We visited the Giulia museum in Rome, dedicated to the ancient Etruscans (indigenous Italians).  The Etruscan culture is so fascinating.  I particularly enjoyed learning about the hand gestures on a particular statue-couple, found on an ancient tomb. They may have been holding small vials, but the Professor indicated that they might also be gesticulating, as Italians do, when they speak.  I like this theory.

In the evening, we visited St. Peter’s Basilica. Aside from being beautiful and impressive as I knew it would be, I felt something touch me the moment I crossed the threshold. It was surprising. I’m not a religious person, but I suppose all those years of an Italian-Catholic family environment have made a lasting impression. I was at our “Mecca.”

In the Vatican Museum, my feet hurt so much from walking, all I wanted was to find the Sistine Chapel before I ran out of steam. I was so lucky to get inside while it was nearly empty. To hop around the floor like an excited little kid, “reading” the story of each panel, enjoying all the little brush strokes, reverse-engineering with my eyes the work of this great master. And, laughing at the Renaissance style given to the Israelites.

What makes this work special is the sheer amount of work put into it. The room started to fill after half an hour or so. I was so lucky to have had that time in the Sistine Chapel.

Much like our ancient Greek counterparts, after we spent some time getting comfortable with our new surroundings along the coastline, it was time to explore the hinterland of Sicily. Our charter bus arrived this morning to whisk us off to the site of Morgantina, a city that began as an indigenous settlement, occupied by group known as the Sicels.

Our chariot through Sicily

By the 6th century B.C., it began increasingly Hellenized, so much so that in the mid 5th century B.C., it was punished for its “Greekness” by the Sicel patriot Douketios, who sacked the original settlement on the Cittadella Hill. Soon afterward, between 450 and 425 B.C., the city was re-established on the nearby Serra Orlando ridge which commands an extraordinary view over the surrounding hilly countryside.

Heading into the site of Morgantina on Plateia B, one of the original streets of the town. Note Mount Etna looming in the distance!

This was our first true active archaeological site in our travels through Sicily, and Morgantina allows one to get a true sense of the layout of an ancient Greek town because it was never built over at a later date, allowing one to explore everything from the remains of houses to major public buildings. The highlights for the students were clearly (a) getting to literally touch the past, rebuilding ancient buildings in their imaginations from the surviving foundations and walls and most importantly (b) being adopted by one of the admittedly slightly mangey dig dogs, who stars in the majority of our pictures (see her following us above).

Learning about Hellenistic Greek houses perched on the foundations of the House of the Arched Cistern at Morgantina

Morgantina particularly flourished during the third century B.C. under the control of the tyrants of Syracuse. Its prosperity is reflected in the many elegant homes built at this time that were equipped with some of the earliest surviving domestic wall-paintings and mosaics made of cut pieces of stone (tesserae) as well as indoor plumbing!

The Hellenistic Fountain House at Morgantina

The main public square of the town, the agora (marketplace) that served as both the political and economic hub of the community was monumentalized as well during this period. Stoas (covered porticos, some with built-in shops and offices), a council house (bouleuterion), and an elaborate fountain house providing free water to the people were constructed to beautify and provide comfort to Morgantina’s inhabitants.

Looking at different flooring types in the House of the Doric Capital at Morgantina

Despite its many Greek types of buildings, when it came to sacred architecture, the population of Morgantina chose to follow indigenous traditions rather than construct typical Greek temples with stepped foundations, colonnades, etc. Given the importance of agriculture in region, it is no surprise that multiple sanctuaries were dedicated to Demeter, the goddess who gave grain to mankind. She was worshipped throughout southern Italy and Sicily, alongside her daughter Persephone, the queen of the underworld and the model for girls transitioning to womanhood through marriage. Gods with chthonic associations and those associated with beliefs in the afterlife, like Persephone, were widely popular in the western Greek world, and Morgantina is no exception with its own shrine in a central location of the agora, complete with a sacred well or pit called a bothros into which offerings were tossed to reach the infernal deities, including lead curse tablets.

Visiting the underworld gods at the Sanctuary of the Chthonic deities at Morgantina

Our next stop was the archaeological museum in the nearby town of Aidone to see the objects that had been uncovered in the excavations at Morgantina. The intent was to focus on the collection’s highlights including brightly painted terracotta busts, bathtubs from the North Baths of Morgantina (the building with the first known domed roof in Greek architecture), and the famous Morgantina goddess, who likely represents Persephone.

Visiting the Aidone Museum

This limestone and Parian marble statue, sculpted between ca. 420-410 B.C., was clandestinely excavated from a sanctuary at Morgantina in the early 1980s and was purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum for a breathtaking 18 million dollars. The piece had always been a point of contention between the Italian government and the Getty, and after it was conclusively proved that the limestone body of the goddess was carved from formations nearby Morgantina, a settlement was reached so that the statue could return back home again, where it is now a major point of pride for the community.

Chatting with the locals in Aidone

Our visit to the museum coincided with the first Sunday of the month, when all state-run museums in Italy are free of charge, meaning that they are usually packed with locals taking advantage of the savings. It soon became readily apparent that the main focus of the museum was not the antiquities, but instead observing us exotic New Yorkers. A number of the students were approached by Italians who wanted to take pictures with them or talk to them about their relatives that live in the U.S.

Our final archaeological adventure of the day was a visit to the extraordinary Late Antique villa at Piazza Armerina, which contains over 32,000 square feet of well-preserved figural floor mosaics. It is currently believed to have been the country estate of a wealthy Roman Sicilian family, but some scholars argue that it belonged to the emperor Maximian (ruled 386-205) and his son Maxientius, the rival of Constantine for control of the western Roman empire. The complex consists of a clever arrangement of gangplanks, allowing one to walk high above the mosaic floors to see them better, as well as reconstructions of the walls and roof, thereby giving a true sense of what the original architectural spaces looked like.

The Small Hunt Mosaic from Piazza Armerina

The mosaics feature a wide variety of iconography from mythological stories to representations of courtly life and favored aristocratic activities. The most incredible mosaic is that in the Great Hall, illustrating how animals from across the Roman world and beyond were captured and transported to Rome to be hunted for public entertainment in the Colosseum.

Gazing over the Great Hunt mosaic at Piazza Armerina

After a very long and busy day, I was delighted to introduce the students to one of the more delightful ways to travel through Italy – by staying at an agriturismo, a working farm that offers room and board to tourists. We spent the night at an olive farm, and the students managed to get in a quick plunge in the freezing cold pool before our group dinner. I have so enjoyed watching the students bond together and develop meaningful friendships over the past few days, and I am impressed by how much they enjoy spending time with one another.

Enjoying agriturismo life outside of Piazza Armerina

Mangia, mangia!

A wedding reception was held at our agriturismo on the same evening as our group’s dinner, so we got to enjoy sharing a very formal waitstaff with them, complete with linen hand towels over their arms, which the students thought was very swanky. After four courses (!) of Sicilian specialties, I waddled back to my room to begin reading the student’s journals, which they write in each day as part of their assignments for the program. More than once, tears of joy came to my eyes as I read my students’ utterly sincere and detailed reactions to all that they had experienced since their arrival in Italy. I have been traveling overseas for so long that I had forgotten the feelings of wonder and awe that accompany being outside of one’s own part of the world for the first time. I am so impressed by their resilience and desire to make each moment of this program count. They are fearless in trying new things, which makes my job as a faculty leader much easier. At dinner, one of the students leaned over to me and whispered, “This has been the happiest day of my entire life,” and with that simple statement, a year’s worth of preparatory work was worth it. I think a message in the threshold mosaic of a home in Morgantina says it best – EYEXEI – “All is well.” Yes, truly, all is well.

Mosaic floor from the House of the Doric Capital at Morgantina

I thought the best place to write my first blog about getting ready to leave, would be during my seven hour flight to Ecuador. I am very excited now that I am on the plane, but before getting on I was more nervous. When I arrived home from college, I unpacked my things from college and started to pack for Ecuador. I was running around preparing and going to doctors appointments and calling my bank and my cell phone company. There is a lot that needs to be done so try not to procrastinate too much. However, I know that can be hard to do sometimes. I spend my time with my family and at the beach. When I was at work, I was able to practice my spanish with my co-worker Romi.

The trip did not feel real until three days before leaving, when I realized I will be able to see the Pacific Ocean in about a week. I will see mountains, volcanos, and have the chance to meet many different people. The day I was leaving, I became very nervous about the trip. I could not eat all day. I was not nervous at all until this point.  However, I told myself that this is an amazing experience and I just need the strength to step on the plane. Once I do that I can not go backwards or change anything, but I could look forward and have a great time studying abroad. On the plane I keep trying to imagine what Ecuador will be like. I can not wait to land and walk onto a different, yet amazing land. I will take many pictures and share it with all of you!

Picture: Many websites said to bring your host family candy or a tourist gift. However, I wanted to give them something they could keep and remember me by. I got them a wind chime. They are very common where I live and especially on Fire Island. They are beautiful in appearance and sound.

As I get ready to leave Madrid I am mixed with multiple feelings. I am excited and happy to see my family and friends back in New York but I am filled with incredible sadness at the thought of leaving the beautiful city of Madrid and all of my wonderful friends behind. It will be one of the toughest things to do to say goodbye to all of my friends. I have such an awesome life in Madrid and have seen so many beautiful places and met so many people. It is the people that I met that I will remember most when I look back on this trip. Each and everyone one of them has left a mark on me and hold a special place in my heart. I know that all things have to come to an end but this is one thing I didn’t want to end. I truly feel that my study abroad changed me for the better. I learned that I am capable of being completely on my own in a foreign country. I came on this trip with one goal and that was to truly be myself with each and every person I meet. I matured so much by living on my own, paying my own bills and rent and taking care of myself 100%. I like who I am and who my study abroad has helped to make me. I’m not ready to end my study abroad I want to continue exploring and I am certainly not ready to leave my friends but I will take everything I’ve learned on this trip with me when I return to New York.
I never thought this trip would have such a large impact on me. I got so incredibly lucky my friends from Madrid I know for a fact will be friends that I will have for a lifetime. Some of them have already started planning to come visit me in New York for my 21st Birthday. I am already counting down the days until I can see them again. We all spent our last week together every single day doing fun things throughout the city. Our last night out together was the toughest night there was not a dry eye in our group as we hugged each other on our last group trip to McDonald’s on the corner of Sol. I will never forget these people they’ve all left their mark on me in one way or another and I hope that I have done the same.

For the past three days, my brave colonists have explored the wonders of Syracuse, which was one of the wealthiest cities in the ancient Mediterranean and the most influential Greek settlement in the history of Sicily. Founded in 734 B.C. by Greeks from the city of Corinth, the city was a place where brilliant minds such as the playwright Aeschylus, the philosopher Plato, and the mathematician and inventor Archimedes flourished. We travelled here from Catania by train, giving us a glimpse of the rolling Sicilian farmlands and the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean.

Waiting for the train to Syracuse

The original settlement was on a tiny island called Ortygia, which we explored our first morning here, visiting the remains of several important temples. The first, dedicated to the god Apollo, was a particularly appropriate choice for the city’s first monumental stone temple as it was Apollo who oversaw the establishment of new colonies in the Greek mind. This temple, located close to the waterfront, was the first stone temple in the Greek West as well as one of the first Greek temples ever to have a stone colonnade running around it. Several of these massive monolithic columns, dating back to ca. 590 B.C., still stand, attesting to the skill of the masons who were still experimenting in building in stone. It set the precedent for many of the distinctive features of temples in the Greek settlements of southern Italy and Sicily, making it extraordinarily important in the history of ancient Greek architecture despite its ruinous state today.

Walking by the Temple of Apollo, ca. 590 B.C.

Walking on streets that belonged to the original street grid plan of ca. 730 B.C., we came to the Temple of Athena, built ca. 480 B.C., which now serves as the cathedral of Syracuse today. Many of the well-preserved Greek and Roman temples survived because they were converted into Christian places of worship in Late Antiquity. In the case of the Temple of Athena, the space between the columns were walled in and arches were cut into the interior walls to create the nave of the church.

Temple of Athena/Cathedral of Syracuse

This temple was constructed to commemorate a major Greek victory over the Carthaginians in northern Sicily in 480 B.C., which made Syracuse, and particularly its leader, Gelon, famous across the Mediterranean. Gelon was the first in a succession of rulers of the city known in ancient Greece as tyrants. While we tend to think of the term “tyrant” as a negative, oppressive leader; the term in antiquity simply indicated that the individual was the sole ruler of a city-state, and they could be both benevolent or abusive. Gelon was originally the tyrant of another Greek colony in Sicily, Gela, and was called upon for military assistance by the oligarchs of Syracuse when they were expelled out of the city by the lower classes. After defeating the Syracusans in battle, he took control of the city for himself and was succeeded as tyrant by two of his brothers. Gelon’s reign was remembered later as a golden age in Syracuse, but he was aggressive towards Syracuse’s neighboring Greek colonies, often deporting and enslaving the populations of entire cities to increase his control over eastern Sicily.

Sitting on the foundation of the Temple of Athena, ca. 480 B.C.

Some of the temple’s more unusual contents recorded in surviving ancient sources were giant doors with ivory panels and gold nails and a giant stalk of bamboo brought from India!

Our interactions with the tyrants of Syracuse continued that afternoon when we visited the area of the ancient city known as Neapolis (“new city”), which originally was partially used as a cemetery in the earlier centuries of Syracuse’s history and later was developed as part of the urban fabric as the city’s population expanded during the Classical period. During the reign of Hieron II, the area was particularly monumentalized with a rebuilding of the theater and the construction of an enormous altar, over 650 feet in length and 75 feet in width, the largest surviving altar in the ancient world. While the territory that Hieron II controlled was not particularly large, he was extraordinarily wealthy from the grain tax of 10% he charged, allowing him to have a royal court on the scale of the contemporary Hellenistic princes, and he was particularly close with the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt. His interest in enlarging the theater of Syracuse was especially personal, as he wrote (allegedly awful) tragedies himself, which were even performed at dramatic festivals in Athens.

A student presentation on Greek drama in the ancient Greek Theater of Syracuse

A view from the top of the theater hill – the stage is set for a performance of Euripides’ Alcestis in a few hours

Perhaps one of the most evocative ancient sites in Syracuse are the quarries, which were the source of stone for many of the structures in the city as well as its extensive fortifications. Here, one can still clearly see the chisel marks extending upwards for nearly 100 feet, a reminder of the human labor it took to build the ruins we visit today. Several tales are connected with these quarries, including one of the most decisive moments of the city’s history – the failed Athenian invasion between 415-413 B.C. During the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, Athens became very interested in controlling Sicilian grain trade and using the island as a strategic outpost of its naval empire that could control the majority of the western Mediterranean. Seeing Syracuse as its greatest threat, Athens began allying itself with Syracuse’s traditional enemies elsewhere in Sicily and on the southern Italian mainland, hoping that they would contribute to their military exploits. Sadly, the allies greatly disappointed Athens, fearing retribution from Syracuse, and infighting and mis-management among the Athenian commanders resulted in a terrible rout, resulting in 7000 captured Athenian prisoners of war and around 40,000 casualties (roughly 1 out of every 25 people in the city of Athens). This event crippled the Athenian military and likely led to the city’s eventual defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The Athenian captives were held by Syracusans in their quarries, where many of them died of thirst and hunger.

A group shot in the Ear of Dionysios for scale

One of the man-made caves in the quarries has unusual acoustic features in which noises echo, but repeat only once. Allegedly, another tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysios I, used to imprison his enemies here, using the features of the cave to eavesdrop on them. The shape looks a bit like the inside of a human ear, inspiring the artist Caravaggio to nickname it the “Ear of Dionysios.”

Our last stop in ancient Syracuse was a visit for several hours to the local archaeological museum, one of the largest in Sicily with three wings containing objects dating between the Paleolithic and the Byzantine eras. Most of the pieces come from Syracuse and its surrounding areas, and we concentrated primarily on objects related to the temples we explored in Syracuse and finds from Gela, the home city of Syracuse’s first tyrants.

A visit to the Syracuse Archaeological Museum

Tomorrow, off to Morgantina and Piazza Armerina!

Jet-lagged but in good spirits, sixteen intrepid New Paltz students arrived in Sicily, and I was so relieved to see them walk through the sliding exit doors in the Catania Airport. A bit dazed and confused, probably much feeling much like their ancient Greek counterparts when founding the city of Catania in 729 B.C., they cheerfully set off to learn about their new surroundings while trying trick their bodies into getting into the right sleeping pattern for their new time zone.

After checking into the hotel and a brief orientation, we had a lunch of traditional Sicilian fare at a nearby restaurant. Unbeknownst to me, the chef decided to expand our planned menu (as it is not every day he gets to cook for New Yorkers) and gave us a belly-busting amount of food for over two hours. So much for that “light meal” I promised the students! Thankfully the shots of expresso at the end perked everyone up once more, so we were ready to explore the city of Catania itself.

Our first stop was the local civic museum, which contains the local antiquities collection. In a surprise turn of events, the entire museum had been taken over by an exhibition of local contemporary art, including what appeared to be sculptural groups featuring mummified humans. Yes, you read that last sentence correctly. A personal highlight had to be the one playing the piano surrounded by cases of Greek vases. (Sorry for the lack of a picture!) It was an interesting mishmash, to say the least. Our next stop was a bit more relevant to the topic of our program, the Greco-Roman theater, which hides behind a modern-day facade of buildings, making it all the more extraordinary to see upon entering.

Catania: the Greco-Roman Theater

Our final stop was the central square of Catania to see the cathedral and the famous elephant fountain that serves as the city’s symbol. The elephant dates from Late Antiquity and is carved from lava rock from Mount Etna, which looms over Catania today. Mount Etna is Europe’s largest active volcano, and it destroyed much of the city in an eruption in 1669. When the town was rebuilt, many of the major public buildings were constructed from the grey lava stone with white limestone as trim in an elegant Baroque style, giving the town a very distinctive look among Sicilian cities. Of course, we made time for our first gelato break of the trip as well!

Catania: the Cathedral (duomo) of St. Agatha and the Elephant Fountain

Tomorrow, off to Syracuse, one of the greatest cities in the ancient Greek world!