Last Wednesday we went on a class trip to Ceveteri and Ostia Antica. Ceveteri is an Etruscan cemetery town. It had lots of huge mounds with tombs inside them. The Etruscans were the people who lived in Italy before Rome was built. Not a lot is known about them because the only writings that survived were religious texts and not about daily life. Nobody even knows where they came from! They apparently believed, like the Egyptians, that the body still held traces of the spirit. Their graves were built just like houses. Some of them were very elaborate and some were just hollows in the side of the hill. We were a little bit bored by it because you can only see so many graves before it gets old! We made it more fun by pretending they were haunted houses. Some the tombs had passages that wound through the hill. They were so dark you couldn't see your hand in front of your face! We had to use our camera flashes and cell phones to light the way. That made it more interesting. Here's a pic of me sitting in one of the tombs on the little ledge where the body used to be (the bodies had all been removed):
After Ceveteri we went to Ostia Antica. It was an ancient Roman city that has been very well preserved. The coolest thing there were the public bathrooms, the apartment building, and the restaurant.
This weekend we went to Rome again. We like to spend time in the different piazzas just getting a feel for the city and eating yummy food. I got an extremely ugly caricature done of me! One very interesting thing we did was go to a church that has a very unique feature. It is called the Capuchin crypt, and I have never seen anything like it. The story is that this group of monks called the Capuchin monks lived at the church. As the monks died, their crypt started filling up. Eventually they had no more room, so they had to figure out what to do with the bodies piling up! They took all the bones from all the monks and made decorations for their chapels! These rooms were filled with skeletons dressed in monks' robes, chandeliers made of jawbones, and art pieces made of skulls! They said there are more than 4000 skeletons used in the crypt. It was semi-disgusting but very interesting! They wouldn't let us take pictures, but here's the Google Images site: http://search.aol.com/aol/image?query=capuchin%20crypt
So basically, this past week has been filled with dead people! It doesn't stop there, however; tomorrow we head to Pompeii! I think after that I'll be burned out on dead people, but hey! When in Rome...
1 comment:
Love the picture
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