3.8 Friday: Cerveteri: Dead people's houses, but no dead people.

 Finally, a site the girls liked. Took three hours to get there, ugh, but had a great time once we arrived. The necropolis was easy enough to find – about a mile walk along constantly marked road (a rarity in Italy! What, you mean you don’t already know where you’re going? Then why are you going there?! It’s like Boston, only in a foreign language with more frequent stops for ice cream). Aurora was so excited to be the one to spot the excavations first. The excavation gives a basic idea of the plan (only a tiny fraction of what’s under there is visible), and the scholarly stuff I picked up to help with my textbook said that the necropolis plan mirrors general Etruscan city planning. Many of the tombs are so beautifully preserved, and a bunch are still inside their original round beehive-topped houses. A lot of them were perfectly accessible to get in for pictures, but they were FULL of flies and mosquitoes, which positively swarmed when we shone a light in, ugh. Very uniform in design for the most part: a few steps down, an antechamber, with one or two rooms leading off of it, each room with two beds. All grave goods long gone, of course, and no indications of any decorations on the walls. But the architecture itself pretty much completely unchanged from 2500 years ago. SO cool.

Still, it was 36C out, and the tramp back up the hill into Cerveteri was not appealing. However, as we were leaving the excavation park, a little bus came by. I stuck out a thumb and he stopped; clearly a shuttle of some kind from town. I asked him how much (it’s only a mile, so I knew it wouldn’t be more than 1 or 2E, and that was TOTALLY worth it by then!), and after a second’s hesitation he said, “Fa caldo. Gratis.” (It’s hot. Free.) When we got to the museum I called him il nostro santo – the ride is usually part of an 8E ticket to the museum. We decided to pass on the museum and catch an earlier bus back, which was just as well. We’re going to Tarquinia next week, and the Etruscan museum in Tarquinia is supposed to be better anyway, so we’ll take in that one instead.

Arrived back at the hotel at 6, grabbed a pizza and decided to turn on the tv. When what to our wondering eyes should appear, But Bill Cosby in Italian (but no tiny reindeer)! Couldn’t really follow it but laughed our butts off anyway. Just the IDEA of Cosby in Italian was funny. Or maybe we were really tired. Hard to tell ☺