Grandparents and Paella

After returning from the ruins of Pompeii, I had to turn around and welcome my grandparents to the Eternal City. Having visited my sister in Switzerland, the two Grand Tourists (pun intended) made their way down to my neighborhood for a few days, eager to see Rome's offerings. Unfortunately, the trip to Pompeii cut short our time together, but we still managed to visit several landmarks, including the Capitoline Museums, San Luigi dei Francesi, and sample some great food, with the lasagna al forno at La Scala a particularly memorable favorite. The two days spent with family was an enjoyable break from the grind of the semester.

A couple weeks of school passed by soon after, and semester break shined down on the mid-semester gloom. Classmates scattered to the four winds, some staying as close as the Florence, while others went as far afield as Morocco and London. I went to the latter, along with a small contingent of peers who were ready to revel in another, if slightly colder, metropolis. The four day sojourn marked my second trip to London, yet there were a few boxes on the "Tourists Guide to London" still left unchecked. Up first was Saturday Portobello Market, an exhaustive sprawl that makes the Winter Park Farmer's Market look like a garage sale. Walking down what felt like two miles, I passed all manner of goods for sale, including wrinkled maps, rusty telescopes, and counterfeit football jerseys. All the perusing made our group quite famished, so we helped ourselves to huge bowls of seafood paella, freshly prepared within massive pans along the street. Full of mussels, shrimp, and calamari, the dish was too good to be called mere street food.

Amazingly, my first London tour came and went without any trip to the famed British Museum. Seeing as how I call myself a history major and all, it would have been unbecoming to miss it. An absolutely massive complex, the British Museum contains items spanning over one million years of existence from all corners of the globe. I marveled at the Elgin Marbles (although I feel they would be better placed in Greece), crowded around the other tourists to gape at the amazingly well-preserved Egyptian mummies (sadly, none of them felt inclined to wake up and rampage around the exhibit-50's monster movies be damned), and admire a flawless jade turtle taken from the Near East. Like most public museums in London, there was simply too much to see in one afternoon, but it was an extremely informative and exciting tour nonetheless.

Frustratingly, something stuck in my craw as I sat on my flight back to Rome: having been a player and fan of soccer for almost 15 years, I was unable to attend a match in the birthplace of football once again. All in due time, all in due time.

Back in the Saddle

It's kind of hard to write blog entries without a functioning computer, but that problem has been remedied and it's time to catch up. First, the whole group took a weekend trip to Stabiae, nestled between the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. The trip was mainly focused on the ruins of Pompeii, but there were other opportunities to learn about the area, which had so famously been covered by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Our first excursion took us to a recent excavation in Stabiae, an imperial villa that at one point had the Bay on its doorstep. The most illuminating feature was its completely intact bath complex, consisting of four different rooms, each at a different temperature.

The next day took us to Pompeii, the famous city directly within line of the eruption. The city is surprisingly large, with incredibly long major avenues bisecting rows of tightly packed houses and shops. Several sights stood out: the "Cave canem" mosaic adorning the porch of a small house, the immense House of the Faun, and the ampitheater's perfect acoustics. We finished our weekend sojourn with a trip to the Napoli Art Museum, which contained the famous Alexander and Darius mosaic (taken from the House of the Faun) and an entire wing filled with colossal statuary from the Palazzo Farnese. My trip would not have been complete, however, without having a pizza napolitano, so I made my way to a pizzeria and had a slice filled with cheese, light tomato sauce, and sardines, which were surprisingly mild and much more tasty than the tinned variety. We returned to Rome, having had our fill of ancient cities and anchovies in equal measure.