For Thanksgiving break the Art History class had a mandatory trip to Rome. Although I'm not in the class, I decided to tag along to see Rome and it's history. We left very early Thursday morning and got in around 8 am. After going to our hostel-B&B combo, we went to the Vatican Museum. It was really overwhelming. Just hallway after hallway packed full of old art. You could spend literally days there if you wanted to see all of it. The highlights were Rafael's room and of course the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel was pretty overwhelming and took about 30 minutes of just looking around to start to piece it together. Very beautiful.
After the Sistine Chapel we went to the Basilica of San Pietro in Vatican City. The Basilica is right outside the main courtyard and the inside of the Church area was amazing. Even more amazing was climbing to the top of the Basilica and being able to see the entire city from how high up it was. The climb was tough (steep and ridiculously narrow) but worth it.
For Thanksgiving dinner we had pasta, which was upsetting. We all went out as a group to a restaurant and had a caprese salad, pear-stuffed tortellini with a cheese and pumpkin sauce, and flan. The pear-stuffed tortellini was good, but not really my thing.
We went out Thursday night to the college area of Rome where there are a bunch of bars. Cool area. The next morning I went to the Colosseum and walked around the surrounding area. The Colosseum was really cool and besides just looking around had some other stuff on exhibit as well (art from the time and historical background).
After that I went back to the B&B before going out to a pub for a good plate of mixed meat (way too hard to find) then going out for the night to the same area.
Overall, Rome was beautiful but it really shouldn't even count as Italy. I didn't hear a word of Italian, everything was catering to tourists, and there were just people trying to aggressively sell you stuff everywhere (more so than any other touristy city I've ever been to). I'm glad I went, but I'm also glad I didn't choose to spend more than a couple days. Really expensive too.
Saturday morning most people returned to Bologna but I went on my own excursion to Napoli. I got in around 4 p.m. and walked about an hour through the city to my hostel. As someone new to the city with nothing but a bad picture of a map on my phone to go by, this took me a while and I walked through a pretty dirty, nasty, vender-y part of the city. The hostel was really nice and had a ridiculously cheap bar. After meeting some people at the bar I went out on my own to the historical/university part of the city and was amazed. All I'd heard about Napoli made me think it all looked like the initial walk I took. Luckily that wasn't so. All the streets in the old area are how you picture Italy looking hundreds of years ago. Little shops, pizzerias, and everybody hanging their clothes out to dry above you. Speaking of pizzerias, definitely the highlight of the city. All three meals I had there were the exact same and I do not regret that in the least. Neapolitana pizza with two arancini (fried risotto with cheese, mostly Sicilian but also southern Italian). The pizza was so different from here in Bologna. The tomatoes were sweeter (they claim it has to do with them being grown in the nutrient rich soil at the foot of the Vesuvius), the cheese was richer (made from the milk of local free-roaming buffalo) and the crust incredibly thin, but still amazingly doughy. Sunday morning on my way to the train station I stopped at the Duomo in Napoli for mass. Beautiful church, but the tourists walking around mid-mass really took away from the spiritual feeling a mass is supposed to have. Overall, (besides the Church experience) Napoli felt incredibly authentic for a major Italian city (no English, few tourists) and was incredibly cheap (my huge meal of a personal-ish pizza with two arancini and a beer would be no more than 5 or maybe 6 euro).
After that, I hopped on a train to Salerno, then Avellino. Arriving in Avellino I felt so out of place and alone. I wish I took pictures of the train station. It looks post-apocalyptic. Like, an apocalypse that happened so quick it didn't have time to get dirty, just locked in time. They had electronic signs up that all stops have that are supposed to say what that tracks next train is, but instead said (in Italian) "insufficient memory". The clocks were all broken. The date on the wall was from 2009. The ticket office was boarded up. Their wasn't a single employee. So upon leaving I walked to the B&B and the area I walked through was not bad or dangerous, but also not too pretty or much to do. Once I got into the actual city though it was beautiful. Felt really Italian. By this I mean: tons of little old men and women just standing on beautiful street corners, facing the sun, occasionally yelling something (seemingly friendly) to another old man or women 10 feet away. Really funny to just sit and watch. After checking in to my B&B and relaxing a little I decided to go out. Thought it would be absolutely dead and weird on a Sunday night. Nope, it was great. The main streets were all blocked off to cars, lined 10 times over with Christmas lights, and little shops set up on the streets selling local Avellino goods (clothes, wine, cheese, meat, anything really). One particularly cool type of shop set up was a local butcher shop that had a wood BBQ going with a huge ball of cheese hanging over, beginning to melt. When you ordered he would cut a huge chunk of bread, throw it on the grill, lower the ball to closer to the fire, and just as the cheese was about to melt, scrape it off and spread it on your bread. 1 euro, and an accompanying glass of hot mulled wine for another 1.5 euro. It was a great night and really beautiful and peaceful to just walk through the streets with some hot wine stopping at all the little boothes. The people were also really friendly, and upon hearing that I didn't speak perfect Italian would become very interested in where I was from and what I was doing there (they don't get many tourists) and I had some nice conversations. Another good thing: even cheaper than Napoli.
The next morning I got up around 9 and spent the next hours just walking around exploring (and buying myself a jacket) until my train. I messed up my train home, which sucked. Basically, I thought that since I bought my ticket from a train website and that it didn't say bus anywhere on the ticket that it was a train ticket. And since the Avellino station has no workers or information posted I had no way of double checking. So after waiting there, a train pulls in right at the time my ticket says. As I'm getting on, I ask a worker on the train where it's going. Nope, wrong train. He points to the bus pulling away, that I had been sitting next to for the past hour, and tells me I was supposed to be on that. Great. So basically I had to spend another 60 euro and didn't get back until 330 a.m. (as opposed to 9 p.m. like I was supposed to). Oh well I guess.
This week is hectic and I'm really frustrated with the amount of work we're getting. I've talked to a lot of people about their study abroad experiences and without fault the classes are described as a joke. These are not, at all. I get they don't want it to be a joke, and I don't think I would want them to be, either, but it's pretty absurd that I'm doing more work here than at TCNJ. I could sit in a library at TCNJ, I came to Italy to see the country.
This weekend I go to Dublin to visit a friend who is living there which should be fun. Next week all my papers are due and I have my Italian final. Then, two weeks from the writing of this post, I will be flying home. I'm both excited and upset with how close it is. These two weeks are going to suck (besides Dublin) because of all the work, and I would be really excited for my last two weeks if I could actually enjoy them and go out on the city. I'm excited for all that to be over and be home and relax, but I will definitely miss Bologna, Italy, and Europe.
Allora, pictures:
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| You aren't allowed to take pictures in the Sistine Chapel, but I snuck this one. You can see the Creation of Adam right below my face. |
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| Vatican Museum |
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| Vatican City |
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| San Pietro |
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| San Pietro |
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| San Pietro from break in the climb up to top |
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| Showing stupidity of the stairwell on climb up. My shoulders were wider than the stairs. |
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| Rome from top of San Pietro |
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| Vatican City from top |
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| San Pietro |
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| Fountain of Trevi in Rome |
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| Pantheon |
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| Forget the name, but HUGE thing in Rome. I was pretty far away when I took this. |
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| Roman rubble |
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| Outside of Colosseum |
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| Inside |
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| Sunset |
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| More |
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| Vatican City at Night |
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| Beautiful train ride through Mts. |
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| Napoli University area during lunch. Its like a busy metro, without the metro. You find a spot on the road to squeeze into. You are pushed until you get to your "stop" then jump out. Pretty ridiculous but fun. |
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| Napoli Duomo |
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| Duomo |
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| Duomo |
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| Napoli |
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| Train to Avellino |
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| More train to Avellino |
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| Avellino |
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| More Avellino |
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| More Avellino |
