Southern Italy

Last week we did a group travel to southern Italy.  We spent one day in Naples, stayed in Sorrento, did a day at Pompei, hiked the top part of Mt. Vesuvius, spent a free day on the island of Capri, a day in Amalfi, and a day at Caserta a massive palace.
Naples was the worst place ive been in all of Italy.  It was a landfill, the streets were covered in trash as well as heaps of trash piled everywhere, the buildings were old and decrepid, it smell like urine, there were more street hustlers than ive ever seen, and the view of the sea was blocked by storage containers and large boats. I felt unsafe there for the first time here and didnt really want to take my camera out.  We did however have some good thick crust pizza and the hottest cup of coffe in the world.  I wouldnt recommend Naples to anyone though. Just head south to nicer places.

More stories coming soon.

Enjoy the photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/59481748@N03/

Rome with my parents and Lago di Vico/Faggeta

Some photos from Rome when my parents were here theres the inside of the colosseum, and some shots of Bernini's Elephant and 4 Rivers fountain in Piazza Navona.  Then last tuesday we were suppose to go to a horse race for carnivale in a next town over called Ronciglione funny thing about that place probably not appropriate so ask me personally if your interested hahaha but they had to cancel the race on tuesday because the race on sunday ended fatally.  The story in my interpretation as I heard many different versions in translated english from a few different Italians was that a horse in the race, the horses race jockeyless through the main street in the town, somehow impaled or collided with one of the metal barrier partitions to protect the crowd and sliced its underside open and spilled blood and guts all over the road and viewers and was then trampled by the remaining horses. Very brutal and due to that the animal rights activists persuaded the town to shut the event down for tuesday too bad I was really hoping to see the race and get some pics.  Anyway we went into town just over the mountains from Viterbo, and talked to some locals, got coffee and some typical carnivale pastries.  On the way out and back we explored some of the mountain area and the lake.  Lago di Vico was real cold up in the mountains and is apparently a popular spot when the warm weather hits but was pretty dead when we arrived.  We then went to the top of Mt. Chimina to the Faggeta, which in Italian means beach wood.  The whole forest consisted of only beach trees and this is actually a very rare occurrence because this specific type of beach tree is only supposed to grow at much higher altitudes but the forest has thrived here at much lower altitudes for a very long time. It was real nice up there to get into the woods and out of the hustle bustle inside the walls.  We watched the sun set and saw some wild boar tracks which is the most common predator in the area.

Link for photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/59481748@N03/

Pienza and Acquapendente

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Link for photos above:  We went to two small towns called Acquapendente and Pienza in the first town we went to a church with a fully original basement where the capitals of the columns were all very intricately carved, we also had lunch in that town which was a set menu and really good.  We then went north into the Tuscany region to the small town of Pienza which has the oldest renaissance garden in Italy, the garden was really small and so was the town but there I had some of the best cheese ive eaten here mostly sheep cheese and very sharp.

Bracciano and Field trip for Studio Art

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Link Above for photos from Bracciano where there was a late 14th century castle and Lake Bracciano.  It was beautiful there we also saw two brand new red Ferraris race by while we were walking along the white line on the road absolutely amazing only in Italy.  The second set of pics are from a small town about 45 minutes away where we went for our studio art class.  The castle was once a getaway for the pope and across the square from the castle was a church were we were able to go down into the crypts and walk around the tunnels that connected the castle to the church and also provided a way out of town.  The whole experience inside that castle and inside the crypts had a very uncomfortable feeling.  There were lots of bones under the church and just a very eerie feel.  I was happy to get out of that church and town but luckily on the way out a stop at the pasticeria eased me out.

way behind

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Link to pics above, Pics from Villa Adriana just outside Rome crazy roman ruins and then the at the Mediterrian Sea just outside Tarquinia also 2000 year old Eutruscan Tombs.

Villa D'Este

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Here are the pics enjoy!  Story will come soon, I'm a little behind on posting.

Workin Hard or Hardly Working

This past saturday our gardens and cuisine professor asked for volunteers  to help her in her garden out in the countryside.  She is a landscape architect and a great chef and I had heard that she has a beautiful house and garden around her house and the offer of a good home cooked meal I just couldn't turn it down.  So my friend Mike and I volunteered to help her and she picked us up at 930 in the morning.  Unfortunately I was in a bit of rough shape that morning but ended up sweating it out once we got out there.  On the way out she took us on this ancient Etruscan road that was carved at least thirty feet down through solid rock sometime around 400 BC.  The road was pretty scary actually, hardly large enough for a 4 door fiat punto and wound around the looming rock walls at close to 90 degree corners to the point that our teacher had to lay on the horn while bustling around the corners.  Once out of the tunnel like road we hit the countryside and the pavement soon ended to a terribly rutted dirt road through hundreds of acres of sheep farms, the sheep kept and bred mostly for their milk to make cheese.  The sheep had their lambs and she informed us that most of the lambs would not live past easter as it is customary to eat the lambs on easter.  The older sheep however, were rarely eaten because the meat becomes too tough.  The farm surrounding their house, as she said had over a thousand sheep and the sheep were the loudest neighbors they had.  As we pulled off the road into their driveway we came upon their house a three story place constructed of the local redish brown volcanic rock.  The yard or i should say garden surrounding the house was absolutely beautiful, a few rows of olive trees which they use to hand crush their own olive oil, a formal 4 section garden design out front and a wrap around porch covered in lattice with numerous thorned vines running up the pillars and up the lattice.  The whole compound was surrounded by tall hedges and from inside the garden yard you felt as if in paradise because the only view was over the hedges and spread out over the countryside to blue hazy mountains sitting just on the horizon.  However, lost in the beauty we were assigned to a pile of dirt towards the back the of house.  There we were given pitchforks to sift through the pile of dirt and pick out the trash, sticks, rocks, and gremenia, which is a kind of root weed that grows and sprouts without being planted or cared for.  As we prepared the dirt to be put into the vegetable garden her husband would shovel it into the the wheel barrow and one of us would help him dump it carefully not to spill into the raised bed garden which was already growing leafy greens and beans.  After a few hours of work at the same monotonous project we took a break for lunch of capricollo, prosciutto, pane pizza, and caciatta cheese.  After the half hour break we returned for another three and a half hours of work and depleted most of the pile.  They were impressed with our work and were satisfied with the progress we made that day.  We cleaned up the yard and she set up to start dinner.  The first step was starting a fire in their outside wood fired oven because the flavor from it was unmatched.  While our teacher started at dinner, her husband took us out to these ancient Etruscan tombs.  Carved into the solid exposed rock from a cliff side was a full necropolis.  The set up of the tombs was a large carved facade with T shaped "false door" above the actual entrance and the actual entrance was just a large void into the cliff face with a set of stairs cut down below the meeting area.  Down into the actual tomb would lie the bodies in stone sarcophaguses of the families deceased members.  The actual site was in pretty terrible shape as it was open to the public and there are no funds for the up keep.  Most of the facades were broken off and stairs to the tombs were blocked off by the fallen rock from the facade.  All of the tombs had been raided in earlier times and all that remained were the massive beds that the bodies would lay on.  I was pretty erie being down inside the tombs a very strange energy was in the air and we didn't spend lots of time actually inside.  From the necropolis out across a small flat valley and over a river sat the acropolis.  Taken over in the medieval times by a fort and lookout tower.  The only remaining piece of Etruscan architecture left was the original entrance archway.  But we went inside the fort anyway and climbed to the top of the lookout tower for a spectacular view out over the Lazio region.  From the top you could clearly see why the spot was chosen for a civilization.  Where the acropolis sat was on a triangular shape of land in between two rivers that converged at the point and entrance of the fort.  And as I said directly across the valley sat up on the hillside and inside the cliff the necropolis, completely visible from the acropolis and protected by the river.  That finished our tour of the ancient landscape and we wandered back to the house through vineyards and olive groves the vineyards mostly used for homemade wine which to todays standards are unfavorable and only the farmers who make their own drink their own, comparable i guess to moonshine.  We returned back to the house exhausted and in just enough time to sit out on the porch and watch the blood red sun sink beneath transcending lines of pinks, purples, and blues.  Then came dinner, for first course we had pasta with a sausage cream sauce followed by a roasted chicken and potatoes and the Fibonacci sequence broccoli like vegetable.  Accompanied by an expensive bottle of local red wine which was a mix of merlot and some other grape that I was unfamiliar with.  To finish the night off we had a fresh made apple crisp and an interesting conversation about what to do around Viterbo.  We worked hard but it was totally worth it, good people, good food, good times.