The June 20 Blog

This day was another adventure-filled day as I headed out again, ready to take on Rome for another day.

But first, pictures of trash in Napoli! Because I forgot to post those before.







I started walking and got a bit lost by the Colosseum, so I hung out on the street waiting for some touristy-looking people to come by with a map. I then got directions to Teatro di Marcello (also known as Tempio di Apollo). It has the remains of what used to be a temple for Apollo. And by remains, I mean REMAINS. There's like three columns left.



It was a theater, linked to an area that contained a lot of fish markets and was pretty cool. I then stumbled upon a church right next to it--St. Nichola in Carcere, or St. Nicholas in Prison. It was a nice church that had a back door going into a courtyard. They also had very modern Stations of the Cross hung in the church. I hopped the fence and found out that it led right to the entrance of the theater I couldn't get into--but it was locked. I rehopped the fence and continued walking. At one point, I accidentally walked into an office building.

I wandered around a little more before I ran into the Jewish Museum that I'd heard Ali and Katie had gone. I got in after having an interesting conversation with the guards:

First Guard: ItalianItalianItalian.
Me: Um...I'm trying to go to the museum? Um...museo?
First Guard: *points*
Me: Grazie.

I approached a second gate that looked very complicated.

Me: *pokes at gate*
Second Guard: Italian.
Me: Um...can I come in?
Second Guard: You want to come inside?
Me: Yes.
Second Guard: Okay. *presses button that open gate*
Me: *walks in*
Second Guard: Do you have a knife?
Me: No.
Second Guard: Okay. But I will check. *checks bag* Okay! You can go in. No photo. Grazie.
Me: Grazie.

The museum was amazing. They had all the fabrics that the Jews in Rome made in the ghetto when they were only allowed to work as textile workers. They took us into the Spanish Synagogue and the big synagogue, and security was tight, as someone had come in in the 80's and blown up the synagogue. A child had died and others were wounded. There was a lot of discrimination against the Jewish community. They showed a video of Pope John Paul II's acts of peace toward the Jewish community, and it was interesting. Because you hear about Catholic persecution and they persecuted Jews, and Jews were persecuted...

It was pretty cool, though, because last year, I went to a Jewish Friday service...I know what it's called but not how it's spelled. Anyway, so many of the Catholic mass parts come from that, and the two religions are really linked.

Here's my notes:

Quadriportivo is a four-sided porch. The Jews lived in the Ghetto of Rome. In the synagogue, the organ is only used for weddings. And there are a lot of symbols! The rooster represents the choice of good over evil. The palm represents a righteous person. The sun, waxing crescent, and stars represent divine law. Wheat symbolizes good and fruitful works. The tree of life represents life. The crown represents divine presence. The flowering branch represents the staff of Aaron, Moses's brother.

Rabbi David Prato contributed a lot to the Jewish community rerising in Rome. Also, there were ritual baths.

Pompeii and Naples

After an emotional post like that, I just needed to recharge my emotions a little. I'm back in the States now, but I will blog until the end of this trip.

Also, I lost twenty-five pounds in Italy. Can we talk about that? EPIC.

So here's some pictures from Napoli and Pompeii. We took a train over, which was nice. It was an hour and a half and was originally supposed to be three hours, which made some people angry because I think they were planning on sleeping (and a lot of us were up late packing and doing work), but it turned out okay. We kept on keeping on, because that's what you do when you're a college student. :)





And I got some nice views of Naples.







We got lost.



But we eventually ended up on another train and in Pompeii with our guide, Rosario. She's awesome. And she loves to tell us cool things!









Basically, she and her architecture students had been uncovering an old house they found near Pompeii. She said that the house had collapsed in 62 CE then was rebuilt. It had a room like a hallway as well as a thermal bath. There was an earthquake in 62 CE--the reason for the house's collapse. Building on it continued after the earthquake.

There were frescoes in the house that looked like Venus and Eros, which bear a remarkable resemblance to the Madonna and Child. Dare I sense a connection? :) Pompeii as a city was surrounded by walls, and the fresoes were made using the city walls. The house was also made out of the old city wall, and we could see a bit of that as we walked around. The walls were made into a house because they weren't necessary anymore. The walls were built for wars, and when there were no more wars, they took down the wall. Pompeii became a Roman colony in 89 BC, and people who won the war got the property. After 89 CE, people began to rebuild, and the house that they had recovered was one of the best examples of a beautiful villa rebuilt (according to Dr. Rosario).

The bedrooms were dark for temperature control (since there was no air-conditioning or heating back then :P).

Pompeii features four different painting styles. In 1889, an archaeologist looked at some frescos (frescoes? I apologize in advance because I'm getting it wrong somewhere) and figured out the styles. They go in a chronological order.

First: 200-80 BCE (native Pompeii?)
Second: 80-20 BCE
Third: 20 BCE-30 CE
Fourth: 30-79 CE

The eruption happened around 79-80 CE. The Fourth style is often split into two styles because of the earthquake that happened in 62 CE.

We learned the difference between Herculaneum and Pompeii. Herculaneum is another small ancient city very close to Herculaneum that was destroyed by a volcano. However, while Herculaneum was immediately destroyed by hot toxic gases. Lava covered the city later. Pompeii got the ash and debris first. They had time to escape, but most people didn't realize Vesuvius's warning.

[Long rant I will make a separate post because it's taking up a lot of space here.]

We had an excellent champagne metaphor to explain all of this. If you weren't there...well, you should have been there.

Pompeii was officially discovered in 1990, but people had known about it beforehand. They saw a bit of the ruins sticking out from under the earth. And so they began to dig.

A funny situation happened when we found a public bath (equivalent to a locker room) that had pictures of sex positions on the walls. A first century aqueduct provided water. The water that needed to be heated was heated by a grate. Pompeii had its own Forum for the market and politics. We also found two theaters. One sat 20,000 people! Theater productions could last two or three days. I honestly have no idea how they did that. Sometimes, I feel like ancient people were more practical but could party harder than we did. It's that whole work hard, play hard thing. But I guess you'd need money to play.

We were told that the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was thought to have happened around August 24. In October and November, people wear heavier clothes. They still put it around that area though, the eruption.

Venus was a big protector for Pompeii.

We walked into the Villa of Mysteries, a very cool title. The villa was actually discovered right next to a previously existing house. Imagine not knowing that was there the entire time you were living there. The house was built before the villa was discovered; we walked though both. The villa was used for the production of wine and had frescos that were definitely up for interpretation, even by experts. We took a crack at it and were very tired, which caused some really hilarious suggestions.

That's it for now! I'm sorry that the pictures are all jumbled together this time, but I'm trying to change up the visual aspects of my blog for some variance...and to see what works the best. :)

Three Questions

I'm going to use some strong language in this post. If that's not okay with you, you should probably refrain from reading this one. I believe that strong language should be saved (notice I said "should," which does not mean that I necessarily adhere to this belief all the time) for strong situations, and I can at least assure you that this is one of those.

I don't have much to show you about our trip to Napoli (or Naples), Blue Capri, and Pompeii because we didn't stay there the whole time. We left early because we didn't feel safe. We were told that Napoli was an unsafe city. We were told that pickpockets and perverts ran rampant and wild. Usually this translates into "stay in the good part of town and no one gets hurt," but that wasn't the case.

On the bus getting from the train station to the airport, my professor had her camera stolen out of her bag. She looked down, saw the guy's hand in her bag, and started hitting his hand to try and get him away. He still got the camera. I got felt up on the bus, and I was lucky because someone else felt up my friend with the intention of getting under her skirt. Right after we got off the bus, our group (mostly female) got called cunts by the locals. Later that night, my friend almost got pickpocketed by a kid.

I'm young, but I'm not naive. Those are all things that can happen when you're out somewhere. They happen all the time, and this time, they happened to us. I'd already carried out the precautions: stuck my money on my body, carried a pickpocket-resistant purse (I just made up that term), didn't make too much eye contact with people.

And then the next day, while my friends are walking back from a day at the beach, a guy drives up on a motorcycle and tries to take her bag. He knocks her over and she gets dragged down the street until her purse breaks and he drives off.

I wasn't going to put that part in here. I was going to go through my pictures from Pompeii and mention that we left early but not provide any reason about it. Because why should I? Blogger tells me that the majority of my readers are in the US, across the ocean. I wasn't even there. Antonia and I had walked back a couple hours before from the island. And the reason I haven't been on here was because I was trying to figure out a way I could just move on, even in writing, and not pretend everything happened. It was hard, and that's when I realized that it wasn't the right thing for me to do. Suppressing the truth has gotten so many people in trouble in the past. But even worse, I considered staying silent. But if I'm silent, that guy wins. And so does everyone else who takes advantage of tourists or women or teenagers or people who look a certain way or talk a certain way.

I live my life convincing myself that the world is the most horrible place imaginable. Every stranger is a potential threat. Every situation is a worst-case scenario. Does that mean I live my life in constant fear? No. Because I'm here to live, and you can't do that if you're always looking over your shoulder. I've learned that. But if I can acknowledge the truth, if I can make peace with the fact that the majority of the world and my life is out of my control, if I can live aware knowing that my gender and my color and my culture and my language will always to a certain extent condemn me in the eyes of people I have never met...then I can live without unnecessary anger at God and the world and "those other people." Because all of the danger is danger we as a species created. We were in Napoli for less than seventy-two hours. Other people go through what we did for their whole lives, and it's much worse. Someone tried to take my friend's possessions, but she's still alive and healthy. Someone touched me without my permission, but he didn't break me. I keep telling myself that we were lucky it wasn't worse.

But there's a second question here, and if you're reading this, you've already asked it. Because after you ask yourself Why and you answer it with That's just the way it is, there's a second question. I've been ignoring it, because I've rationalized the first question by essentially saying that there is no answer, but then that throws you in the dangerous realm of I Let Everyone and Everything Walk Over Me Land, and I don't want to go there.

Should things be this way?

See, that's an easy one. No one has to rationalize their way through that one or lose sleep or cry or break things over that one. The answer is no. That's just the way it is was the crappy half-ass answer you got from your parents when you were a kid, and I think you'll all agree that it hasn't gained any strength over time.

That was easy. Let's move on to the third question: what do we do about it?

That's only half-rhetorical, because I'm not entirely sure myself. You individually will make almost no impact. And that's usually where we call it quits. Do we blame the other people? Do we play that awesome game called If Only? That game got played after everything happened in Napoli. If our teachers had been there...if we'd been walking in a group...if we hadn't walked so close to the street...if more boys had been there...if we had been watching more closely...

Blame's what started the mess in the first place. I don't have to tell you that.

Maybe that's where we go from here. Some of you reading this have made stopping discrimination and violence the focus of your lives. Maybe that's where you're needed. Others of us are needed somewhere else. But can we stop the blame? Can we think a little more about things that come out of our mouths? Can we remember that people are never, never, ever to be looked at as objects?

I've been constantly running this whole trip. I've constantly felt like I was in competition or like I wasn't doing enough or I wasn't seeing enough. I focus less and less on the human aspects of our trip with every blog post I make. I know this. But I know that this, the experience I had in Napoli, will be the most important lesson I carry away from here. And what do you know? It's one I've learned before, again and again, a thousand times.

On our first day here, TerTer said that repetition was the mother of learning.

Last week, Hutch and Sebass were talking, and she asked him who they were kidding, we weren't adults, we were still kids. And he looked at her and said, "But you are adults. Of course you are."

That has never been so painfully realistic.