Free Travel #1

Everyone arrived back to Citerna safely from the hotel by Sunday night. There were students who stayed in Italy, some who went to Spain, some to France, some to Germany, some to Switzerland, and some to Austria. A few even went to Liechtenstein. There were some inevitable snags in the travel plans of some groups. One group of six had to take a long detour in order to get back here from Munich because all the trains to Italy from there were booked solid because of Oktoberfest. Another group got locked out of their hostel because they arrived in town too late. These sorts of things are certainly annoying, but part of the maturing experience offered by this kind of program is the opportunity to learn how to deal with unexpected situations. No one got hurt or lost, and so we all considered the weekend a great success!

My family spent almost the entire travel period in Tuscany, specifically the area around Lucca, a walled city in northern Tuscany that dates to the Roman period. We spent three nights in Lucca and used it as a base to explore the area. Wednesday, on our way there, we stopped in Collodi to visit the Parco di Pinocchio, a small theme park dedicated the wooden boy whose creator hailed from that town. Collodi is also home to the Villa Garzoni Gardens (pictured), which are quite impressive and include a butterfly house, which the kids enjoyed.

On arrival in Lucca, we had to park outside the city walls despite our hotel's being inside; only residents are allowed to park within the city. Lucca's walls are its most distinctive feature; they were built in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and are completely intact. They were converted into a public park in the early 19^th century and now attract joggers, bikers, and others who simply want to enjoy the view. We spent all day Thursday in Lucca, walked on the walls, visited a couple of villas that are now museums, and climbed the city's highest tower, which actually has trees growing on top of it. We even found a playground that the kids were able to play on for a while.

Friday morning we drove to Pisa and spent a couple of hours in the Piazza of Miracles. This was the only experience during the travel period that was not new to me. The Leaning Tower now costs 15 euros and a couple of hours' wait to enter. Furthermore, they do not allow children under the age of eight inside, so we passed on that. We paid to go into the cathedral and spent the rest of the time relaxing in the piazza. Then we returned to Lucca, checked into our new hotel outside the walls—we were unable to get reservations for all three nights in the same place—and walked back into town to rent bicycles. We found a rental shop and hired two tandem bikes that allowed us to tow the kids behind us, and then we took the bikes up on the walls for a ride around the city. It was quite fun, and Edward and William really enjoyed it (Richard fussed a lot.) Afterwards we returned to the hotel and relaxed the rest of the evening. The only wrinkle was that I got a call from Ed Hicks back at Faulkner informing me that the administration wanted us to produce a video of the Study Abroad students for Faulkner's Benefit Dinner on October 2. I had no idea how to do this, but said we'd figure something out.

On Saturday, we left our hotel and headed west to Torre del Lago Puccini near the coast. Lucca was Giacomo Puccini's birthplace, and the town boasts several sites associated with him, including a café where we got charged nearly five euros for a couple of coffees. However, Torre del Lago Puccini is where Puccini lived for most of his adult life and where he composed several of his most famous operas. His home there is still owned by the Puccini family and operated as a museum. The place is not big, but it is nearly perfectly preserved; his son left everything there the way it was when his father died and made it into a museum the following year (1925). After leaving there, we took a driving tour into the Apuan Alps and saw some fantastic scenery, including some apparently abandoned marble quarries. We made it back to Citerna around 7:30 p.m., tired but happy.

On Sunday, we breakfasted at the hotel before setting off for Perugia, about an hour south of Citerna by car. The historic center of Perugia is actually very nice. A series of escalators takes you from the public parking areas up into the remains of the 16^th-century papal fortress and from there out into the streets. We did a walking tour of the town's most historic streets, sat in on part of a Mass in the cathedral, ate lunch in the town square for about half of what it would have cost us in Florence, and got free admission to the city's major art museum. To top it off, we found a nice painting on canvas in an open-air market that we decided to buy for our wall at home. All in all, I'd have to say it was a very successful trip. We got back to Citerna in the mid-afternoon, and I tried to catch up on some schoolwork. At 7:00 p.m. we held a worship service for everyone who had returned to the campus by that point; we had about a dozen people there to participate. The rest of the groups trickled in over the next four hours.

Monday and Tuesday (yesterday and today) were class days and a time of recuperation from the free travel. It was also a time for Kevin Cline and me to try to put this Benefit Dinner video together. We have come up with something that I hope will meet with everyone's approval; we hope to email it to Dr. Hicks tonight. We are also recharging our batteries for our trip to Greece, for which we depart at 7:30 a.m. tomorrow. I don't know what the availability of internet connections will be in our hotels, so I may not be able to post another update until October 10. Please pray for our continued safety on these travels.

Four Days of Classes

Today is our fourth consecutive day of classes since returning from Rome and Pompeii. The energy devoted to getting coursework done while we are here at the Hotel Sobaria overshadows the other things that are going on (or is that just a professor's wishful thinking?). There have been a couple of more afternoon trips down the hill to play soccer or volleyball. Jonathan has set up the first intramural events; I've been told that I am supposed to play in a ping-pong tournament for which I did not volunteer, and that I am a team captain for some other sport (volleyball?—I can't remember).

On Sunday and Monday nights, Jenny Towns (the English instructor from Freed) and I screened the BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries for extra credit to our students in English Literature and Western Cultural Heritage. Some of the students came early on and found it not to their taste, but we had at least a dozen who stuck it out through the whole six hours over the two nights.

The only excursion I have made since Pompeii is a trip to Sansepolcro, a small town north of Citerna, on Saturday. Sansepolcro is known primarily as the birthplace of Piero della Francesca, a prominent Renaissance painter. His Resurrection fresco in the Civic Museum is one of the best known works of the 15^th century. I had wanted to see it for a long time, and it did not disappoint. The rest of the town is charming, too; most of the historic center's architecture dates from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Unfortunately, we inadvertently left our camera at the hotel, so a return trip will be necessary to acquire some photographs.

The looming event for everyone here is the free travel period which begins tomorrow afternoon after classes end and lasts until Sunday. Each group of students traveling together has been required to provide an itinerary as well as contact information and arrival/departure trains from Arezzo. There are groups going to Spain, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as some students who are staying in Italy. I think the smallest group has six people in it, so there should be adequate safety in numbers. Still, all prayers will be appreciated.

My family is headed for northern and western Tuscany, and I will be posting more information about our trip in the coming days.

Pompeii

On Friday morning we were all supposed to be on the chartered bus at 7:00 to depart for Pompeii, but one roomful of students failed to appear on time. Jonathan had to go roust them from their room; they claimed they had never gotten the message about the early departure. So it was about 7:15 before we actually pulled away from the hotel. It was a three-hour drive to Pompeii, and by the time we arrived, it was raining lightly. Edward and William were transfixed by the knowledge that they were looking at a real volcano, and the resemblance to smoke of the cloud bunched around the top of Vesuvius only added to their excitement.

This was our first experience with a tour where the guide spoke to us through radio headsets. We had often seen groups using this technology in Florence and Rome, and I think on the whole it worked fairly well. It certainly would have been nice to have in the Vatican Museums when there was no way the people on the fringes of our group could possibly have heard Dr. Gardner or me. Jonathan told us that his father was considering investing in a set for the program to use on a permanent basis. Our Italian guide took us to most of the significant sites in the ruins, with the amphitheater being an obvious exception. There were a number of other tour groups there that day, so the going was slow at points, particularly in the public baths. The entire tour lasted about two hours. Unfortunately, we had no opportunity for independent exploring; as this was my fourth visit to the ruins, it was no tremendous loss to me, but I'm sure some of the students would have enjoyed looking around on their own.

We ate lunch at a cafeteria-style restaurant outside the ruins and had some time to shop for souvenirs. I bought a little book for Edward that had imaginative overlays of shots of the ruins to show what the city may have looked like in the first century. The price was a hefty 14 euros because it included a DVD that covered not only Pompeii, but also Herculaneum and the Villa Jovis on Capri. Edward looked at the book for much of the six-hour journey back to Citerna.

The tedium of our return trip was ameliorated by a couple of movies Jonathan played for us on the bus's system. We arrived just after dark, a little before 8:00, and had supper waiting for us. It felt great to be "home" again!

Rome Day #3

Thursday was a completely free day in Rome for the students (and faculty). From what I heard afterwards, different groups went to a variety of places: the Borghese Gardens, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon and Trevi Fountain, St. Peter-in-Chains, etc. Everyone made it back to the hotel at the end of the day, so I suppose we can count the time as a success.

My family went to the Testaccio neighborhood, an area I had never visited on my four prior trips to Rome. We saw the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius, built by an ancient Roman nobleman as his burial chamber; it was smaller than its Egyptian counterparts but with the same proportions. Next was the Protestant Cemetery, begun in the eighteenth century and containing several notables, including John Keats, Percy Shelley, Richard Henry Dana, the son of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Antonio Gramsci. After the circus of the previous two days, the cemetery was blessedly uncrowded and peaceful. We spent more than an hour there before walking down the road to look at "Mount Testaccio," which looks like an ordinary hill or ridge, but is actually an ancient trash dump for earthenware pots that piled up for 500 years. Returning to the pyramid, we visited the small museum in the gate of the ancient city wall adjacent to it; it contained a number of artifacts discovered at Ostia Antica, Rome's ancient port.

After exhausting the sights in the immediate area of the pyramid, we walked south along the Via Ostiense a little more than half a mile to the Museo Montemartini, which is a branch of the Capitoline Museum. It was certainly one of the most unusual museums I had ever visited: hundreds of pieces of ancient statuary and mosaics were displayed in the city's first power plant, which still contained all of the original machinery from the 1920s. The juxtaposition of the statues and machinery looked strange, to say the least. However, there were no crowds, and the kids were able to run around to an extent.

After leaving the museum, we lunched in a nearby cafeteria and then proceeded farther south to the church of St. Paul's-Outside-the-Walls, which contains the tomb of the Apostle Paul according to Church tradition. I had forgotten how big the place was; it's one of the largest churches in Europe. We enjoyed walking around the place and even paid to enter the cloister and attached museum, which contained a number of interesting documents (papal bulls and the like) and reliquaries. Again, the crowds were light, so this was by far the most enjoyable day for me in Rome.

We took the subway back to our hotel's neighborhood and did some grocery shopping at a supermarket for another picnic supper. The kids had not been eating the hotel's breakfast food, so we bought some yogurt and other things we figured they would consent to eat the following morning. I think we got back to the hotel well before any of the students (around 6:00) and retired early because we had to be up early the next day for the bus to Pompeii . . .

Rome Day #2

Wednesday morning we ate breakfast at the hotel and set out around 8:00 for the subway. We managed to keep the group together without incident, traveling four stops to the station closest to St. Peter's. We arrived in the colonnaded square around 9:00 or so; Dr. Gardner and I explained the history and context of the church before we took everyone inside, past metal detectors and other such things that were not present on my last visit in 1998. We spent the better part of an hour inside the church, letting the students mill around before regrouping outside and walking around the walls of the Vatican to the entrance of the Vatican Museums. Dr. Gardner and I got copies of the official guidebook and shepherded the group through the galleries, stopping at several points to discuss specific works such as the Laocoön, the frescoes in the Raphael Rooms, and of course Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel. After exiting the chapel we made our way to the museum's cafeteria and had our lunch about noon. Then we turned the students loose for free time for the rest of the day.

I think nearly everyone went back to the Colosseum at some point that afternoon because our Forum tickets from the previous day included admission to the Colosseum through Wednesday. Since it was Vickie's first time to Rome, my family also went there, but we arrived later than most because we stayed in the Vatican to see the gallery of paintings we had not seen as a group. When we arrived at the Colosseum, about a dozen people from our group were lounging on the grass outside, having already been into the place. We went through the security check and found half a dozen of our people unnecessarily waiting in the lengthy ticket line; I pulled them out and took them through the "fast lane" for people who are in groups or who already have their tickets. The Colosseum has definitely changed since my last visit; it looks as though there is an ongoing attempt to reconstruct a section of the floor and seats, which ought to turn out interestingly. They have even installed toilets in the outer section.

After we had finished looking around, we left the students gawking and made our way outside, walking past the Forum and, since I felt an obligation to take Vickie to some iconic Roman sites, all the way to the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain. We made the kids happy by stopping for gelato; I think at least ten Italian ladies stopped to coo at Richard with chocolate all over his face. To be honest, though, the crush of tourists in both places sapped a lot of the enjoyment for me. I think Rome in December is more my speed.

We hiked back to the subway and rode back to the neighborhood of our hotel, picnicking in our room for supper. On the way we stopped in a bookshop to buy an English version of the original Pinocchio stories, which we had never read. This was an essential purchase because we are planning to visit a Pinocchio theme park in northern Tuscany this week on our first free travel period. We read several chapters of the book both before and after supper, and Edward and William nearly laughed their heads off. I think for the first time ever, I was so tired that I fell asleep before the kids did that night; I vaguely remember hearing William say, "Night, night, Daddy, I go bed," while I was lying nearly comatose.

Rome Day #1

Tuesday morning we hit the road early, loading up a 55-passenger bus and driving to Arezzo to catch a 7:46 train to Rome. Everyone got his luggage onto the train without incident, and although the train was crowded, we all found seats. In fact, my family was able to lay claim to a compartment in the mostly day-coach train after the first forty-five minutes or so, having to share it with just one other person for most of the journey. The train arrived in Rome around 10:30, and after taking a bathroom and snack break, we loaded our hired bus for the day.

Roman traffic is horrendous, at least in the center of town. Nearly every road was under construction, and it took us nearly thirty minutes to go the mile between the train station and the Capitoline Hill. When we reached Piazza Venezia, I pointed out the "Mussolini balcony" and the monument to the united Italy's first king, Victor Emmanuel. However, the bus was unable to stop there for pictures; it dropped us off down the street from the Capitoline, and we hiked back to walk up Michelangelo's ramp to the Campidoglio. After an orientation atop the hill, we descended the other side to the Mamertine Prison, which the students found fascinating. We spend the next hour or so walking through the ancient Forum and ascending the Palatine Hill. It was only the second time I had actually gone inside the ruins and my first time on the Palatine, so I particularly enjoyed that.

We exited the Forum around 1:45 and had about 30 minutes for a lunch break by the Colosseum. Dr. Gardner took the opportunity to walk over to St. Peter-in-Chains and found it locked up tight, so we were unable to peek in there that day. Also during that time, the group suffered its first successful pickpocket attempt. (There had been an unsuccessful attempt in Siena; the intended victim was our adult student who was former military, and the would-be pickpocket found himself on the ground with a crushed hand in short order.) One of our girls had removed her money belt and put it in her bag temporarily, and the thief had removed it without her knowledge. We did not discover the theft until we were back at the bus a few blocks away, and Jonathan went back to the Colosseum to retrieve it; somehow he had gotten word from the authorities that a passport had been recovered. The group went on without him for the time being.

I had asked the bus driver to take us by St. John Lateran so I could point it and the Holy Steps out to the students. We weren't able to stop there, unfortunately. We then went to the Catacombs of St. Calixtus, where Christians buried their dead from the late second century to the fifth century, for a guided tour. Because our group was so large, we had to wait longer than usual for a guide—Jonathan rejoined us before we went in, having taken a taxi from the Colosseum—and then the tour went slowly. The 30-minute tour took nearly an hour, but most of the students were in awe of the place. We were able to sing and pray briefly in the last chamber.

By this time it was nearly 5:00, and our driver took us to our hotel, which lay a few miles west of the Vatican, about a 10-15 minute walk from a subway stop. Jonathan took most of the students back into Rome on the subway that evening to show them the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, and Piazza Navona, but my family and a few tired students remained in the neighborhood of the hotel. We found a quiet restaurant and ate pizza there for supper before going back to the hotel to collapse. It was a fulfilling but tiring day.

Off to Rome

We are leaving in twenty minutes on a bus to take us to the Arezzo train station, where we will get on a train for Rome. We return Friday evening, so there may not be any blog posts between now and then. I don't know what the availability of internet service will be.

Sunday we had a worship service downstairs in the classroom and then started classes at 11:15. Monday was a normal class day. So there is not a lot to report other than that there was another soccer excursion yesterday afternoon. The students and Jonathan are organizing some sort of "Olympics" with all kinds of different events such as ordering cappuccino; I don't really have a good grasp of that process . . .

At any rate we should see the Forum, Colosseum, and several other sights today and the Vatican tomorrow. Thursday is scheduled as a free day in Rome, and Friday we go to Pompeii before returning to Citerna.