, and sometimes at the bottom of the recipe the old gentleman would add a comment like “my good friend Mr.-So-and-so tried this a few years ago, and he swore it made him feel 10 years younger!” I decided that such an unusual book would be worth the weight it added to my suitcase, and bought it.
I enjoyed the morning, but after a long and expensive sit down lunch I really wanted to see the beaches and the water that Capri is so famous for. Unfortunately, I never got the chance—the girls I was with wanted to keep shopping at the designer stores and with no other recourse at my hand I followed them until at the last 5 minutes I could see the water on the way to the ferry. Kind of disappointing. I think if I got the chance I would avoid that upper town on Capri entirely, and devote my whole day to hiking, seeing the famous blue grotto—a cave filled with limestone that reflects the blue in the water all around the walls, making the whole place glow (I did not see it in person, but the pictures looked wonderful), and a natural arch of limestone that arcs down over the water. Hopefully I will get the chance to return and rectify my mistake.
We returned to Sorrento in the late afternoon, and I came to the hotel room and stayed just long enough to put on my running clothes, and venture out into the town. Moving away from the coast this time, I headed back toward the cliffs and out, away from the bustle of the shops and the people and into a more remote neighborhood. Gradually the crowds cleared away and the streets faded into smaller roads, and then I finally came to what looked like the end: a hotel perched on the edge of the mountainside, and the road curved around and headed back toward town, on the right a small path continued down into a park. I went down here for a while, but the path to the park faded into a crowded residential district so I headed back up, reaching the hotel again.
I noticed on the left hand side a staircase leading up into the mountain, a sign in Italian spitting out a lot of text, all of it indecipherable, but the sign itself was topped by a cross, and looking above I could see a small turret, so I guessed that the staircase must lead up to the church. It seemed like as good a place to run as any, and was utterly without any people to gawk at the crazy American actually exercising, so I started up the stairs. The stairs turned into a rough stone-paved path that swtichbacked all of the way up the mountain. At each of the turns on the path was a small ceramic shrine, painted with depictions of the stages of the cross—Jesus in each carrying it, stumbling, falling, getting picked up, being crucified, etc. And at each of the turns in the trail, in the steep ascent, the buildings stopped obscuring the view and I could look over Sorrento itself—the straight but narrow streets and peach and cream colored buildings dotted with trees, and then in the distance the sweep of mountains and that wonderful colored ocean.
I reached the church, stopping briefly to stop and savor the view. I could now see the whole city almost in its entirety, and was halfway up the mountain. The church itself was really more of an open chapel—statues of Mary filled niches to the left and right, and in the center, now closed with an iron gate, a crucifix stood, honored by lit candles and watched by a row of empty wooden chairs.
And then I noticed to the side of the church the winding path continued on, up and up, where the stairs faded out and I entered a narrow road, wide enough for only one car to pass and flanked on each side by orange and lemon groves and small houses. I continued up the steep path, huffing and puffing as I slowly passed villa after villa, until I reached what looked like a good stopping point and turned around to head back down the mountain. It took half as long to get to the bottom as it did to labor all of the way up to the top, but the view was just as good going down. I headed back to the noise and bustle of the city, returning to the room for a good hot shower.
That night we had dinner on the patio of one of the rooms. Scott and I split a salad we made with my newly decorated bowl, a good one with tuna and fresh fruits and vegetables, and we watched as the sun stained the clouds a bright orange and the light faded from the sky. Chris Vincoli brought out his laptop for music, and we ate and talked until it grew dark. It was a wonderful end to the freeday, a nice dinner on a patio with some of my favorite people on the trip—Jess Bradshaw, eating a peanut butter and jelly and banana sandwich, Vincoli with yogurt and cereal, Dan reading the Anead and Scott and I sharing a salad. We talked about our favorite books, and languages, and the craziness that is the Classics Trip until we all realized that we still had a lot of work to do and reatreated, reluctantly, to our own rooms to do our work, pack, and sleep. On to Rome in the morning.
Today we spent the whole day on the train, traveling to Rome, hauling our stuff up the stairs and down the stairs, through the heat and the noise and the bustle before we finally go to the familiar hotel Silva. We were going to go out to see some of Archaic Rome that day but it looked like rain and there wasn’t that much to see so Jarrett just gave us a lecture on the patio of the hotel, and we took notes there. Just at the end of his lecture, the skies opened up and the rain poured down, leaving us very happy that we did not venture out into the forum. Instead, Katie and I hung out in the room for a while, we all had a picnic dinner.
Then, when we were all about to do work, Chris Vincoli came in the room with a strange bit of news—he had seen Italian headlines featuring a shooting at Virginia Tech. We didn’t know what to make of it, or how serious it was, until Stewart checked her email and the details started to come out—many many students had been injured, and her sister had been witnesses to the ambulances coming into to survey the scene. We all sat in stunned silence, and suddenly everyone sprang into action, bringing the computers out and calling friends and relatives to make sure everyone was ok.
We stayed glued to the computer and email for the rest of the night, checking and talking about the horrors we were uncovering. 50 people shot, and 30 dead, by some crazed gunman apparently on a quest to avenge some perceived slight by his girlfriend. We all thought school was a safe place, and VT could have been any college campus. It could have happened. It was us out there, getting shot—college students put in a position that no college student should have to face. Katie knew someone in the classroom who played dead and was the only one to get out alive. A kid our age, in a school just like ours. I think we will all remember exactly how we found this out… where we were, and what will unfold in the coming weeks. This hits too close to home for all of us for it to be any other way, even when we are all of the way over here in Europe. I just cannot believe that it happened.
We all went to bed tonight with a feeling of unease; feeling a little bit sick to our stomachs.
Naples
April 14, 2007
Sorrento, Italy
Yesterday we went to Naples, to see the national archaeological museum, one of the biggest and best archaeological museums in Italy. Naples itself, however, was less than enjoyable—a big ugly dirty and loud city that I was very happy to get out of at the end of the day. I did, however, get the chance to see the Capidimonte Museum, an art museum dedicated to the renaissance and just afterward. It was a beautiful, wonderful place, but walking there from the archaeological museum felt highly dangerous, and we were happy to take a cab back to the train station for our return to Sorrento. The two cities are on complete opposite spectrums from each other—I think that Naples is one of the first places I have seen where I definitely would NOT want to return to.
The archaeological museum was a sprawling place set into an old university building, with all of the old world charm. Inside, the tall galleries contained some of the most famous works of Greek and Roman sculpture, including the Doryphoros, the canon of sculpture by Polykleitos—the best Roman copy of the original Greek work which is now lost. He stood in a sunlit gallery together with another famous copy, that of the Tyrannicides, an early classical work which depicted two warriors rising up in rebellion against the tyrants in Athens, which was later erected in the agora.
Walking in these vast echoing spaces I came upon other humungous and very famous statues, the statue of the Farnese Herakles, a massively muscle bound giant of a statue who rested his huge arms upon a tree, the apples of the Hesperides behind his back. There were a number of over-lifesize statues of gods and goddesses, Aphrodite, Athena, and various men in heroic pose. Moving around these marble giants made me feel very small, and very fragile. These things had withstood the test of time. Moving into the basement, I encountered a small Egyptian collection, complete with small statuary and tons of relief sculpture, and then it was up a massive double staircase with niches for statues and onto the second story, which held two very interesting parts of the museum.
One of these is called the Secret Cabinet—finds from Pompeii that included all of the erotic art we found in the brothel the previous day, and then more and more. Apparently the exavators at the time were scandalized by the apparent immorality of the Romans living here and had all of the finds herded together and locked safely away from prying eyes. In reality both the Greeks and Romans were highly aware of sexuality and took the opportunity to portray it in a lot of settings—on vases, walls, statues, etc. Walking into the cabinet was a very strange experience, but worthwhile—most of the images of these ancient cultures are highly santitized, pictures of gods and such, but it is important to remember that they were real people with real feelings and desires. Even some of the mythology has been watered down for modern consumption, and looking back on the originals, or even of some of the translations of early Greek comedy indicates a different picture from the stately robed figures we typically see. They were a raucous bunch. It kind of reminded me of an old National Geographic arcticle about the original Grimm’s fairy tales—read old versions of them and you will be startled at how different they are from the modern versions, changed during the Victorian period to make them more palatable to the prevailing tastes. The original Repunzel did not get cast out of her lonely tower by the witch because she remarked to the witch how much heavier she was than the young prince; she got cast out because she herself was expanding at the waistline…
The other objects on the second floor were no less interesting, the most important of which included the famous Alexander mosaic, originally in Pompeii, which shows Alexander attacking Darius’ Persian troops. The piece is huge—it occupies an entire wall of the museum, and is made up of tiny tiny tesserae pieces, small enough to trace the highlights on the horses’ flanks. It’s a big concfusion of people, weapons, flying horses, and although some of the central part of the mosaic has been destroyed, time was kind and spared the head of Alexander and the figure of Darius in retreat.
This was not the only mosaic in the museum, however. There were a number of fine examples from all different time periods, some showing banquet scenes and drama masks, others showing hunts, in varying sizes of tesserae. One in particular was made up of the smallest pieces I have seen, tesserae as big as a pencil point, depicting a portrait of a young girl. I can only imagine how long it would have taken to make one of these.
Elsewhere on that floor were a bunch of bronzes, portrait heads, lounging satyrs and curious boys, and a number of jars of glass and bronze, everyday objects from the people that lived in Pompeii. One of the more unexpected things about the museum, however, was walking up the grand staircase and into a huge vaulted room, complete with an elaborate illusionisitic ceiling and filled with huge oil paintings. At the far end of the room stood a statue of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders. This was a complete jump from all of the ancient Greek and Roman stuff we had seen before, perhaps a holdover from the original function of the building. On the floor, laid out at an odd angle to the room, was a glass-covered line of stone, inscribed with the signs of the zodiac. I had no idea what it meant at the time, but I later discovered the whole place is called the Sundial room, and the strange line is one that is used to mark time. The walls contain oil paintings by the Genovese painter Draghi and illustrate the life of Alexander Farnese, the collector of many of the museum’s marble masterworks. Very interesting…
We stayed at the museum wandering around and doing some sketching until 2 pm, when the group met and split off. Ambrice, Katie, Jess Eisenberg, and I decided to continue on to the Capodimonte museum, a large museum dedicated to renaissance art. The walk was long and a bit scary, but we made it to the entrance all in one piece and walked out of the dirt of Naples and into another world. The Capodimonte museum was originally a royal palace, and walking into the gates led us to gardens of verdant green, and an imposing red and grey building several tall stories. Walking into one of the openings at the bottom we entered into a big courtyard, surrounded on four sides by the rich façade. We walked inside to buy our tickets and enter the museum, ascending a wide staircase and then coming into the heart of the museum itself.
The museum was huge and varied, and I saw so many gorgeous works that they began to blur together in my head, it was three huge stories of renaissance works. However, the few biggest works I saw were a wonderful Titian, a picture of the reclining Danae, a Caravaggio showing the Flagellation. So many of the big names from my Survey of Western art book jumped off the pages and I stood for a long time and stared at them all. They ranged greatly in subject matter from highly religious scenes: the annunciation, the deposition, dormition of Mary, the entire life of Christ in its brilliant colors. I saw faces of anguish, faces of rapture, pain and pleasure…. Other scenes were scenes from mythology—pastoral scenes with Bacchus and dancing goddesses. I saw a Masaccio, Botticelli—a lovely painting with crystalline edges and transparent clothing as is Botticelli’s wont, and El Greco’s portraits with its hint of dark twisted forms, and a number of others that are harder to remember and impossible to enumerate. It was lovely but a bit overwhelming and by 5 pm my head was pounding with all I had seen.
The other part of the museum, besides the paintings themselves, were a number of rooms decorated to look like a palace—complete with furniture, period portraits and shiny dark wood furniture. One of the rooms contained a number of ceramics affixed to the walls showing romanticized versions of the Chinese countryside. A big banquet hall complete with table settings and an elaborate inlaid marble floors. This was like stepping backward in time, but instead of the dusty street of Pompeii, we were frozen into a scene of sumptuous overdone European elegance.
Finally, after such a long day, all our feet hurt and we were ready to retreat back to our hotel. We hailed a taxi and endured the long ride through the 5 pm traffic to get on the train, which through many stops and starts finally delivered us back home, at 7:30. We only had enough time to picnic—again, a big group with lots of talking and laughing, before settling into our reading and going to bed.
This morning we got to sleep in until 7 am, a big accomplishment! I was surprisingly awake and ready to go, benefiting from my early night and half hour extra of sleeping in. Then it was breakfast and onto the bus, where we took a two hour ride over a windy steep green hillside that eventually leveled out to rolling flat green land and all of the way to Paestum. I had learned a bit about the place from my Greek Art class, this area had three notable temples and not much else.
We walked out into a dreary morning, overcast, with the moisture that hinted at rain in the air. Turns out, it wasn’t just a hint, because about halfway through our morning talk about the site and the first temple, the drizzle hit, causing all of us to groan and stuff ourselves into our raincoats, hunching over to avoid getting soaked. The first temple we saw was called a Basilica, by mistake, in actuality it is the temple to Hera I, the first of two that sit side by side in the short wet grass. This temple looks rather odd—it has very squat columns with severe entasis (the slight bulge at the middle that makes all columns have more or less of a cigar shape) that tapered upwards to meet huge pillowy capitals. Furthermore, the temple has an odd number of columns on the front, 7, and 18 along the sides, making it an exceedingly long and strangely proportioned building. On the interior, the srangeness continues, with a cella that is almost divided exactly in half by a collonade that matches the proportions of the outer peristyle. This temple may have been dedicated to Zeus and Hera, explaining the doubled interior space and two corresponding doorways. That, I think, is the only reasonable explanation that can be given.
As the rain started to fall, we moved toward the newer and better preserved Temple of Hera II, about 100 years later than the first and dated to about 470 BC. This temple is by far the largest of the three, and stands almost fully intact, from the base of the columns all of the way up to the raking cornice of the pediment. It is known for its use of many of the refinements on temples taking place simultaneously on the mainland—corner contraction (moving the corner columns closer to the others), curvature of the temple platform and of the entablature, and column inclination (all of the columns leaning inward toward the cella). All of these refinements help to relieve the solid rigidity of the Doric post and lintel construction, allowing the temple to sway and move, in a way, and to subtly relieve the heavy stone members of some of their weight. We could not go inside the temple, but walked all around the outside, surveying it from every angle and taking tons of pictures, before the rain drove us to the next temple.
The temple of Athena at Paestum is chronologically located right between the other two, at a date of right around 500 BC, and is the first example of the integration of Doric and Ionic architecture, predating the Parthenon by about 50 years. This temple is not as well preserved as the Hera II temple, but a good deal of the exterior peristyle and some of the entablature still remain, framed against the gray sky. On the way to the temple we passed the fallen down ruins of a number of oddly shaped structures; a bouleterion that is not square like most of the ones that we saw in Turkey and on the mainland, but is perfectly circular, making crop-circle like depressions in the ground. Although to me this arrangement seemed more aesthetically pleasing to me, it caused some problems for public speaking, requiring the speaker to always have his back turned to some of his audience members, which would make for awkward speeches.
And then it was on to the temple, standing in all of its limestone wonder. The temple looks rather old for its date, with really squishy column capitals and a really high pediment. The outside of the temple is ringed with the typical Doric triglyph and metope series, but inside of the outer peristyle is a small ring of Ionic columns, a feature totally unusual in a temple of this time and date. The temple also probably contained a good deal of metopal sculpture, many of which are probably still buried in the grass ground cover. It was impressive, but all of the temples were starting to look alike to me, and I was happy to retreat from the rain and eat our lunch.
We camped out underneath the canopies of the local shops and had our sandwiches, watching the rain drizzle outside of the safety of our tents. Some people got gelato and slurped them noisily as we watched the world turn greyer and greyer. Then it was into the museum, a modern building that featured slabs of grey unfinished concrete and austere white walls. Inside, we saw a number of sculptures, featuring the first known depiction of the suicide of Ajax. The museum also featured a good deal of tomb painting: the tomb of the diver, as it is called, is the earliest example of ancient Greek painting. The chambers of the tombs have been dismantled and hung piece by piece on the walls, and show animated scenes of fighting, music and dance contests, and scenes of symposium. Browned skinned men in their long skirts reclined on couches, crowned with their olive wreaths and playing lyres. They would sit and talk to one another, or watch the dancers and musicians entertain them. The paintings were essentially flat washes of color, picked out in simple lines with no shading, and scenes were more ideographic than fully illusionistic. No one was shown perspectivally—the painting was actually much more similar to vase painting in which backgrounds were non-existent and scenery was only added as an afterthought.
After the museum, we returned to the bus for a long and winding bus ride home, arriving just in time to go out and see the town! It turns out that Sorrento is a lot bigger than I intitially had thought—once we exited the big square area, Ambrice and I walked down some narrow side streets choc full of Lemoncello shops, a liquor that is famous for its production in this area. Some of the lemons we have seen are as big as my head! We wandered around and around, stopping at some shops to do a little bit of window shopping and price comparison—I want to buy something in Florence, which is supposedly the leather capital of Italy, and I wanted to scope it out while I got the chance.
Then we met up with Anne, Jess Bradshaw and Scott, and wandering down a side street went into a great local Italian restaurant for dinner, and Jess had her first real meal since breaking her tooth in Rome several days ago. Apparently, it was delicious. I had very good minestrone, different from how they make it in the states with a greenish broth and a lot more vegetables. Nonetheless, it was delicious, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves in the town. We capped the night off with a trip to the 60+ flavor gelato place, and strolled on home. The next day was our last off day, and Stewart’s friend Rosemary was turning 21, so we all decided that we would have a little get together for her.
It was a good night—they ran out of cups in the hotel rooms so I resorted to drinking out of a bowl, which I decorated with a pair of eyes so that it resembled the Greek kylix. (I know, I am a HUGE dork) The Greek kylix is a cup with a very wide opening that looks to be the shape of a small bowl with a short stem and two wide handles on either side. IT is usually decorated with florals and such but always the outer edge of one side of the cup is decorated with a pair of eyes, so that when you put it to your face to drink out of it looks like a monster is staring out at the rest of the symposium—a creature with a stubby round nose and a huge painted stare. And we hung out and watched the lights come out over the water, and laughed and talked late into the night. We were taking full advantage of the coming off day, and when the clock struck midnight we all sung happy birthday to Rosemary, and continued partying for another hour or so until we all got way too tired and went to bed.
Sorrento, Italy
Yesterday we went to Naples, to see the national archaeological museum, one of the biggest and best archaeological museums in Italy. Naples itself, however, was less than enjoyable—a big ugly dirty and loud city that I was very happy to get out of at the end of the day. I did, however, get the chance to see the Capidimonte Museum, an art museum dedicated to the renaissance and just afterward. It was a beautiful, wonderful place, but walking there from the archaeological museum felt highly dangerous, and we were happy to take a cab back to the train station for our return to Sorrento. The two cities are on complete opposite spectrums from each other—I think that Naples is one of the first places I have seen where I definitely would NOT want to return to.
The archaeological museum was a sprawling place set into an old university building, with all of the old world charm. Inside, the tall galleries contained some of the most famous works of Greek and Roman sculpture, including the Doryphoros, the canon of sculpture by Polykleitos—the best Roman copy of the original Greek work which is now lost. He stood in a sunlit gallery together with another famous copy, that of the Tyrannicides, an early classical work which depicted two warriors rising up in rebellion against the tyrants in Athens, which was later erected in the agora.
Walking in these vast echoing spaces I came upon other humungous and very famous statues, the statue of the Farnese Herakles, a massively muscle bound giant of a statue who rested his huge arms upon a tree, the apples of the Hesperides behind his back. There were a number of over-lifesize statues of gods and goddesses, Aphrodite, Athena, and various men in heroic pose. Moving around these marble giants made me feel very small, and very fragile. These things had withstood the test of time. Moving into the basement, I encountered a small Egyptian collection, complete with small statuary and tons of relief sculpture, and then it was up a massive double staircase with niches for statues and onto the second story, which held two very interesting parts of the museum.
One of these is called the Secret Cabinet—finds from Pompeii that included all of the erotic art we found in the brothel the previous day, and then more and more. Apparently the exavators at the time were scandalized by the apparent immorality of the Romans living here and had all of the finds herded together and locked safely away from prying eyes. In reality both the Greeks and Romans were highly aware of sexuality and took the opportunity to portray it in a lot of settings—on vases, walls, statues, etc. Walking into the cabinet was a very strange experience, but worthwhile—most of the images of these ancient cultures are highly santitized, pictures of gods and such, but it is important to remember that they were real people with real feelings and desires. Even some of the mythology has been watered down for modern consumption, and looking back on the originals, or even of some of the translations of early Greek comedy indicates a different picture from the stately robed figures we typically see. They were a raucous bunch. It kind of reminded me of an old National Geographic arcticle about the original Grimm’s fairy tales—read old versions of them and you will be startled at how different they are from the modern versions, changed during the Victorian period to make them more palatable to the prevailing tastes. The original Repunzel did not get cast out of her lonely tower by the witch because she remarked to the witch how much heavier she was than the young prince; she got cast out because she herself was expanding at the waistline…
The other objects on the second floor were no less interesting, the most important of which included the famous Alexander mosaic, originally in Pompeii, which shows Alexander attacking Darius’ Persian troops. The piece is huge—it occupies an entire wall of the museum, and is made up of tiny tiny tesserae pieces, small enough to trace the highlights on the horses’ flanks. It’s a big concfusion of people, weapons, flying horses, and although some of the central part of the mosaic has been destroyed, time was kind and spared the head of Alexander and the figure of Darius in retreat.
This was not the only mosaic in the museum, however. There were a number of fine examples from all different time periods, some showing banquet scenes and drama masks, others showing hunts, in varying sizes of tesserae. One in particular was made up of the smallest pieces I have seen, tesserae as big as a pencil point, depicting a portrait of a young girl. I can only imagine how long it would have taken to make one of these.
Elsewhere on that floor were a bunch of bronzes, portrait heads, lounging satyrs and curious boys, and a number of jars of glass and bronze, everyday objects from the people that lived in Pompeii. One of the more unexpected things about the museum, however, was walking up the grand staircase and into a huge vaulted room, complete with an elaborate illusionisitic ceiling and filled with huge oil paintings. At the far end of the room stood a statue of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders. This was a complete jump from all of the ancient Greek and Roman stuff we had seen before, perhaps a holdover from the original function of the building. On the floor, laid out at an odd angle to the room, was a glass-covered line of stone, inscribed with the signs of the zodiac. I had no idea what it meant at the time, but I later discovered the whole place is called the Sundial room, and the strange line is one that is used to mark time. The walls contain oil paintings by the Genovese painter Draghi and illustrate the life of Alexander Farnese, the collector of many of the museum’s marble masterworks. Very interesting…
We stayed at the museum wandering around and doing some sketching until 2 pm, when the group met and split off. Ambrice, Katie, Jess Eisenberg, and I decided to continue on to the Capodimonte museum, a large museum dedicated to renaissance art. The walk was long and a bit scary, but we made it to the entrance all in one piece and walked out of the dirt of Naples and into another world. The Capodimonte museum was originally a royal palace, and walking into the gates led us to gardens of verdant green, and an imposing red and grey building several tall stories. Walking into one of the openings at the bottom we entered into a big courtyard, surrounded on four sides by the rich façade. We walked inside to buy our tickets and enter the museum, ascending a wide staircase and then coming into the heart of the museum itself.
The museum was huge and varied, and I saw so many gorgeous works that they began to blur together in my head, it was three huge stories of renaissance works. However, the few biggest works I saw were a wonderful Titian, a picture of the reclining Danae, a Caravaggio showing the Flagellation. So many of the big names from my Survey of Western art book jumped off the pages and I stood for a long time and stared at them all. They ranged greatly in subject matter from highly religious scenes: the annunciation, the deposition, dormition of Mary, the entire life of Christ in its brilliant colors. I saw faces of anguish, faces of rapture, pain and pleasure…. Other scenes were scenes from mythology—pastoral scenes with Bacchus and dancing goddesses. I saw a Masaccio, Botticelli—a lovely painting with crystalline edges and transparent clothing as is Botticelli’s wont, and El Greco’s portraits with its hint of dark twisted forms, and a number of others that are harder to remember and impossible to enumerate. It was lovely but a bit overwhelming and by 5 pm my head was pounding with all I had seen.
The other part of the museum, besides the paintings themselves, were a number of rooms decorated to look like a palace—complete with furniture, period portraits and shiny dark wood furniture. One of the rooms contained a number of ceramics affixed to the walls showing romanticized versions of the Chinese countryside. A big banquet hall complete with table settings and an elaborate inlaid marble floors. This was like stepping backward in time, but instead of the dusty street of Pompeii, we were frozen into a scene of sumptuous overdone European elegance.
Finally, after such a long day, all our feet hurt and we were ready to retreat back to our hotel. We hailed a taxi and endured the long ride through the 5 pm traffic to get on the train, which through many stops and starts finally delivered us back home, at 7:30. We only had enough time to picnic—again, a big group with lots of talking and laughing, before settling into our reading and going to bed.
This morning we got to sleep in until 7 am, a big accomplishment! I was surprisingly awake and ready to go, benefiting from my early night and half hour extra of sleeping in. Then it was breakfast and onto the bus, where we took a two hour ride over a windy steep green hillside that eventually leveled out to rolling flat green land and all of the way to Paestum. I had learned a bit about the place from my Greek Art class, this area had three notable temples and not much else.
We walked out into a dreary morning, overcast, with the moisture that hinted at rain in the air. Turns out, it wasn’t just a hint, because about halfway through our morning talk about the site and the first temple, the drizzle hit, causing all of us to groan and stuff ourselves into our raincoats, hunching over to avoid getting soaked. The first temple we saw was called a Basilica, by mistake, in actuality it is the temple to Hera I, the first of two that sit side by side in the short wet grass. This temple looks rather odd—it has very squat columns with severe entasis (the slight bulge at the middle that makes all columns have more or less of a cigar shape) that tapered upwards to meet huge pillowy capitals. Furthermore, the temple has an odd number of columns on the front, 7, and 18 along the sides, making it an exceedingly long and strangely proportioned building. On the interior, the srangeness continues, with a cella that is almost divided exactly in half by a collonade that matches the proportions of the outer peristyle. This temple may have been dedicated to Zeus and Hera, explaining the doubled interior space and two corresponding doorways. That, I think, is the only reasonable explanation that can be given.
As the rain started to fall, we moved toward the newer and better preserved Temple of Hera II, about 100 years later than the first and dated to about 470 BC. This temple is by far the largest of the three, and stands almost fully intact, from the base of the columns all of the way up to the raking cornice of the pediment. It is known for its use of many of the refinements on temples taking place simultaneously on the mainland—corner contraction (moving the corner columns closer to the others), curvature of the temple platform and of the entablature, and column inclination (all of the columns leaning inward toward the cella). All of these refinements help to relieve the solid rigidity of the Doric post and lintel construction, allowing the temple to sway and move, in a way, and to subtly relieve the heavy stone members of some of their weight. We could not go inside the temple, but walked all around the outside, surveying it from every angle and taking tons of pictures, before the rain drove us to the next temple.
The temple of Athena at Paestum is chronologically located right between the other two, at a date of right around 500 BC, and is the first example of the integration of Doric and Ionic architecture, predating the Parthenon by about 50 years. This temple is not as well preserved as the Hera II temple, but a good deal of the exterior peristyle and some of the entablature still remain, framed against the gray sky. On the way to the temple we passed the fallen down ruins of a number of oddly shaped structures; a bouleterion that is not square like most of the ones that we saw in Turkey and on the mainland, but is perfectly circular, making crop-circle like depressions in the ground. Although to me this arrangement seemed more aesthetically pleasing to me, it caused some problems for public speaking, requiring the speaker to always have his back turned to some of his audience members, which would make for awkward speeches.
And then it was on to the temple, standing in all of its limestone wonder. The temple looks rather old for its date, with really squishy column capitals and a really high pediment. The outside of the temple is ringed with the typical Doric triglyph and metope series, but inside of the outer peristyle is a small ring of Ionic columns, a feature totally unusual in a temple of this time and date. The temple also probably contained a good deal of metopal sculpture, many of which are probably still buried in the grass ground cover. It was impressive, but all of the temples were starting to look alike to me, and I was happy to retreat from the rain and eat our lunch.
We camped out underneath the canopies of the local shops and had our sandwiches, watching the rain drizzle outside of the safety of our tents. Some people got gelato and slurped them noisily as we watched the world turn greyer and greyer. Then it was into the museum, a modern building that featured slabs of grey unfinished concrete and austere white walls. Inside, we saw a number of sculptures, featuring the first known depiction of the suicide of Ajax. The museum also featured a good deal of tomb painting: the tomb of the diver, as it is called, is the earliest example of ancient Greek painting. The chambers of the tombs have been dismantled and hung piece by piece on the walls, and show animated scenes of fighting, music and dance contests, and scenes of symposium. Browned skinned men in their long skirts reclined on couches, crowned with their olive wreaths and playing lyres. They would sit and talk to one another, or watch the dancers and musicians entertain them. The paintings were essentially flat washes of color, picked out in simple lines with no shading, and scenes were more ideographic than fully illusionistic. No one was shown perspectivally—the painting was actually much more similar to vase painting in which backgrounds were non-existent and scenery was only added as an afterthought.
After the museum, we returned to the bus for a long and winding bus ride home, arriving just in time to go out and see the town! It turns out that Sorrento is a lot bigger than I intitially had thought—once we exited the big square area, Ambrice and I walked down some narrow side streets choc full of Lemoncello shops, a liquor that is famous for its production in this area. Some of the lemons we have seen are as big as my head! We wandered around and around, stopping at some shops to do a little bit of window shopping and price comparison—I want to buy something in Florence, which is supposedly the leather capital of Italy, and I wanted to scope it out while I got the chance.
Then we met up with Anne, Jess Bradshaw and Scott, and wandering down a side street went into a great local Italian restaurant for dinner, and Jess had her first real meal since breaking her tooth in Rome several days ago. Apparently, it was delicious. I had very good minestrone, different from how they make it in the states with a greenish broth and a lot more vegetables. Nonetheless, it was delicious, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves in the town. We capped the night off with a trip to the 60+ flavor gelato place, and strolled on home. The next day was our last off day, and Stewart’s friend Rosemary was turning 21, so we all decided that we would have a little get together for her.
It was a good night—they ran out of cups in the hotel rooms so I resorted to drinking out of a bowl, which I decorated with a pair of eyes so that it resembled the Greek kylix. (I know, I am a HUGE dork) The Greek kylix is a cup with a very wide opening that looks to be the shape of a small bowl with a short stem and two wide handles on either side. IT is usually decorated with florals and such but always the outer edge of one side of the cup is decorated with a pair of eyes, so that when you put it to your face to drink out of it looks like a monster is staring out at the rest of the symposium—a creature with a stubby round nose and a huge painted stare. And we hung out and watched the lights come out over the water, and laughed and talked late into the night. We were taking full advantage of the coming off day, and when the clock struck midnight we all sung happy birthday to Rosemary, and continued partying for another hour or so until we all got way too tired and went to bed.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Herculaneum and Pompeii
April 12, 2007
Sorrento, Italy
The past two days have been spent at some of the more well known sites of Roman antiquity: the places covered by ash and lava when that fateful day in AD 79 Vesuvius blew its top.
The night we arrived we went out to dinner at a very nice restaurant with good pizza and pasta, I had a margerita pizza with artichokes and a wonderful fruit salad that I loved. The entire group went out that night, because it was Erika’s birthday, and we all had a great time laughing and talking the night away. Then it was into the town square, Sorrento is very tourist oriented and the main square is filled with shops and restaurants. Walking down a little side street we ran into the most amazing gelateria, which contained about 60 different flavors of gelato, with bits and pieces of all kinds of European candy bars, especially those made by the Kinder brand, mixed in. I sampled a chocolate-with-stuff and another scoop of a vanilla-with-stuff flavor, both of which were delicious, but they had flavors ranging from apple pie to nutella, to strawberry and back again. By the end of my 2 scoops I was absolutely stuffed up to the neckline, but it was a special night and the gelato was amazing, probably the best I have had in Italy so far. And the variety and selection were amazing.
The next morning came entirely too early, and taking a train from Sorrento we disembarked at the archaeological site of Herculaneum. Although less famous than its counterpart, Herculaneum was another Greek-turned-Roman town in the area of Naples, which was by and large dedicated to pleasure villas for the Roman dignitaries and rich folks. Dotted here and there among the Roman mansions were a few towns, Herculaneum was one, that was a small trade and fishing town along a much-closer Italian shoreline. All of the peaceful industry of the city was obliterated in one fell swoop when in AD 79 Mount Vesuvius, which actually looks quite beautiful, soft and peaceful now, spewed up a huge column of ash and smoke into the sky. At some places, like the more famous Pompeii, which we saw the next day, this resulted in a fine layer of ash deposits throughout the city, suffocating many of the people but leaving almost all of the buildings intact.
However, at Herculaneum, the day was a bit wetter, and the falling ash mixed with mud and rain to form a humongous landslide of lava that came storming through the city, flattening many of the buildings and locking all of the city under a huge thick layer of molten rock. This created a protective barrier against the elements, ultimately resulting in a preserving process that worked so fast that organic material such as plants, wood, and even human remains could be preserved. The wood petrified, and so did a number of Papyrus scrolls found in a big villa in the city, which can be unrolled and decoded, giving archaeologists a good deal of new ancient literature.
In any event, bulldozers have removed the mountain of rock that covered the city, and a good deal of construction work has been done, resulting in a ghost town of sorts, one that contains wood and paintings, but in many instances no walls and certainly no furniture. The place has literally been frozen in time. Walking down to the site, we looked over a maze of walls and streets, designed along a typical Roman grid pattern, and surveyed the complication from above before descending within.
This was an entire city, and we walked through most of it that day. Luckily the sun was out, and there was a good deal to see—we saw a very well preserved bath complex area with mosaics on the floor and the cubby holes to store clothing still in place along the walls. In other places, the plaster covering the walls had fallen away, revealing to us a number of the methods of Roman wall construction, which varied quite a bit from time to time but always involved placing chunks of stone or brick of various sizes into a concrete core. It was very easy to see where the walls had been patched—the blocks were of different sizes and shapes and without the plaster to make it all look uniform it was a hodegepodge of masonry.
We walked into a number of large private villas, some still containing petrified wood in the doors, the main entryway leading to a large open atrium, surrounded by an interior collonade. In some places, where the petrified roots of the plants still remained, the ancient gardens had been replanted to give an oasis of green in all of the bleached dustiness of the ruins of the town.
In some houses the walls had been perfectly preserved—frescoes of figures in their delicate architectural frames, lounging or eating, figures of Dionysus and his followers or other standard mythological fare, or in some cases elaborate floral patterns and depictions of other houses, false windows looking into a world of opulence and grace. The entire place was a ghost town, and walking through the rooms I could feel the pulse of the inhabitants that made their homes here, so surprised when all at once the benign mountain over their heads turned into a fire-spewing monster.
We were there until well into the afternoon, as the sun grew hotter and hotter, and finally at around 3 we boarded the train to head for home. We all almost fell asleep to the rocking of the train as it roared back across the countryside to Sorrento. I returned to the hotel room, but I wanted to see the town so I went on a jog around, following the streets until I reached the shoreline, and then town through a long cobblestone road that lead from the cliffs of Sorrento down into a small port area, where above the hotels carved themselves out of the rock and hung, arms outstretched, over the thin air. Looking out into the water, I could see curved piers that thrust out into the bright blue water, and brightly colored fishing boats bobbing. It was a bright and sunny day, and everything seemed like it was out of some kind of movie—and if Sorrento today is anything like the area was back when the Romans had lived, I would have understood perfectly why the rich and famous of Rome would have wanted to make their homes here.
I jogged back along the palm-shaded streets by sumsuous hotels with wide lawns and bubbling fountains to the town square where the city was in its afternoon hubbub. Tourists milled around and looked in all of the shop windows, the aroma of gelato leaked out of the small booths, and the sun was bright. I headed back to the hotel, returning to my room to study: I had a test due that night and needed to take it.
So I studied and tested for the rest of the night, stopping only after I had finished to check my email and do some internet prawling before giving up at the slow connection, and heading off to bed.
Pompeii was today, and it was like a larger, more complicated Herculaneum. The city in the Roman period was quite a bit larger, and most of the public buildings, such as the forum, the basilica, the theater and the amphitheater have been uncovered. However, one of the more creepy things about Pompeii is that when the volcano erupted, it asphyxiated and then preserved its inhabitants. In some of the buildings we would walk into, plaster casts of human forms would be elevated up in glass cases, cowering under the fumes and dust, preserved by the ash just as they fell. In some instances we could see the impressions of belts, the folds in the garments and the grimaces on the faces impressed in the stone that formed around it. It felt more like looking at a dead body than actually observing the skeletons—these were real people, encased in the hard rock.
Elsewhere, we did much the same as we did at Herculaneum, walking through the straight well paved streets and observing the sites in the ancient city. One of the more impressive buildings was a basilica—not used for a church as the building type would be later, but a large space used for public meetings and for the practice of law. Like the modern type, it was divided into three asiles by a series of stout columns, constructed of the sturdy Roman brick but originally stuccoed to disguise its humbler construction materials. The far end of the basilica contained a huge two story engaged colonnade, some of the second story still existed and projected snaggletoothed into the sky. Unlike modern churches, this building was not entered from the far end, but had two sets of entrances half way up the long sides, that led out into the main space. And the opposite end from the snaggletoothed wall was the entrance to the forum, most of which is missing now but originally contained a wall much like the opposite end, and a doorway that led to the forum itself.
We visited a number of temples, all constructed in the roman fashion: plopped down in the middle of a colonnaded square, but not in the center as was the case with the Greeks, but near the rear so the whole thing had the feel of a procession. The temple itself was more directive than the Greek predecessor; it told the worshipper exactly where to go by erecting a large staircase in the front, with a deep front porch, and a smaller cella. The back room, because it was not part of the procession, was usually dropped entirely, giving the worshipper a straight shot to the heart of the sanctuary. The sanctuary of Isis was the big one at Pompeii—the importation of Egyptian and other western gods was big in this region, and this was one of the few temples to be repaired after the earthquake in 62 AD, many of the other temples in the city had been left in a state of semi-disrepair when Vesuvius erupted. The Isis temple still contained some of the shallow relief sculpture in stucco that would have been painted over to leave the temple in a state of wild color.
Then it was on to the exact opposite of the spectrum: a brothel, a very popular place in ancient times, and located in one of the older districts of town. This brothel was small, with claustrophobic little rooms and narrow passages, but it is most famous for its wall paintings, which depict a number of erotic scenes that acted as a type of a “menu” from which the customers could choose. This was one of the hot spots of Pompeii, many many groups were vying to get inside, and there was a guard at the door who regulated traffic flow into and out of the warren of rooms. We were ushered through quickly, and reemerged into the afternoon light happy to get out of the press of bodies.
Another big place that we saw was the amphitheater, first built in 70 BC, and the oldest known permanent one in the ancient world. The Romans loved their spectacle, but until then had been happy to erect wooden stands and stalls for the demonstration of the beast hunts and gladiatorial games, but later they realized the need to construct something permanent for the growing demand. The popularity of such games is telling: Pompeii itself has a population of about 20,000 when the volcano erupted, and the amphitheater had the same capacity, indicating just how many people would show up to watch the gladiators fight.
The amphitheater itself is shaped like an oval with two main entrances on the axial ends near ground level, one for the entrance of the gladiators, and the other for the exit of the dead and dying. Ringing the bottom of the amphitheater, underneath the seating area, is a large vaulted passage for the movement of people and to vault the stands up to the sky. Most of the spectators did not use this lower passage, but entered through two pairs of broad steps, built into the outside walls of the amphitheater and leading up over the edge and down through a series of arches into the bowl itself. The stands are divided into three sections, separated from one another by walls, the lowest were reserved for the wealthy elite. There was also a separate section for aristocratic women, called cathedra, but most of the stands were overgrown with grass and it was hard to tell where they might have been, or how close they would have been to the arena floor. Unlike the Colosseum, this amphitheater had no underground passages, but as an early example of an amphitheater it isn’t hard to imagine that the underground stuff would have been a later development.
I am curious to see just how people were moved into and around stadiums like this, the Romans seem to have organized the divisions between class, performer and performance much more firmly than the Greeks, and it can be evidenced through the use of walls and distinct barriers in the amphitheater seating. I would guess that the movement into and out of the amphitheater was regulated in the same fashion. More stuff to research!
After visiting a few more houses, we went to the final spot, the House of the Mysteries, located outside of the city walls in a rambling complex. The place is beautiful, with shady trees and walkways and reconstructed rooms all of the way up to the rafters, and one room contained a massive fresco with fauns and women engaging in some kind of Dionysiac ritual. The background of the paintings was a dusty red and the figures engaged in their strange activities, lost in their own world, completely unaware of the voyeuristic nature of our viewing. We were privy to the mysteries.
By that time of the day, however, the only mystery I was prepared to contemplate was food in my stomach. It was nearing 5 pm, and we had been out in the sun all day. We were ready to head home. So we walked back to the train station, and proceeded to fall asleep for the long ride back, wake up enough to stumble back to the hotel, and sleep for a little longer.
Later, we all woke up and had a big picnic in Stewart, Rosemary (Stewart’s friend that is visiting us on her spring break), and me all invited people in. They all came, some using the hot water heaters that some of the kids had bought to semi-cook pasta, some making huge sandwiches from the grocery store, and others like me eating a variety of leftovers, capped off with peanut butter (a rare find) and bread. But it was really fun, we all told stories about the trip and laughed at each other and talked late into the night. And then it was reading and bed.
Sorrento, Italy
The past two days have been spent at some of the more well known sites of Roman antiquity: the places covered by ash and lava when that fateful day in AD 79 Vesuvius blew its top.
The night we arrived we went out to dinner at a very nice restaurant with good pizza and pasta, I had a margerita pizza with artichokes and a wonderful fruit salad that I loved. The entire group went out that night, because it was Erika’s birthday, and we all had a great time laughing and talking the night away. Then it was into the town square, Sorrento is very tourist oriented and the main square is filled with shops and restaurants. Walking down a little side street we ran into the most amazing gelateria, which contained about 60 different flavors of gelato, with bits and pieces of all kinds of European candy bars, especially those made by the Kinder brand, mixed in. I sampled a chocolate-with-stuff and another scoop of a vanilla-with-stuff flavor, both of which were delicious, but they had flavors ranging from apple pie to nutella, to strawberry and back again. By the end of my 2 scoops I was absolutely stuffed up to the neckline, but it was a special night and the gelato was amazing, probably the best I have had in Italy so far. And the variety and selection were amazing.
The next morning came entirely too early, and taking a train from Sorrento we disembarked at the archaeological site of Herculaneum. Although less famous than its counterpart, Herculaneum was another Greek-turned-Roman town in the area of Naples, which was by and large dedicated to pleasure villas for the Roman dignitaries and rich folks. Dotted here and there among the Roman mansions were a few towns, Herculaneum was one, that was a small trade and fishing town along a much-closer Italian shoreline. All of the peaceful industry of the city was obliterated in one fell swoop when in AD 79 Mount Vesuvius, which actually looks quite beautiful, soft and peaceful now, spewed up a huge column of ash and smoke into the sky. At some places, like the more famous Pompeii, which we saw the next day, this resulted in a fine layer of ash deposits throughout the city, suffocating many of the people but leaving almost all of the buildings intact.
However, at Herculaneum, the day was a bit wetter, and the falling ash mixed with mud and rain to form a humongous landslide of lava that came storming through the city, flattening many of the buildings and locking all of the city under a huge thick layer of molten rock. This created a protective barrier against the elements, ultimately resulting in a preserving process that worked so fast that organic material such as plants, wood, and even human remains could be preserved. The wood petrified, and so did a number of Papyrus scrolls found in a big villa in the city, which can be unrolled and decoded, giving archaeologists a good deal of new ancient literature.
In any event, bulldozers have removed the mountain of rock that covered the city, and a good deal of construction work has been done, resulting in a ghost town of sorts, one that contains wood and paintings, but in many instances no walls and certainly no furniture. The place has literally been frozen in time. Walking down to the site, we looked over a maze of walls and streets, designed along a typical Roman grid pattern, and surveyed the complication from above before descending within.
This was an entire city, and we walked through most of it that day. Luckily the sun was out, and there was a good deal to see—we saw a very well preserved bath complex area with mosaics on the floor and the cubby holes to store clothing still in place along the walls. In other places, the plaster covering the walls had fallen away, revealing to us a number of the methods of Roman wall construction, which varied quite a bit from time to time but always involved placing chunks of stone or brick of various sizes into a concrete core. It was very easy to see where the walls had been patched—the blocks were of different sizes and shapes and without the plaster to make it all look uniform it was a hodegepodge of masonry.
We walked into a number of large private villas, some still containing petrified wood in the doors, the main entryway leading to a large open atrium, surrounded by an interior collonade. In some places, where the petrified roots of the plants still remained, the ancient gardens had been replanted to give an oasis of green in all of the bleached dustiness of the ruins of the town.
In some houses the walls had been perfectly preserved—frescoes of figures in their delicate architectural frames, lounging or eating, figures of Dionysus and his followers or other standard mythological fare, or in some cases elaborate floral patterns and depictions of other houses, false windows looking into a world of opulence and grace. The entire place was a ghost town, and walking through the rooms I could feel the pulse of the inhabitants that made their homes here, so surprised when all at once the benign mountain over their heads turned into a fire-spewing monster.
We were there until well into the afternoon, as the sun grew hotter and hotter, and finally at around 3 we boarded the train to head for home. We all almost fell asleep to the rocking of the train as it roared back across the countryside to Sorrento. I returned to the hotel room, but I wanted to see the town so I went on a jog around, following the streets until I reached the shoreline, and then town through a long cobblestone road that lead from the cliffs of Sorrento down into a small port area, where above the hotels carved themselves out of the rock and hung, arms outstretched, over the thin air. Looking out into the water, I could see curved piers that thrust out into the bright blue water, and brightly colored fishing boats bobbing. It was a bright and sunny day, and everything seemed like it was out of some kind of movie—and if Sorrento today is anything like the area was back when the Romans had lived, I would have understood perfectly why the rich and famous of Rome would have wanted to make their homes here.
I jogged back along the palm-shaded streets by sumsuous hotels with wide lawns and bubbling fountains to the town square where the city was in its afternoon hubbub. Tourists milled around and looked in all of the shop windows, the aroma of gelato leaked out of the small booths, and the sun was bright. I headed back to the hotel, returning to my room to study: I had a test due that night and needed to take it.
So I studied and tested for the rest of the night, stopping only after I had finished to check my email and do some internet prawling before giving up at the slow connection, and heading off to bed.
Pompeii was today, and it was like a larger, more complicated Herculaneum. The city in the Roman period was quite a bit larger, and most of the public buildings, such as the forum, the basilica, the theater and the amphitheater have been uncovered. However, one of the more creepy things about Pompeii is that when the volcano erupted, it asphyxiated and then preserved its inhabitants. In some of the buildings we would walk into, plaster casts of human forms would be elevated up in glass cases, cowering under the fumes and dust, preserved by the ash just as they fell. In some instances we could see the impressions of belts, the folds in the garments and the grimaces on the faces impressed in the stone that formed around it. It felt more like looking at a dead body than actually observing the skeletons—these were real people, encased in the hard rock.
Elsewhere, we did much the same as we did at Herculaneum, walking through the straight well paved streets and observing the sites in the ancient city. One of the more impressive buildings was a basilica—not used for a church as the building type would be later, but a large space used for public meetings and for the practice of law. Like the modern type, it was divided into three asiles by a series of stout columns, constructed of the sturdy Roman brick but originally stuccoed to disguise its humbler construction materials. The far end of the basilica contained a huge two story engaged colonnade, some of the second story still existed and projected snaggletoothed into the sky. Unlike modern churches, this building was not entered from the far end, but had two sets of entrances half way up the long sides, that led out into the main space. And the opposite end from the snaggletoothed wall was the entrance to the forum, most of which is missing now but originally contained a wall much like the opposite end, and a doorway that led to the forum itself.
We visited a number of temples, all constructed in the roman fashion: plopped down in the middle of a colonnaded square, but not in the center as was the case with the Greeks, but near the rear so the whole thing had the feel of a procession. The temple itself was more directive than the Greek predecessor; it told the worshipper exactly where to go by erecting a large staircase in the front, with a deep front porch, and a smaller cella. The back room, because it was not part of the procession, was usually dropped entirely, giving the worshipper a straight shot to the heart of the sanctuary. The sanctuary of Isis was the big one at Pompeii—the importation of Egyptian and other western gods was big in this region, and this was one of the few temples to be repaired after the earthquake in 62 AD, many of the other temples in the city had been left in a state of semi-disrepair when Vesuvius erupted. The Isis temple still contained some of the shallow relief sculpture in stucco that would have been painted over to leave the temple in a state of wild color.
Then it was on to the exact opposite of the spectrum: a brothel, a very popular place in ancient times, and located in one of the older districts of town. This brothel was small, with claustrophobic little rooms and narrow passages, but it is most famous for its wall paintings, which depict a number of erotic scenes that acted as a type of a “menu” from which the customers could choose. This was one of the hot spots of Pompeii, many many groups were vying to get inside, and there was a guard at the door who regulated traffic flow into and out of the warren of rooms. We were ushered through quickly, and reemerged into the afternoon light happy to get out of the press of bodies.
Another big place that we saw was the amphitheater, first built in 70 BC, and the oldest known permanent one in the ancient world. The Romans loved their spectacle, but until then had been happy to erect wooden stands and stalls for the demonstration of the beast hunts and gladiatorial games, but later they realized the need to construct something permanent for the growing demand. The popularity of such games is telling: Pompeii itself has a population of about 20,000 when the volcano erupted, and the amphitheater had the same capacity, indicating just how many people would show up to watch the gladiators fight.
The amphitheater itself is shaped like an oval with two main entrances on the axial ends near ground level, one for the entrance of the gladiators, and the other for the exit of the dead and dying. Ringing the bottom of the amphitheater, underneath the seating area, is a large vaulted passage for the movement of people and to vault the stands up to the sky. Most of the spectators did not use this lower passage, but entered through two pairs of broad steps, built into the outside walls of the amphitheater and leading up over the edge and down through a series of arches into the bowl itself. The stands are divided into three sections, separated from one another by walls, the lowest were reserved for the wealthy elite. There was also a separate section for aristocratic women, called cathedra, but most of the stands were overgrown with grass and it was hard to tell where they might have been, or how close they would have been to the arena floor. Unlike the Colosseum, this amphitheater had no underground passages, but as an early example of an amphitheater it isn’t hard to imagine that the underground stuff would have been a later development.
I am curious to see just how people were moved into and around stadiums like this, the Romans seem to have organized the divisions between class, performer and performance much more firmly than the Greeks, and it can be evidenced through the use of walls and distinct barriers in the amphitheater seating. I would guess that the movement into and out of the amphitheater was regulated in the same fashion. More stuff to research!
After visiting a few more houses, we went to the final spot, the House of the Mysteries, located outside of the city walls in a rambling complex. The place is beautiful, with shady trees and walkways and reconstructed rooms all of the way up to the rafters, and one room contained a massive fresco with fauns and women engaging in some kind of Dionysiac ritual. The background of the paintings was a dusty red and the figures engaged in their strange activities, lost in their own world, completely unaware of the voyeuristic nature of our viewing. We were privy to the mysteries.
By that time of the day, however, the only mystery I was prepared to contemplate was food in my stomach. It was nearing 5 pm, and we had been out in the sun all day. We were ready to head home. So we walked back to the train station, and proceeded to fall asleep for the long ride back, wake up enough to stumble back to the hotel, and sleep for a little longer.
Later, we all woke up and had a big picnic in Stewart, Rosemary (Stewart’s friend that is visiting us on her spring break), and me all invited people in. They all came, some using the hot water heaters that some of the kids had bought to semi-cook pasta, some making huge sandwiches from the grocery store, and others like me eating a variety of leftovers, capped off with peanut butter (a rare find) and bread. But it was really fun, we all told stories about the trip and laughed at each other and talked late into the night. And then it was reading and bed.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
On The Move Again
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…
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…
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.
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