SICILY!

Okay, so to begin with, there is no way to post all the pictures I want to from this trip, but even if I could it would not do any justice to how absurdly beautiful the entire week was. On the way down we stopped in Paestum for a day, then Regio Calabria, and then we took a ferry over to Sicily and traveled through there for the rest of the week. It was a great week, aside from half the Centro, including myself, coming down with a puking virus. But we all survived. I think in a weird way it brought us closer.

The Tomb (well, its lid) of the Diver at Paestum. I did my presentation on this for our archaeology class. It's kind of complicated to explain, but it comes from Paestum, which was a Greek colony originally, and it's a great example of a mixture of Etruscan and Greek influences in art. It's also beautiful and incredibly well-preserved givent that it's well over 2000 years old.

One of the (Greek) temples of Hera at Paestum. Doric temples are sweet.

I realize that I have a lot of pictures of Sophie on this blog, which is funny because she hates being in pictures. Anyway, this is the ferry over to Sicily.
The Greek theater (which evolved into a more Roman theater when they took over). The smoky mountain in the back is Etna, which is often mildly active. I was pretty much in awe of the view the entire time. They say Taormina is the most beautiful town in Sicily, I think I could agree with that.



Taormina again. Sorry I don't know how to rotate this stuff!

More to come.

Fortuna Primagenia, out and about in Rome

The column of Marcus Aurelius at sunset, right after coming out of Zara.
Vintage shopping (is terrible in Rome) with Ali and Jackie.
The Spanish steps. (I proceeded to fall down several of them after taking this photo.)
Standing on the (huge) temple of Fortuna Primagenia in Praeneste. It was a Republican temple, possibly built by a returning general with war spoils. People made pilgrimages to it from all over. Pretty cool. That's all I remember. (We went in March!)
View from the top.

LOOOOONG overdue

Hi all,

Sorry I have been terrible about updating. I am making up for it starting now!

First, here are some picture from Cosa. We visited Cosa in mid-February. It was the site of a Roman province, and actually has some well-preserved remains, especially of Cosa's forum (above). Studying these towns is useful because they were often modelled after Rome, and so they can help us reconstuct certain buildings in Rome that we don't have any traces of.
Sophie!!!! and an old temple in the background
the view was the best part!

Lavinium, Nemi, Tusculum

This week's all day field trip was to some very early Roman sites at a few places north of the city. Our first stop was Tusculum, where we saw the 13 (maybe 14 or 15...they recently excavated some more) alters, as well as the alleged tomb of Aeneas (first picture below), which was definitely not actually the tomb of Aeneas, but probably a wealthy Etruscan from the 8th or 7th c BC. It was still kind of exciting.


In the field nearby were the remains of a this little medieval church, which is completely unrelated, but I thought it was cool.
Our next stop was Nemi. We went to the ship musesum, where we saw a few small remains and some reconstructions of ships thought to be the luxury ships of Caligula. Unfortunately the ships themselves, which were excavated from the nearby lake under Mussolini, were destroyed during in 1944 in WWII. We then climbed up a hill to the temple of Diana, shown below. (This is only one wall of it). It dates back to maybe the 8th c BC, but it became a Latin sanctuary in about 500 BC. The presiding priest was called the Rex Nemorensis. Apparently, if you wanted to take over as the Rex, you had to find the sacred branch, and use it to kill the existing Rex Nemorensis. Ironically, the temple is in a grove, so I wasn't sure which tree was the sacred one.

Next was Tusculum. We climbed up a steep hill to a site where a lot of wealthy Romans had villas, including Cicero. Despite the wind and fog, the view was amazing. The little house-looking structure is a Christian shrine. I'm not sure what the other lump of rocks is.

The view.
More view!

a few random adventures

This past week we focused on the origins of Rome: the Etruscans who inhabited the land originally, and the earliest Romans. The first two pictures are from a necropolis (literally, city for the dead) in Tarquinia, which is about 1 hour NW of Rome. The first one I took standing on the hill of the necropolis. It wasn't a great day for photos, but the dark patch on the mountain on the left is the site that was inhabited by the Etruscans who used the necropolis.

This is one of the many tombs in the Necropolis...it dates to the 6th century BC...and the paintings are still incredibly vivid. We were able to access the tombs by some modern stairs (they are maybe 2 storeys underground) and look at them through glass. This one is called the tomb of the leopards (you can see the leopards on the frieze at the top), and it depicts a banquet...this tomb in particular shows Greek influence on Etrsucan art, etc.
After Tarquinia, we got back on the bus and headed to Cerveteri (Caere in ancient times), which was an Etruscan city in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. We visited the Banditaccia Necropolis, which had a few different types of tombs. The one below is a mound tomb, which was made by cutting into natural rock. We saw some other really amazing tombs, one of which was probably about 3 storeys underground. All of these tombs were built so that they could be repeatedly accessed...they all had stairs of some kind. The necropolis was HUGE. I don't know how people back then avoided getting extremely lost.

Anyway, moving on from academia. Sorry to bore anyone. Today we went to an Italian football game! Roma vs Genoa. Roma, of course was victorious, 3-0. (Ironically, they're ranked below Genoa). It was pretty awesome. I can only imagine how much pride I would have living in a city with such a long history. I felt a lot of pride as a visitor. (We all did...here's us with our Roma scarves). The picture below this one is during a song everyone sang for the Rome team...we all plan on learning the lyrics for the next game we go to. I think the best part was the bus ride back to the Centro. We crammed on with a bunch of Rome fans and the entire ride they were yelling and singing different team chants. I've never seen anything like it in the US...but again, there's a lot of city pride.
Okay, that's all for now. I have to get some sleep for this coming week. But what an awesome game.

Obelisks

So today was our first day to really get acquainted with downtown Rome and its public transportation. We were split into groups, and had to navigate the city to find two assigned obelisks, which are Egyptian monuments brought back to Rome by different emperors. Most of them have Christian symbols/engravings on them now. When we got back we gave a short presentation.

It was an awesome day, aside from the rain. We saw a ton of different famous sites, ate our first Centro bag lunch, learned from a girl on the bus that there's an "ice bar" in Italy where all drinks are served in glasses made out of ice, and managed to get pretty lost.

Here are a few highlights from yesterday, when I walked into Rome with 2 girls from my program to look around, and today. The weather hasn't been great. But it's beautiful here even when it rains.

We live in the neighborhood of Monteverde, on Gianicolo (the name of the hill). Down these steps is Trastevere, which is right across the Tiber from Rome. (Climbing back up these was incredibly difficult.)

A Roman drinking fountain. You can find them all over. You cover the end of the spout, and the water comes up out of a small hole in it. This is Sophie...she had a little trouble at first.
Downtown Rome at sunset. I took this right after we discovered the column of Trajan.
The Vatican. This is the first one from our adventure today. That's me in the center, with my touristy looking backpack. I already have much more sympathy for the tourists in NY that I always looked down on. At least we travel in a group here, so it's obvious what we're doing, but the Centro staff did warn us against being Brutti Americani, the "ugly" Americans that talk loudly, negatively compare everything in Rome to America, and wear high white socks, sweatsuits, and baseball caps that say "Roma". I think I have avoided all those things so far.
Here's our first obelisk, in the Piazza del San Pietro. They still had a huge creche set up on the other side, the the tree to the left is a Christmas tree.
Here's a few of us in front of the Trevi Fountain, which we passed on our way to our second Obelisk.
The base of the second Obelisk (in the Piazza della Minerva) is on the right, and the Pantheon is in the background.
The coffered dome ceiling and the oculus in the Pantheon. Definitely the most impressive sight of the day.

That's all for now. Class officially starts tomorrow (I'm taking Greek, Latin, and the Ancient City course, which counts as two classes and takes up the majority of our time with field trips.) So I will probably update this much less frequently. But I hope you liked the photos. (I'm trying to avoid making a zillion Facebook albums. I'm trying to avoid Facebook in general...)

Ciao!
Mary

The Centro

Front and street view of the Centro (it used to be a convent). All 38 of us live, eat and take our classes here. There are 5 American professors who live nearby and teach the classes. A lot of our time is going to be spent on field trips to various locations in Rome (and two extended field trips; one to Palermo and one to Sicily). All the students live on the 2nd and 3rd floors in singles or doubles (I'm really glad I requested a single. It's good to have some space.)


Our backyard! There's also a small fish pool with some goldfish, some intersting plants, a ping pong table made out of concrete (weird), and...

a lemon tree!? We also have an orange tree. We ate one and were pretty impressed.

Tomorrow we start at 8am with breakfast, then we are walking around the neighborhood (Trastevere) to become familiar with it. We went for dinner tonight...we're mostly surrounded by apartments, with some stores and restaurants. The American Academy is nearby, and there's a beautiful park right down the block I'm looking forward to seeing.

That's all for now. I need to go to sleep (I think I slept a total of 1.5 hours last night because of flying/time change.)

I'm finally here! I got in about 30 mins ago...

I will start with real posts (pictures, mostly) soon!

Mary