It had been a long day of traveling, and I was honestly desperate for a moment of inspiration. Our group had just travelled for hours from Rome to Paestum headed towards Sicily, preceded by a tough week for me with a Latin test, an Ancient City (ancient art, culture, architecture and archaeology) quiz and an art history presentation. It’s like the week before October break at Vassar when the professors feel the need to cram in obligatory midterms. On top…
It had been over a year since I had last seen the Tiber river. To me, the Tiber felt like the only immutable aspect of the ancient city. Its water flows through Rome today just as it did in ancient times. In the Aeneid, Virgil describes its deep blue, watery depths while his contemporary, Horace, describes a yellowish, raging Tiber, cutting the Roman landscape. Passing by the ancient river on my way to get coffee or meet for class, I…
I’ve come to my last blog post and realize that I’ve had yet to post about the beautiful city, which I’ve lived in these past four months. Roma, Italy is a place I’ve grown to love, not for the wonderful historical and tourist-heavy opportunities it promises, but for its God-awful bus service, businesses that are never open between the hours of 12pm-3pm, crazy Italians, crazy Americans, aggressive selfie-stick vendors, and the food. The food the food the food. I won’t…
Magna Graecia First off, I just want to impose, upon everybody, the national symbol of Sicily. This is the Sicilian Triskelion, or the trinacria. Anyone who has been to Sicily is already familiar with this, but for someone who had never been there before, it was rather unnerving to see that ridiculously creepy thing everywhere the first day or two. It grows on you though; now I have an obnoxious red hat with the symbol stitched on the front. My…
Cinqueterre. Cinquestair-re. Cinquemontagnegiganti. Cinqueeverythingwillhurt. Apparently it is possible to get PTSD from looking at a flight of stairs. On October 26 and 27, a few of my friends in my program and I decided to do the famous Cinqueterre hike. The trek is amazing, and the coast legitimately looks like Crayola puked on a mountain— it’s gorgeous. Vernazza, La Spezia, Italy. Fourth town from the bottom (starting at Riomaggiore). Unfortunately for us, the main trail going from Riomaggiore to…
JOURNAL RAMBLINGS #1: En Route to Umbria (Orvieto) Note: The cheapest flight from the Philippines to Rome, Italy, was scheduled about a week before I was allowed to move into my program. Considering the fact that I was going to be living in the Ancient City, I decided that I would travel around the region of Umbria in the extra week, meaning that I could not easily wander around rolling a giant suitcase. Thus began my weeklong backpacking trip carrying…