A Week of Tuesdays

First, a short note—while these may show up in large clumps as I get internet access, they’re generally written at the end of each day, so when I say “today”, it’s the day that I visited the site, not the day that these are uploaded. Hence, today is Friday. Now that I’ve confused you all, let’s get started!

The title is because while it might be Friday, it feels like Tuesday in that it’s a full day of site visits—and it’s going to be like this the entire week! We all got up and dragged ourselves down for breakfast at 7:30 and were on the bus with all of our luggage at 8:00, on our meandering way toward Sicily. Well, I say toward Sicily—we actually spend the night in Paestum. Anyway, it was about a three hour bus ride to our first site visit, at Velia, and we had a brief stop at a gas station for coffee and a bathroom break. There was an adorable cat there, which I sadly do not have pictures of because I didn’t have my camera with me. But I found out that professor Scott is also a cat person, and that he names (and takes pictures of) every cat he comes across, so in case you’re curious, this cat was dubbed “Taco”. Just because.

We made it to Velia at about 1:30, and ate lunch before hiking up the hill to see the ruins. We found another adorable kitty there:

 This one’s name is Bartleby. He was very friendly! And, of course, happy to have us feed him :)

Anyway, to the site proper: Velia was a Greek colony (the area we’re mostly traveling in this week is called Magna Graecia, and was controlled by the Greeks and occasionally the Phoenicians, before the Romans came in), then taken over by the Romans, and later settled in medieval times. So, there’s a lot of different ruins in the area. Velia has elements of both Greek and Roman colonies.

 Look! Lovely Roman brick. A nice mix of opus reticulatum (the diamond-shaped bricks) and opus testaceum (the thinner, horizontal bricks).

Here's some of the ruins, with the medieval fort later built at the site visible on the hill in the background.

While the ruins are currently somewhat inland, in ancient times Velia was a seaport (in fact, the silting up of the port contributed to its eventual decline), so most of the area is paved in these gray rocks with beautiful lines of salt running through them.

Velia is particularly known for the Porta Rossa, a monumental gate that is remarkably fully intact. Isn’t it purty? It also happens to be fairly high up a hill, so there were some gorgeous views, including of the ruins of Velia below.

I told you I'd occasionally indulge myself in artsy-fartsy shots. Sorry :) It is a nice view through the Porta Rossa though. We then headed up the hill for more sites

It’s much easier to view archaeological evidence from above! When you’re in among the ruins, you get to see some beautiful structures, but it’s very difficult to understand what you’re looking at, at times.

Up at the top of the hill we saw this little Greek theater.

Also at the top of the hill were some medieval ruins, primarily this lovely tower. We actually got to climb up into the tower, where there were even more spectacular views, including the bay. There were also a ton of lizards.

 Very pretty views of the bay and surrounding fields. Also a tad bit windy--we were pretty high up (yet I love you all enough to pose for a picture with a sheer drop just a foot behind me).

The stairs up to the tower were sort of fun--here's a big group of Centristi heading back down them. Also, Mom pointed out that apparently I've failed to explain the "Centristi" thing--it's sort of a neologism in Italian, it just means students from the Centro--so, me and my fellow students (and technically teachers too).

These are just pretty flowers--I loved them at our house in San Jose, so it was a little nostalgic to see them growing everywhere here. The climate in Sicily (well, and southern Italy where we are now) is really a lot like that of California.

I handed my camera off to a friend and said "get a 'candid' shot for me" and went to wander off in the ruins a bit. This is the result--no, I'm not sure what I was staring at. Probably the drop--the medieval tower and ruins were built on top of a temple, and the part that I'm standing on is part of the original temple, with a fairly deep depression next to it.

These three (Bob, Emmett, and Blount) somehow found their way out onto this little parapet, and were kind enough to let me take a picture. You might recognize them from my previous picture of the tower--I try to keep my pictures in chronological order here, but all of my pictures of the tower after climbing the hill have the sun in the background shadowing everything.

Here's a picture of Franco taking a picture of the town below as we started heading back down the hill. How very meta.

 And here's my picture of just the town itself, with the beautiful sea in the background.

There were two small museums at the Velia site, on different parts of the mountain. The one in the old medieval church was very small, and I don’t have any good pictures from it, but the other museum, while not much larger, had some very nice pieces.

 It’s sadly not a very good picture, but this is a vessel carved out of pure obsidian—it was awesome. I love obsidian!

This is a horse belt in bronze. It’s incredibly ornate, and remarkably well preserved.

 Roman glass! We couldn’t believe that a piece this large had been so perfectly preserved—I think it was fully intact. It’s a lovely blue.

After the second museum, on our way out, we got to see the substructure remains of a Roman house. It was a little interesting to try to analyze, because it appeared that there had been some reconstruction, and the reconstruction had blocked the original doorway...so there was some discussion on what would be the best place for where the door would have originally been, as well as the usual game of “how much of this is original?”

You can see the impluvium (the shallow rectangular area) here—I’m inordinately fond of these little pools, and you will see a lot of pictures of them when I go to Pompeii in a month or so.

Remember the salt-veined rocks from above? Well, this is what it looks like when the salt has eroded away.

Some of the cool three-pronged bricks that used to be made in the area--these are the original Roman bricks, in remarkably good condition.

After we were done at Velia, we hopped back on the bus (we’ll be spending a lot of time on this bus) to go to Paestum for our hotel and a Franco Surprise. We pulled into the hotel...and it turned out our Franco Surprise involved a view much like this (well, minus me--I came on the scene later):

BEACH TIME! Of course, I didn’t bring a swimsuit to Italy in the first place, and then I lost my shorts on the bust a while back—so I freaked out over that for a while, but managed to find someone to lend me a pair of shorts (thanks McKenzie!) so I could jump in the water. Incidentally, I would have gone in even if I’d had nothing but jeans—it’s the friggin’ ocean!

I have now swum in the Mediterranean! It’s absolutely gorgeous. The water is spectacularly clear—I could still see the bottom even after swimming out far enough that I couldn’t touch the bottom (which was a ways out—it slopes very gently). The water was a bit on the cold side for me, but I was at the beach so I didn’t care. My friends in this photo are Maggie, Alex, Lauren, Brittney, and Caitlin.

Eventually it was a little too cold, so most of us got out and hung out on the beach for a while, and a large group got together to play Ultimate Frisbee, including two of our professors. The other two hung out with the rest of us and offered snarky commentary on the game, which was hilarious and awesome.

Some shots of the game for you all. There were a lot of cool diving and jumping catches—people were very competitive!

We all trooped back to the hotel, showered all the sand off, and had a late (8:30!) dinner, and we were all ready to collapse into bed—but Franco had another surprise for us. We dragged ourselves onto the bus one more time, and we had a short drive out for a sneak preview of tomorrow’s site visit.

Temples! Lit up at night! They were spectacular—I’ve tried my best to get good shots. There will be more pictures tomorrow of the temples in the daytime. (Incidentally, since I don’t have an internet connection right now, I’m writing this in a Word document, and it really makes me see how freaking much I write—this is almost three pages long, without pictures. Sorry!)