21.7 Piles of Pompeiian Stuff

But first, a blog note: POOH! My pretty blog font doesn’t work in Italy! Large frowny face.

Went to the Museo Archeologico. The most amazing collection in the most impressive and yet depressing building. Rick Steves calls it dusty, unkempt and decrepit, and there’s some truth to it. Huge Baroque palazzo, magnificent columns, staircases, ceilings, windows – badly lit, badly maintained (a bunch of it was covered in scaffolding but no indication of what work was actually being done), with a general air of, “Oh, and there’s some cool stuff we found upstairs. Have a look! It’s up there somewhere….” The map of the collection was a xerox copy of a fundamentally unhelpful floor plan (it managed not to mention that several rooms of the collection were off side stairways that weren’t marked). Much isn’t labeled, especially the frescoes from Pompeii and the Villa dei Papyri. I took bunches of pictures but the lighting was sufficiently terrible that I’m not sure even my groovy camera was able to compensate. We shall see – Elise assures me that she can fix most things now that we have LightRoom on the big computer.

It's been so hot that doing much on any given day is difficult. We all achieve brain melt pretty early on. Back to the seawater pool!

22.7    We’re Driving a Bike with a Roof. Your Argument Is Still Invalid.

Had planned to hang out with an SCA friend today, but her son was sick so they flaked on us, and we ended up just checking out the neighborhood of the Lungomare (where we’re staying). We rented a bike…thing. It’s a little pedal-driven carriage, with 2, 4 or 6 sets of pedals. We all three fit nicely in a 2-set equipage, and rode up and down the Lungomare for a while. It’s hard work for two out-of-shape Americane :) but it was very silly and fun. There were 2 steering wheels, but only the right one was the actual steering. I drove to start with and Elise drove back, which was only moderately terrifying. Remind me not to be her driver’s ed teacher. Then we went swimming again and taught some French kids how to play Marco Polo.

This week has been a dream and a nightmare for Meg As Linguist :) I’ve had to dredge up Italian, French (yes, David, I hear you falling off your chair laughing) and German. I love it, but it’s frustrating too, not to be good enough to just talk to people. The Italian is improving, however; I managed to understand the terms and conditions of a phone I propose to buy tomorrow and ask intelligent questions about it, senza parlare inglese. So that’s progress. And hey, my French has definitely improved after trying to talk to a bunch of 4- and 7-year-olds! The girls were very entertained at one point when they met a little girl named Alix (pronounced, basically, Elise) and so they were shouting Alix Alix Alix at each other and at Alix and her sister all morning. Forte, as Alix might have said, amusant.

Tomorrow is supposed to be beach day, either down to Positano, or up to Miseno (my personal preference, as Miseno is both closer and more Roman-history-y), but we’ll have to see when we get up – it’s supposed to thunderstorm all day. Happily, it WAS supposed to thunderstorm all day Tuesday when we’re going to Pompeii. Better it should do it and get it over with tomorrow when we had no hard-and-fast plans.

23.7 I Have Fried Whims for Lunch. Your Argument?

Ok, I'll stop with the stupid memes now :)

Thunderstorms off and on all day today. We took advantage of a break in the rain to walk up to the Via Toledo to get my phone figured out and hit the bank. On the way up we encountered a store called Quid Vis ("What Do You Want" in Latin) which naturally we had to patronize. We were in search of razors (which I of course had packed in the shipping boxes and not in our suitcases). Well that’s what we wanted and so naturally they had it! So we proceeded on our way, and of course the heavens opened again and we ducked into a restaurant for shelter. Decided to eat lunch there. Upon perusing the menu, I discovered an entry by which I was positively enchanted: Fried Whims. I actually had a rough idea of what it had to be, and indeed it turned out to be: arroncini of rice, of polenta, and of cheesy batter; fried zucchini, fried eggplant, and fried, uh, additional vegetable thing. Very tasty. By the time we finished lunch the rain had stopped. We dealt with the phone, headed toward  the bank…and another deluge. We took refuge in an 18^th c grand exhibition hall that is now a mall, got ice cream, waited…waited…waited… and finally broke down and bought 3E umbrellas to get back to the hotel under. Being 3E umbrellas, you may imagine that they were merely better than nothing. I went out later and got us hot dogs and mini pizzas for dinner – the girls got hot baths and stayed in. We watched Italian MTV. They repeated the same 4 shows all day long, but at least it was all music, unlike American MTV. Pop-up video in Italian pops faster than I can read it :(

24.7 Pompeiian Piles Part Deux: In which I take my daughters to a bordello.

Pompeii

I’m glad we did a tour for Pompeii. I want to go back without one now, but Pompeii is pretty overwhelming; easier to have someone take you through the highlights to start with, and to give you some background on the bits and pieces, as nothing in the place is labeled or explained. Since we didn’t buy our own tickets, I don’t know if the ticket office had brochures or anything.

Our guide, Andrea, was very entertaining, and his English was good enough that it was easy to fill in or mentally correct any glitches. (“Een Pompeii, they were not having any tomatoes, potatoes, or corns.” No need for podiatrists, then, eh?) He didn’t identify any of the famous (to classicists, anyway) houses, but showed us the arena at the edge of town, the theatre just inside, a basic house with shops, a thermopolium, the public water fountains (which, Roman water works being what they were, still work – we filled our water bottles there!), and the forum. The streets were named after the public fountains: each fountain had a different god’s head on it and gave the couple blocks in each direction its name. So we walked through Medusa section, Cornucopia section, and Poseidon section.

Elise climbs Vesuvius and I don’t

We only had one hour to get to the top of Vesuvius and down again. Sadly, I am too fat and out of shape to go up the hill that fast, and Aurora is too small. We only made it 2/3s of the way up in 35 mins. Elise, however, took my camera and got to the top, and took loads of gorgeous pictures. We had a perfect day for it, largely overcast and not hot, so really I have no excuse. 

I find that it's frequently worthwhile to go on the guided tours. They know useful things that I probably wouldn't get myself, and they give pointers on ways to explore by oneself at a later date. I'll try to get back down there to see more. We're thinking of going to the Amalfi coast in the spring or early summer, and it's an easy day trip from Sorrento or Positano. We’ll be in better shape and we’ll get to see more of the city. All good.

The Egg Castle

Amazingly, after all that climbing of Vesuvius, we had the energy to contemplate climbing Castell dell’Ovo (Egg Castle) across the street from the hotel. Fortunately there was an elevator to the top, which Fat and Forty here took (Elise naturally walked up). The girls rushed around looking over parapets and through arrow slits, so I didn’t get to read all the boards with Stuff About The Castle, which made me sad; there was a lot of history here. According to the brochure I did manage to find, it started life as a Roman seaside villa; one of Odysseus’ sirens, Parthenope, is buried in the foundation; the poet Vergil buried a magic egg in the foundation in the 11^th century to keep the structure from falling down; big chunks of the central bailey were rebuilt in the 18^th century, and those sections are currently Ministry of Tourism admin offices, an art gallery and 2 (!) little churches with live-in priests. Some of the rebuilt sections are extremely easy to identify, as the builders just kinda stuck bits in – in one spot, a staircase goes up to a blank wall, and in another, a parapet bridge is cut off by the building. Elise, again, took the camera and got lots of good pictures. We took over 400 in the course of the day.

The launching of forks

Just because it made us laugh. We ate dinner next to the castle overlooking the marina. When the food came, Elise picked up her fork…and somehow managed to shoot it under the table and over the edge of the patio we were eating on and floop! Into the water. I called over a waiter. “Scusi, abbiamo un piccolo problem. La sua forchetta e’ adesso nel mare.” (Excuse me, we have a little problem. Her fork is now in the sea.) He laughed, and said not a problem at all; apparently diners launch forks into the sea with some regularity there. (The marina is only about 8 feet deep, so we could actually see our fork. They may well have someone whose job description includes “must be able to dive for errant cutlery.”)

Arrival at the Abbey 25.7

Nine years ago I took a class in gold leafing in Montefiascone, Italy, where I made a friend, one Mother Agnes Shaw, SOSB, who was the binder for a little abbey not too far from Naples. We kept in touch sporadically, but when it became clear that The Year In Italy was going to happen, I went looking for her on the web, and gratias Deo found her! So we have come to stay at the Abbazia di San Vincenzo, about 90 miles from Naples and maybe 150 from Rome. Tomorrow we will explore, but so far we are all enraptured by the countryside. Mother Miriam gives me a basket full of our dinner which I carry down from the main gate of the abbey to the dairyman’s house. I'm a sort of inverse Red Riding Hood, traipsing across the abbey lawn with the basket of goodies FROM the elderly ladies. The maremma shepherd’s dogs have puppies and the girls are entranced.

We walked into the abbey courtyard and it was all I could do not to burst into tears. It’s so beautiful here. It’s forever away from anywhere, up into the mountains next to a river, with its own vineyards, olive groves, Augustan treasure troves, hay fields – Mother Agnes says that until 10 years ago, she and Mother Miriam harvested the hay themselves. The girls have already asked if they can stay for more than 3 days. I think we’ll have to figure a way to come down while Mamma’s here. The ladies LOVE their Teaching Company videos! J They had 8 nuns when I met Mother Agnes; now they’re down to 4, 3 elderly Americans and a 26-year-old Italian girl. I went to Vespers with them. 40 minutes of Gregorian chant in a 600-year-old chapel. What can I say, I loved it! (I even understood a bunch of it.) They fix us dinner and I go up to the abbey from the edge of the farm (we’re living in the dairyman’s cottage) to collect the basket and bring it back down. The dairyman’s cottage is 4 rooms if you count the bathroom. Elise wanted to know if our house in Besozzola would be as nice as this. I think the adjustment to the house will go very smoothly J

The girls are moderately flipped out by the DARK. They’re city kids, after all. They’ve never seen DARK. And Beso will be DARK too. No light pollution is an amazing thing. In the meantime, the nuns have 2 Maremma shepherd dogs and recently got two more puppies just over 9 weeks old, and they are highly adorable. The girls are completely over the moon about dogs to play with, and the puppies have no objection to friends under the age of 75! Sister Bianca is young, but does most of the housework and has no time for puppies; Mother Agnes and Mother Philip are both well-stricken in years, Mother Agnes hobbling about on sticks since she injured her back; Mother Miriam is the Superior of the house, and does all the farm overseeing and admin of the place. It’s a fairly large spread, and was huge back in the good old days of the 1500s, housed some 400 monks. Before that it was even bigger, but the house had a fight with the Bishop of Naples so he hired Saracens to come and slaughter all 800 of them. (The more one looks into the slaughter of Christians by Moors, the more one finds said Moors having no beef whatsoever with said Christians, but other even more unsatisfactory Christians paying said Moors to slaughter said Christians. All rather disheartening, really.)

We're updated to fully a week ago! More soon. If you've been looking at the pictures on flickr.com, I'll have more about all those frescoes and the Pantheon soon.