Playing Catch Up

So I realized that I need to talk about so many things that have happened. This is a list of the hightlights of my Italian/Euro aventures.

1) Subiaco and Fumone
2) The Antiwar protest
3) Midterms
4) Perugia and Assisi
5) Going to Switzerland

So I guess I better get started becaus that is one long list that I am going to have to finish.

1) Subiaco and Fumone

A couple of weeks ago I went with my school to Fumone and Subiaco. Subiaco was amazing! It name Subiaco comes from the "under the lake" in Italian. There we visited the monastery of St. Benedict. It was crazy! There was actually snow when we got there! It had snowed the night before and we were up in the mountains so it was just gorgeous! I have so many pictrues whcih I cannot update right know because I am not writing this post from my own computer. When we got there is was that perfect time when the snow is just starting to melt so you can hear the sounds of trickling water. It was so beautiful.

We entered to upper church of the monastery and it was covered with frescoes of the life of St. Benedict. There were also cosmotesque marble designs on the altar which was cool because we had studied about that in my medieval class. Also the candle stick resembled the candle stick in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. It was also done by the same artisan family! (hehe wow... WAY nerdy moment!)

The lower church led to the actual cave that St. Benedict stayed in for many yeas when he moved away from teh city to leave behind his "life of sin." (That is just really intense. I don't even like camping. hehe I would never ever live in a CAVE!) The monastery was really awesome because it is built into the cliff so part of the wall is the actual cave. The cloister there was really cool too. I learned something new. The cloister actually symbolizes the garden of Eden. Also the columns in a cloister represent different things. One column stand for humanity and two columns stand for divinity. When the two are intertwined together it is symbolizes the mixture of the two things. This is also supposed to represent Christ because he came to us in human form even though he is God. Okay... so now that i have totally bored everyone to death... I shall move on to other things...

Down the hill from the monastery is another monastery called Santa Scolastica. This one was pretty cool. The most interesting part of thsi church was teh mixture of the many different types of architecure.In one room there were three different types: Medieval, Romanesque, and Gothic. It was crazy!

After that went to Fumone. This place was seriously a a studio set. I really do not think it was actually a town. It was so cute and medieval that I did not know what to do with myself. the population had to be only like 1000 something. It was so small. We ate lunch in a medieval tavern. The lunch was included in the trip and itw as THE BIGGEST MEAL EVER: It was amzing. the food just kept on coming. I got major food coma nd Nabihah got heartburn because she had never eaten that much before in her life. hehe. Lunch was really fun because we just sat around and laughed and ate. At the end they brought us cookies called "ciambellas" and a shot of espresso.

After the meal we had about 30 min to explore. That was really cool and i went picture crazy as usual. Seriously though... I cannot see how someone would not go crazy. Everything in the little town was so amazing. That place is the type of town that I think of when I think of small Italian Il Postino-esque towns. There were small alley ways with stairs and small Italian women dressed in all black walking down the road holding a bucket of water.

One thing that I have fallen in love here are the doors. I know that sounds weird but door like these simply do not exist in California. They are just so old and weathered to the point where you really feel as if you have gone back in time. Every door looks like it has a story that it could tell. okay... maybe the sounds weird, but it is totally true.

Ater the break we went to a castle. This was the weirdest part of the day...of course that meant that it was Nabihah's favorite. (She is sitting right next to me hehe.) First off... Our tour guide was a bit off. We would enter a room and say, "In this room, you can find many old documents that are realy not important. I don't know what they are here." She was not sure who built the castle, but there are remants of ancient Roman busts which means that it was probably built or inhabited around that time. The castle was also said thebe haunted. (This is where is gets scary.) The place is haunted by a woman because she son was killed by his 7 sisters. The sisters slowly poisoned the little boy until he died becaus ethey wanted the estate to go to them. There are many portraits of the woman and she is aways depicted as wearing black and having a sad expression on her face. Weirder still... In the same room as the documents that don't mean anything there is a wax figure of the boy. He is shown sleeping and wearing the actual clothes that he had when he was 2. So now it gets creepy... his bones are still inside of the wax figure!!!! In the same "castle of fun" there was a well that the lord of the house would use to throw women down who were not virgins. Also there was a kitchen that had a slanted floor so that when they killed an animal the blood could drain to the other side of the room. It was a pretty interesting day.

So after the tour of the weird castle we got back on the bus and headed for home. The ride back was pretty eventful because it was full of fun stories and jokes. It was a really nice daytrip.

So wow... that was only one event and I have four more to go... uhmmm I think I am going to wait and do one of these later on. Ciao for now!