"The south of Italy will never be the same"

Our benevolent, but bumbling USAC leaders recently took all us 'bambini,' as they like to call us, on a tour of southern Italy. Our first stop, after a six-hour drive through Italy's greening hills and olive trees, was Napoli ("Naples").

Pre-USAC trip, I was pretty excited to see Napoli. Sure, they've been having problems disposing of garbage. Sure, their major export--buffalo mozzarella--was recently recalled because of garbage contamination. Sure, the mafia runs everything in the dirty port city, including the non-disposal of garbage, but still! Naples is a tourist city. There has to be something there. At the very least, I hoped to see some Cosa Nostra activity.

I was disappointed. Napoli was filled with wild packs of family dogs and garbage. Mike, USAC's intern, and I discussed Napoli's similarities to bad parts of San Francisco and Oakland. Still, Aine, Natalie and I managed to have a pretty good, cheap lunch of pizza in the birthplace of pizza before our leaders took us on a tour of the palace. Napoli was, for the most part, ruled by viceroys, or stewards, not kings or doges, so this palace was slightly unimpressive. Comparatively speaking, that is.

The entry way, all in white (demonstrating the lack of money. Otherwise, it would have been guilded) was pretty majestic:

I never saw anything Mafia-related go down. Sadly.

Post-palace and some free time, we departed for Sorrento, our home base. For the rest of our trip, we stayed in a hotel surrounded by lemon trees, with a view of the coast (that's the Mediterranean, baby!):

My feet above our hotel's private lemon and orange grove:

Lonely Planet calls Sorrento "an unabashed resort town," which may be true, but it's also the slice of Italy everyone's looking for: White buildings, blue waters, sun, clean streets peppered with little trattorias and souvenir shops selling limoncello. Natalie and I opted out of climbing Vesuvius one afternoon and spent it walking around and sipping white wine on our hotel's rooftop solarium. In Amalfi, after another breathtaking tour of a cathedral, Aine, Natalie and I sunbathed on pebbly beaches and collected sea glass.

A shot of the Amalfi coast, including the beach we spent some hours on:

Natalie, Aine and I, cute as a Christmas-card, on the beach:

The cathedral in Amalfi:

The church, as Amalfi was a maritime republic in the days when spice trading with the Orient was like oil trading with the Husseins, has a lot of Moorish influences:

Sight-seeing wise, we also hiked around the nearly perfectly preserved city of Pompeii. I'd learned about Pompeii as a child and, after seeing tons of ruins while being led around by a tourguide, was still blown away. Pompeiians not only invented curbs, speed-bumps, fast-food, indoor plumbing and brothels, but were clever enough to get blasted by a volcanic eruption, so it could all be viewed by us later. The brothel (stone-beds and frescoes advertising specialities) was, of course, a high point for a Nevadan, but I personally enjoyed the plaster casts of bodies:

Our tourguide, Barbara, informed us they suffocated to death. I don't know how anyone could tell:

This is a picture of Pompeii's old boat dock. The blast moved the water outward several meters, as well as changing the shape of Vesuvius itself (which is the mountain in the background):

Also, on the tourist-y agenda was Caserta, a royal palace built in the countryside for hunting and based off Versailles in France (ironically, Marie Antoinette's ugly sister, Maria Carolina, built and lived in this palace). It's one of the biggest tourist attractions in Italy (for Italians.)

In WWII, the Allies used this as a base of operations. In addition to furniture looting, they cut the ornate doors, so they would open two ways (Italians like to point out Allied damage to Italy, while convieniently leaving out their own cooperation with the Nazis, but you know, whatever):

This entryway was also where George Lucas shot scenes of Queen Amidala's palace

Aine taking a picture of a throne at the end of a typical room inside the palace:

The palace had magnificent gardens, including Baroque fountains, statues and reflecting pools like in Washington D.C. that we got to walk around:

I spent the days in the sun senza sunscreen, working on my tan (and by tan, I mean "sunburn and freckles"). After saying, "People's feet never get sunburned," this is what I looked like back in Viterbo, city of rain and pigeons:

The Apartment and The Internet of the Damned

Before it's too good to be true, I'll start posting. somehow, I've hacked into a wireless network in my apartment that my computer's never picked up before. It may be coming straight form Hell, it may be The Internet of the Damned, but I'd still use it. Nothing, including my school Internet ID, works the first (or in the Internet case, third or fourth) time in Italy. Viterbo's been wonderful, though rainy, cold and everything seems to take twice as much effort as it normally would. Naturally, the language barrier slows things up (the other day I got kindly coached by a waiter on how to say 'spinache' [meaning spinach] correctly), but so does walking everywhere in the windy, crazy, completly non-sensical old part of Viterbo. I live, as people--or at least the other Americans--seem to say, 'inside the wall.' Viterbo's wall, unlike Pink Floyd's, is pretty sweet. It's huge, way less crumbly than I expected and Medieval. It circles a large portion of the city, much like Mccarren Boulevard, for those familiar with Reno.

I'll post more pictures at some point ... perhaps. Natalie and I, before spending the day adventuring around mysterious parts of Viterbo with two other girls: Aine ("Anya") from New York and Amy from Reno, took a bunch of pictures of my apartment.

This is my front door and, coincidentally, me.

Natalie turning on the light in the crumbly lobby. They work on timers. The bottom switch also turns on the light in my lobby two floors up.
Natalie took a picture of my ass climbing the first set of stairs. Right above me on the landing, the sign says, "Academia de bella arte" and below my bottom, there's another sign above a door saying, "laboratoria." My Italian is pretty bad, but I'm thinking this used to be a school of some sort.

Here's Natalie in the courtyard. This is completely open, i.e., there's no roof. Pigeons poop here and stuff, but it's still rather pretty. The dead plant in the corner is particularly picturesque. My favorite thing about the courtyard is the well to Natalie's left. There's an inscription above it that I'm convinced, for no particular reason, is Roman. I have no idea what the pyramidal shaped thing by Natalie's feet is, except made of glass.

Here's the "Roman" inscription. I don't know if you can read it, but the word "AQVA" really gave away the well and founded my beliefs that it's Roman.

Here's Natalie on my second set of stairs. I thoughtfully did not focus the picture on her bum.

Here I am in my landing, literally saying, "I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing in this picture." I share this landing with three other apartments--two are other USAC students and one is an art studio. The one by my hand is my front door.

This is Natalie in the front room that we never, ever, ever spend time in. There are pieces of wheat glued to the yellow canvasses hanging up. The door in the picture is my roommates', likewise the umbrella.

This is teeny tiny me in the teeny tiny kitchen cooking on the teeny tiny stove with the teeny tiny dented pan. The little white counter actually houses a propane tank, like the green space heater in the foreground. There is no centralized heating in my apartment, or generally speaking, hot water. It looks like I don't have legs, but if you look carefully, my pink socks are visible.

This is the view from my kitchen window. Very typical Viterbo, everything has these shingle roofs, cobblestones, stucco and greenery. If you scroll down, I took a picture of my street and that gives some more of an idea about Viterbo in general. There's also pigeons, they're all over my house.

The other half of the kitchen. Once again, the green propane heater. A pint-sized fridge and woodstove (the latter does not work.) I love the red, vinyl couch in the background, but it's pretty uncomfortable. The door on the right leads to the front room and the door on the left leads to the bathroom. I'm eating apples.

I accidentally walk in on Natalie in the shower. The behomoth, white tank hanging by the ceiling is the hot water heater, which needs to be on for about an hour if you want a hot shower. If there are too many other appliances plugged in when this is on, the whole flat will short out. I've already done it once (breaker boxes are in the crumbly lobby.) I'm standing right by the toilet, so that's not visible, neither is the bidet. (A funny story: Natalie told me some year-long students shaved their legs in the bidet last semester. I told her that's too gross because people's "dingle berries" have been in there. Yulgh.)

Here's me in my bedroom. Now that I've had the dangerous, metal radiator on for the better part of a week it's pretty warm. My bed is actually a European version of a futon. The green back is a giant pillow that I can remove and Viola! A twin-sized bed. Underneath this marvel of modern bed design is a trundle bed, which is not attached to the bigger bed. Natalie sleeps there sometimes. My coat is on a clothes drying rack. Nobody here dries their clothes (if you noticed in the bathroom, we only have a washer). There are clotheslines and clothes outside people's windows all over the old part of town. Perhaps, in the newer, more prosperous part of Viterbo people have moved out of the 1940s. Heil Mussolini and all that.

As much as I bitch, I really enjoy my apartment and living here. I feel like I'm getting more of an experience than, say, the people living in brand new, heated apartments about a block away from me. Here's the other half my room, with Natalie visiting. I'm pretty sure you can see my books and a water bottle. I don't drink tap water except when I'm eating because it tastes like minerals and pipes.This is the view from my window, including my very own laundry line, which I may use when it gets less rainy/cold.

And lastly, the view down the street from my front door. At the end of this street is a sort of square called a piazza. My piazza has a fountain with lion statues in it. Today, after our adventures (we followed the wall a little ways, finding the Mideval cathedral, a little garden and climbed a fence that gave us a really incredible view), we headed home and people were playing folk music in our Lion Fountain Piazza. More or less incredible.