I suppose I should mention...

...that we spent the morning at Hadrian’s Villa, just outside Tivoli. Also amazing, but less vibrant than Villa d’Este. I mean, because of my background (and particular brand of geekiness), I could see it in living color, maybe not as vividly as I could Villa d’Este, but I still had fun. I know it doesn't look like much now (the pictures don't even begin to do the site justice), but architecturally speaking, this place was revolutionary in its day.





















The so-called "Maritime Theater," named because of a misinterpretation of the space early on. Rather than being a theater, it was actually the Emperor's private home-within-a-home. An imperial villa was like a small city, with family, friends, politicians, and servants crawling all over the place (though the servants were relegated to neat subterranean tunnels and rooms so that they could get from place to place without being seen), and that would naturally try the patience of anyone, so Hadrian built himself a little island, surrounded by a moat and accessed by drawbridges, that he could use to escape from everything else and just think. I think I want one...





















Among the ancient Romans, homosexuality was just a part of life. Hadrian was married, but apparently, he and his wife did not get along, even a little bit, and Hadrian fell in love with a boy named Antinous, who died mysteriously in the Nile (by that, I mean that why he was in the Nile in the first place is mysterious - fall, push, jump - not his actual cause of death - drowning). After the incident, Hadrian built the Canopus to symbolize the Nile, and he decorated it with statues of a deified Antinous so that when he dined in the special triclinium (dining room with three couches) at the end of the canal, he could be reminded of his love.

The Large Baths at the villa have one of the best-preserved roofs on the site, at least from what I could tell. I would have felt better about standing under said roof, had I not just come from several buildings that had massive chunks of their roofs lying on the floor.

By the way, Hadrian's Villa is the reason why my camera ran out of battery at Villa d'Este. I took 86 pictures. I didn't even clear 60 at Ostia, and that was an entire city. Anyway, I enjoyed Hadrian's Villa so much that I used up enough of my battery that I only got 20 pictures of Villa d'Este. Amazing day though, and a few of us are hoping to go back to Tivoli one evening to see both sites lit up. Can't wait!

I used to think Alice was an idiot.

So much trouble and so many questionable decisions, just to get into a garden: drinking magic potions, eating giant mushrooms, taking advice from crazy people, abusing hedgehogs and flamingoes (you know that croquet game couldn’t have been fun for either creature) for the amusement of a homicidal queen, the list goes on and on. Just to get into a garden she glimpsed through a keyhole.

I now know how she felt. I just spent the afternoon in the most beautiful garden I’ve ever seen. It is the garden at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, about an hour east of Rome. The garden is built in terraces going down the hillside behind the villa, and it truly is a Wonderland. My camera died partway through the trip, but I still feel that I got enough good pictures to let them speak for themselves:

Il Palio...Monty Python Style

Alyssa, Shelby, Sherri, Michelle, Me, and Whitney on top of the Duomo.

At the crack of dawn on Thursday, we began a whirlwind tour through Tuscany. We took a high-speed train from Roma Stazione Termini to Florence, where we spent the rest of Thursday and Friday. Florence was nice, but incredibly touristy. I am pretty sure I heard more English in my two days in Florence than I’ve heard in the rest of the month and a half I’ve been in Italy. We got to see palaces, a science museum from the 19th Century, churches aplenty, and famous works of art (Mom, I did see Leo, but I didn’t get to say hi, as he was a bit busy at the time), and we even got to climb to the top of the Duomo and see Florence from above.

On Saturday, we left Florence for Siena, but along the way, we stopped in the medieval town of San Gimignano, the “Manhattan of the Middle Ages.” It was amazing! We got off the bus near a supermarket and had to climb the hill, but at the top, we were greeted by imposing stone walls and a skyline of towers and clay-tiled roofs. I climbed the tallest tower (54 meters tall, built in 1311) with a couple of the girls, and I was able to admire some truly beautiful views of the Tuscan countryside. And I got a gelato from what is officially the best gelateria in the world (this place actually did win the world championships for gelato from 2006-2009). After San Gimignano, we went to another medieval village, this one named Monteriggioni. Like San Gimignano, this town is surrounded by stone walls, but the wall of this one forms a sort of crown around the top of the hill. This town was pretty neat, but San Gimignano was definitely cooler.

Siena was nice as well. Siena is also where the Monty Python bit comes into play. Il Palio is a horserace that takes place in the Piazza del Campo in July and August every year. Jockeys from each of Siena’s highly competitive neighborhoods don period dress and ride bareback at breakneck speeds around the piazza. To give you an idea of how hardcore this race is, I’ll just point out that both riders and horses are blessed by a priest before the race, and that a horse is not required to have its rider at the end to win. In tribute to Il Palio di Siena, Sherri, Michelle, Whitney and I (Shelby filmed the whole affair – and apparently giggled about it) held a short race of our own:

We spent the last part of Saturday, as well as Sunday morning in Siena, wandering back and forth across the old part of town. On Sunday, we left to head back to Rome by bus, but along the way, we had two more stops to make. First was Pienza, where we saw a church and wandered around taking pictures from the walls, and then came Montepulciano, where we saw what I think is my favorite church to date. After that, it was a couple more hours of driving through the Tuscan countryside and then the suburbs of Home Sweet Rome.

"Inactivity is death."

Have you ever seen one of those post-apocalyptic type scenes that come up so often in science fiction movies? A group of road weary travelers finally arrives in a new place (city, planet, time, etc.) and takes their first steps outside, only to find the place completely deserted. It's the futuristic version of the Old West ghost town (usually minus the tumbleweed that rolls across the main street).












*Scene from the popular science fiction movie "Serenity." *

Fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini once said that "Inactivity is death." I think it is interesting, then, to note that the EUR (a neighborhood begun under Mussolini in the 1930s and completed in the 1960s) is just about the most inactive place I've ever been. Even though the place was full of people, I still felt like I was walking through an alien ghost town, and I had the nagging feeling that I should be watching out for zombies as I turned corners. It was futuristic, but at the same time, it was ancient and dead. The whole place was just cold and austere - and downright creepy.