Southern Italy

Although there are plenty of things I'm excited for this semester, the trip we took this last weekend came as a complete surprise to me. Before I got to Rome, I had no idea we would be taken to Montecassino Abbey, Pompei, the Amalfi coast, Positano and that we would be staying in Paestum. Needless to say, it was an extremely nice surprise.

We started early on Monday morning, with a two hour bus ride to the Montecassino Abbey.

Abbey was great in it of itself, but what Ireally enjoyed was the bus ride up the mountain to get there. We had magnificent pictures drawn outside our windows, with layers and layers of mountains within clouds and rays of sun behind the view of the city of Montecassino.

There -> is one of the many pictures we took on the way up.

Once we got to the Abbey we got to listen to Dr. Hatlie tell us about the history of it, and Sister Catherine told us St. Benedict's and other saints' stories right inside the monastery. (St. Thomas Aquinas was a student here for a long time). We were able to then buy St. Benedict medals and have them blessed by a priest of the Benedictine order.

The (slightly crooked picture of the) court yard of Montecassino

Then we got back on the bus on our way to Pompeii! Pompeii was yet another amazing surprise. My mind went back to fifth grade, when I studied Mount Vesuvius and the great city that it had destroyed, but had been dug up and you could visit. It was exactly that... a city almost frozen in time, of course in ruins, but with still identifiable components of what it once was.

The coolest part was seeing the paintings on the walls, still living as frescoes, and seeing the very decorations that the Pompeians enjoyed in their own households. We were able to spend two hours touring the entire city, my group being led by the Art&Arch teacher, the other by the West Civilization professor.

UD Romers walking in one of the main streets, and another picture of some of the remainders of some houses, with Mount Vesuvius in the background.

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After Pompeii, we got on the bus for another couple hours and arrived at hour hotel in Paestum till the next morning!

Saturday started out with a beautiful boat ride to Amalfi. It was an extremely small -very Italian and of course surrounded by beauty- town on the very coast of Amalfi. Much to my enjoyment, its patron saint is Sant Andrea. Unfortunately Andrea is a guy name in Italy... but it was still cool to see my name everywhere, and to go into the his Basilica. His crypt was there, as well as many relics.

After the guided tour through it, and the very short lecture, we had some time to venture through the town. Many of us decided to try the lemoncello since it's famous in Amalfi (because of its abundance of lemons mainly), and others went to the paper museum to buy leather-bound notebooks. After touring around a little, me and my friends decided to go sit by the port to admire the clear waters and write in our Art journals. It was of course, just awesome to be there :P.

To the left,

the coast of Amalfi,

and then, some of us...

It was slightly windy on the boat.

We got on the boat once more, and arrived at Positano. Positano, though I had never heard of it before, is possibly my new favorite place on earth. (To the left is the coast).I was awe-struck by the view from the very first second I saw the coast, and although we were given 2 hours to tour around and shop in the city or to swim, I decided to spend the whole time in the water.

So we hiked to the ocean (we found two little boys were dying of laughter as they threw sand and tiny stones at the huge line of us entering the beach with a broken plastic cup). I jumped right into the ocean after walking, and decided to venture as much as I could. I swam along the coast with two other friends, and we found a cave! Definitely one of the coolest things I've seen in my life, especially because in one of the sections of the cave was a slightly hidden staircase, the only thing that kept us from exploring further was the lock on the gate before it :(. We explored that cave (and got a some cuts all over our bodies) for about half an hour, finding smaller openings after big ones before swimming back to shore to get back on the boat. Of course no one had a camera, but we all talked about how much we would've loved to be able to share this amazing natural happening with everyone else. Once we were further away from the cave, we saw a tower above it, and realized (or pretended) that the stairs probably were probably a secret passageway to the dungeon.

When we got back to the hotel, we had a couple hours to spare before dinner, so most of us headed to the beach. It was a really cool bonding experience for about 40 of us, since we swam about 200 meters in, and reached a sand plateau where we played chicken fights, and (although the girls mostly watched) built 3 and 4 man pyramids and cheered for the winners.

Sunday began with early mass, followed by a traditional Italian breakfast of croissants, cheese, and ham before heading out to the Archeological Site of Paestum.

We sat beneath the shade of huge trees as we listened to each of our professors' contributions to the site. Dr. Osborn (Literature) talked about the literary geography of Virgil's Aeneid through the coast of Southern Italy, Dr. Nelson (Philosophy) spoke of the Greek philosophers in Italy, Dr. Hatlie (History) spoke of the Greek colonization in this part of Italy, and Dr. Lisot(Art&Arch) described the components of the enormous Doric temples from the Early Greek Classical era that stood before us. It was truly the epitome of the UD Rome Semester. Standing on-site, taking in knowledge on the columns of a true Liberal Arts Education, interacting first hand with the pictures in textbooks. (So above is the picture my friend Maggie took of Hera II, a temple believed to be dedicated to Hera of course. It stands next to Hera I, one believed to be dedicated to either Hera and Zeus, Hera and Poseidon - since the name Paestum comes from the previous name of the city: Poseidona from when it was dedicated to Poseidon- or to two sides of Hera: a motherly goddess, and a warrior goddess). We also went into the Archeological Museum of Paestum, and got to see many artifacts from the time period, not only from Paestum but also from other parts of ancient Greece.

I wish I could write with much more detail, but unfortunately I was not able to work on homework as much as I could have wanted this weekend, and I'm going home on Thursday :), so I have to get on it.

Hope you enjoyed this entry as much as I would've enjoyed to truly share this experience with you!

Pictures! Immagini!

You can see the Aula Magna (Big Classroom) to the left, the dorm building in the far center and one of the many palm trees as well as an olive tree :).

My roommates enjoying wine, bread and cheese for dinner :).

The view from our window.

I've seen some of the most amazing sunsets and dusks on this campus.

On our way down to Lake Albano

Lake Albano!

Swimming!

Weekend in Roma

This semester every weekend will be a three day weekend!! We have our five rigorous 90 minute classes from Monday to Thursday and then everyone is free to run off to wherever they planned.

The most popular destination this weekend was Cinque Terre. Around 70% of UD-Romers left the campus to go to this famously calm and beautiful location where they enjoyed cliff diving, sleeping on the beach (or under trees or under the rain) and touristing on the Mediterranean Coast.The rest of the students chose mostly to go to Sienna or to stay on Campus, where I had to stay because I was on duty this weekend. Although I was a bit upset at first, starting to get what Romers call the FMS syndrome, or Fear of Missing-out on Something syndrome, I soon realized that I cannot ever complain about having to spend a weekend in Rome.

So I looked online, and ended up discovering beautiful little towns and ended up having an amazing time.

On Friday I got up early and with six other people took two Cotral Buses to Anzio. Anzio is a small city on the coast of the Lazio region, about two hours away from our Due Santi Campus. In it is a historically important port, since the Allied forces used it to land in WWII, and so there is an amazing and well known Beachhead and City Archeological Museum. If you ever happen to go to Anzio on a day that is not a Friday, you'll be able to go in and please tell me how it is inside. The facade is amazing though, it was almost worth the two hours of walking around to get to it, especially since there were Roman lion sculptures and old US Navy anchors surrounding it.

Either way, what had attracted me most about this little town was the Domus Neronania ruins, recognized as the remains of Emperor Nero's residence. It was spectacular to be standing on the ruins on the very coast of the Mediterranean sea, looking into the blue that Nero would have seen from his prodigious palace. We climbed around the remnants of it, getting splashed by the sea as well as getting a couple cuts on our feet from all the rocks and ancient stones, which just made it feel all the more adventurous.

On the way back to campus we decided to try to avoid taking a second bus by stopping at Albano (a sweet little town about a 20 minute walk from campus) and then to walk back instead. However, one wrong turn turned this short walk into an hour and a half adventure, where we stumbled upon Castel Gandolfo (where the Pope resides in the summer, and also a place that UD had taken us to see before with an onsite lecture) in the middle.

So overall, we returned happy but tired from this magnificent day trip. I definitely recommend it.

On Saturday I decided to stay back on campus, and attempted to get ahead on some reading by the pool. I was able to read Aeschylus's Libation Bearers and some of St. Ignatius of Antichus' letters under the sun and calm that consumed campus these three days. After dinner we (the 10 or so people on campus) decided to play a game of Ultimate Frisbee that went until dusk, including the professor and his preteen daughters (who are the most extroverted pair of girls I know).

Sunday I envisioned another quiet day of study and perhaps more time for myself, but I soon grew anxious and jittery from reading in my empty room, and asked my suitemate Katie if she wanted to walk to Albano for some gelatto. However, as we were going to start our hike we saw another UD-er, a junior named Matt, waiting for the Cotral Bus into Rome, and decided it might be even better to just go into the city and find some quiet place to read there. He told us he had been waiting there for more than an hour, and thirty minutes later the bus still hadn't arrived... so we changed our plan again and took a Cotral into Castel Gandolfo.

So there we were in the city of Castel Gandolfo, looking down at the great Lake Albano and we decided once more to change our plan and find our way down to it. The walk/hike down was a bit of a scary struggle, since most of the roads don't actually have a paved walkways, or any sidewalks and cars and motorcycles tend not to respect any speed limit, but after about half an hour we were before the vast body of water, surrounded by forested mountains and very few other people.

We made our way through the rocks into the sand and warm water, and to our surprise it was a very weird sort of black quick sand that found our toes. It was a weird feeling, and we had to step on stones or our feet would sink in and we quickly found ourselves knee-deep in lakewater. We had a great time there, splashing each other and running on the quicksand trying not to sink, before we headed on a quest for gelatti and te freddo. With icecream in our hands, we saw pedal-boats, and once more said, "why not?".

The three of us rented one and decided to try to make it across the entire lake in the one hour allotted for our money. However, when we were in the middle under the hot noon sun, and we had finished our refreshments... we could not resist the temptation to jump into the azure waters and so we swam for some minutes before heading back.

Here is a picture of lake Albano. I don't have a camera this semester, so I will be relying on my friends' facebook-picture-uploading abilities... and so far not so good :P... And I still wish for you guys to be able to see some of what I'm seeing.. and since there are pictures from google... here it is.

I'm still waiting on the pictures though, and I'll add them as soon as I get access to them :).

Overall, it was a very chill weekend. I ended up going to Anzio as I had planned out, got on with my school work, and even ended up having a spontaneous day with two people I did not really know that well, all within the "state" of Rome, and getting back to campus on time, at 9pm for my duty time every night.

I'll try to make my blog entries more frequent, and consequently shorter (and perhaps easier to read :P), but I'm glad I got time today to be able to share some experiences with you all. Wish you were here!