Alba Fucens and Aqueducts

It's a good thing that Monday and Wednesday are academics-only days, because I'm already behind enough on this blog! Thankfully, the weekend is great catch up time (in between catching up on homework!), so here's the adventures and pictures from Tuesday.

Tuesday is the long day--we eat breakfast at 7:30, hop on a bus by 8:00, eat our bag lunches on-site, and make it back anywhere from 5:00-7:00 in the evening. It's exhausting, but it's also been a ton of fun so far. As the title suggests, this Tuesday's adventure was to visit Alba Fucens and some aqueducts.

Alba Fucens was a strategically-placed Roman colony designed to control the region by virtue of being stuck right in the middle of the only road to Rome through the Appenine Mountains (the "backbone of Italy"). It was apparently very successful at this, and while today it's a little bit in the middle of nowhere, the ruins are still in fairly good shape...for ruins. There's enough of the superstructure (the materials above-ground, so basically everything but the foundations--I'm learning archaeological terms!) to be able to see how the town was laid out, which was really cool, especially from above!

See? Our professors apparently thought there was also enough of the superstructure remaining that we would be able to identify the buildings and their purposes, so we were split up into groups, given a map of the place, and told to identify certain buildings they had marked out. The group I was in managed to have no one with any archaeological experience, which made things difficult, but in the end we were able to correctly identify all but one location, and we were pretty proud of ourselves. It was difficult but a lot of fun!

Down in the ruins, with another group across the way working on the assignment.

Our professors, discussing how best to torment us next who would take which part of the area to discuss. From left: Dr. Adam Serfass, Dr. Scott Smith, Ms. Dora Vennarucci, and Dr. Chris Gregg. I love my professors :) And yes, I have their permission to post their photos here.

These are the remains (well, the reconstructed remains) of a hypocaust--a Roman heating system. They're really very nifty, and I encourage you to look them up. This was our final clue to the most difficult area we had to identify--the baths!

Random philosophical digression time: this assignment, along with our romp around Cerveteri, has really made me think about how different this sort of thing would be back in America. Obviously the US doesn't have ruins as old as Europe does, but the older buildings and sites that we do have tend to be so carefully protected that at best, you can lean over a fence to take pictures of stuff that's at least ten feet away. Here, there are certainly some things that are fenced in or behind glass, but there are also a lot of places where you can not only get up close, but can also climb all over the ancient ruins. I enjoy this freedom immensely, of course, and it's a significantly better way to learn the sites--but at the same time, I'm horrified at the thought of these ruins (particularly Pompeii) being destroyed by the constant presence of students and tourists. I know a lot of the sites that we're visiting as part of this program aren't necessarily available to the average tourist, but I still do worry.

Anyway, back to the site. Before we actually went down to Alba Fucens, we had our history part of the lesson up on a hill overlooking the site. There was an old church there that still had some of the structure of the temple that used to be there. You know what this means...

Columns! I warned you all that there would be lots of column pictures :P One of my friends from my last trip to Rome has a picture of me gleefully hugging a column at the Pantheon. If I can't find it somewhere on the internet, I'll happily recreate it while I'm here.

After we'd briefly explored the church (I've got a few more pictures of mosaics and such inside the church, but they're not from the original temple. If you're interested in seeing them, let me know and I can post them as well), we headed halfway down the hill to come upon the amphitheater. It was relatively small, as amphitheaters go, but Alba Fucens isn't really that large a colony.

Yep, that's me sitting on the edge in my cozy sweatshirt. We were up in the mountains fairly early in the morning, and it was cold! It was a nice change from the really hot days out in the sun though. The two guys you can see behind me are fellow Centristi, wrestling in honor of the gladiatorial games formerly held in the amphitheater. Because we're all geeky classics students, someone yelled "Stop wrestling! We're not in Greece!" My friend LJ eventually won, and grabbed his umbrella as a 'sword'--we all voted that he 'kill' the other gladiator, and they dutifully acted out the scene. I love this group!

After the amphitheater, we trooped down to Alba Fucens proper for the assignment that I've already talked about. I do have a few more pictures from that area though:

There were archaeologists there uncovering the next section of the paved road. I've never had much interest in archaeology before, but the longer I'm here, the cooler it sounds.

Franco! This is Franco Sgariglia, the director of the program--so basically the person who runs everything and the guy we all run to for Centro-related questions. He's wonderful! He doesn't normally come on field trips with us, but he did this time because he had a surprise for us...a Franco Surprise.

But before I get into that, have a picture of a pretty tree. Just because.

And then...more pretty trees!

And yes, there's a reason for them this time--here we are up in the mountains, apparently in the middle of nowhere, for the Franco Surprise--which turns out to be a visit to two old Roman aqueducts! This is not the sort of thing you can do as just a normal tourist--Franco is friends with the guy who runs the hotel and tours here. He spoke Italian and very little English, so we had to stay close to the teachers for them to provide translations (which was entertaining--while they all know far more Italian than we do, they're not necessarily fluent, so they had to keep asking questions. It made me feel a lot better about my own terrible Italian), but it was still wonderful and informative. And, of course, the area was gorgeous:

This is the Anio River, and the source of these former aqueducts--obviously there's no water running through them now. Yes, it really is that green--we were trying to puzzle out why (our current theory is clay in the water coloring it), but we're obviously not sure. I was just happy to be among all the beautiful trees and water! On a somewhat related note, my friend Elliot noticed this passenger hanging onto his pants as we were preparing to head down:

The praying mantis was apparently not at all afraid of us, and let Elliot hold him while we all crowded around to stare and take pictures, before Elliot finally relocated the mantis to a nearby bush so we could be on our way. Praying mantises are very cool.

Anyway, our first stop was in a small cave on our way down to the aqueducts:

The monks that used to live here cut this hole down into the previously water-filled grotto where we were standing to draw up water. The hole is actually a lot deeper than it looks here. Of course, the grotto eventually ran out of water, and since they had this nice little enclosed space...

...it became a burial ground. Yes, those are human bones in the corner there. I told you this wasn't a typical tourist spot. We continued following the path down, seeing a few grottos and ledges in the limestone where the monks would pray or meditate. There was a miniature church stuck in the side of the mountain, and while I'm generally not a church person, there were some very pretty paintings in there.

This one was my favorite. It's still remarkably well-preserved.

We eventually made it all the way down to the aqueduct, and I found that we got to play with three of my minor phobias--acrophobia, claustrophobia, and arachnophobia. You'll have noticed that I mentioned us making our way down--well, we were headed down some fairly small and steep stairs (which had tons of slippery leaves on them), with a lovely view of the river far (see the first river picture) below us:

At one point along the path, we discovered that the guardrail had broken...and the replacement was a little terrifying:

Then, of course, the aqueducts aren't exactly designed for lots of people to be walking in them. They're really quite narrow (and very dark), and we were packed in there pretty tightly at points. They're also very low--I have never before been so grateful to be only five feet tall. I had to duck at exactly one point--I think everyone else hit their heads at least once.

The entrance to one of the aqueducts, and our mad press of people overlooking the dam where we had to turn around and go back out (the path beyond was unstable).

And, as these things tend to happen in unfrequented dark spaces, we had some company in the aqueducts:

*shudder* I really don't like spiders. Thankfully we saw more webs than actual arachnids.

And of course, the experience of going through the aqueducts far outweighed all of these fears. The above picture of the aqueduct entrance is probably the best one for seeing what the aqueducts looked like--all of my pictures from inside are either pretty dark or washed out, and its sometimes hard to tell which way is up. I do still have some pretty cool pictures of some of the elements inside though:

This would have originally been a maintenance entrance to the aqueduct. Now, it's basically a beautiful skylight to the outdoors (and a relief from staring at the walls with flashlights).

Here's another shaft for drawing up water. It's very tall--we saw this at the end of the second aqueduct we visited, and it was pretty surreal to realize how far underground we were.

Here you can see the striations left by different levels of water in the aqueduct over time. There's a fairly solid academic theory that the black line you see at the top there is from the ash of Vesuvius' eruption. My inner geology and classics nerds danced with joy at that little tidbit.

One of the best parts about being underground, of course, are the nifty limestone formations you get in the parts where the aqueduct opens up into a natural grotto or the cracks higher up in the walls (the lower parts of the walls are covered in a smooth waterproof cement. The Romans were geniuses). This place is actually a lot more sparkly than it appears in the picture--not quite the glitter you get from most limestone caves you see, but still very pretty.

Of course, the presence of limestone means calcium carbonate, which means buildup--apparently the deposits needed to be chipped away about every fifty years, which is pretty impressive. In case you're curious about how they cleared the buildup while there was water running through, there's a hole from the higher aqueduct down into the lower one that they could open to drain the upper aqueduct. I don't know what they did for the lower one. Here Dora sticks her hand on the actual wall of the aqueduct to show us just how deep the deposits were. Again, geology + classics = a very happy Katie.

Finally, a very old and very cool graffito. Did you know that 'graffiti' has a singular form? Neither did I. Yes, that really is dated 1672--and it's been tested and determined to be legitimate. The pot (with the red from someone else's camera about to go off) is there to indicate that the person who wrote it was a potter. There's another graffito, also from 1672, with a shoe, but I don't have as good a picture of that one. No one knows how these got here--there's more recent (from the 1800s) graffiti by archaeologists indicating how far they got in one day (apparently pretty far), but the older ones are a mystery.

So, that was my Tuesday--we were out for eleven hours total (luckily we made it back for dinner at 7:30, or Pina and Maria would have been very mad at us!), making for an amazing but exhausting day. Thank goodness for getting to sleep in on Wednesdays!