Megan and I visit the Cinque Terre!!

My best friend Megan came to see me this week! She flew in from St. Louis to tour around Rome with me, and head out on a weekend trip. To plan our trip we didn't look in Italy-in-6-hours tour books or Europe-in-3-days books. We scoured a book my cousin Danny gave me for Christmas: Rick Steve's Europe Through the Back Door. Now, Danny must know me pretty well to give me this book, or else he just has really good taste :) But its not too surprising to find out that my dream destinations this semester are not the usual ones. I am afraid that I am not going to make it to Paris or Madrid, Munich or Stockholm. As beautiful as I'm sure those places are, they are going to have to wait for another trip. As far as this semester, I'm sticking to Italy, with Spring Break in Tunisia and a possible weekend trip to Budapest. Anyways, Europe Through the Back Door doesn't cover any of the usual places that tour books cover. It only shares about "back-door" places that really expose the true culture of an area. In Italy, the focus is on the Dolomites and on the Cinque Terre.
The Cinque Terre is a collection of five little towns in Liguria. We decided to stay in the smallest town, Corniglia, which also happens to be the only one not on the water. It is on top of a mountain right next to the water. This area is unbelievabely beautiful. A trail winds between all five towns, or a train totters by once an hour.

A remarkable thing about Liguria in general, and the Cinque Terre in particular is it's pesto. Yes, I said pesto. This is the birthplace of pesto in all its loveliness. And let me tell you- it- is- lovely. We have been eating pesto on crackers since we returned, which has only been a few days, but its awesome pesto.

Anyways, I thought it might be a good choice to chronicle the trip by what we ate, since this food is the best I've had in all of Italy. When we arrived, we walked around Corniglia and asked around for rooms to stay in. We saw a few, all were between 55 and 60 euro per night, and we decided on a room with a beautiful view for 60. When we got settled in, we walked through town and bought panini to eat on a bench. These panini were good, but not the focal event of the day by any means. The room that we got rested above a restaurant, probably with the best view in town for lunch. We were told that dinner began at 7:00 and we kept it in the back of our minds. When 7:00 rolled around, we weren't very interested in going very far since it is very dark far away from a city (go figure) so we strolled into our ground level. The prices were about the same as in Rome, except that a plate of penne pomodoro (penne with tomato sauce) in Rome costs about what penne alla polpa di granchio (penne with lump crabmeat) costs in Corniglia. Alot of the seafood requires an order of at least two, to get proportions right I assume. Megan and I ordered the seafood risotto, which came to our table in a crockpot. This was probably the best dish I have had in Italy so far. Risotto with clams, shrimp, mussels, prawns... it was heaven.
The next day we had pesto gnocchi and swordfish alla liguria for lunch in Vernazza. As I already mentioned that this is the hometown of pesto, the loveliness of this dish can be assumed to its fullest extent. The swordfish was delicious. It was a steak grilled to perfection with tomatoes, olives, capers, and olive oil on it. Sooooo good.

For dinner, we traveled to Manarola. We ate at a beautiful little restaurant there. Manarola had beautiful restaurants, at least from how little we saw. We got swordfish carpaccio for our appetizer. We really only went to this particular restaurant for this dish. Working at Francesca's Famiglia back in Barrington, our carpaccio con avocado is my favorite dish, and this was the first time I have ever encountered it in Italy. This swordfish carpaccio was delicious, the flavor of the fish was so distinctive and delicate. For our pasta, Megan got another gnocci pomodoro this time and I got pesto ravioli.
Those are the most memorable meals that we had for me. Delicious. Yum.

Vesuvius erupts again!!!!!

I signed up for a day trip to Pompeii led my my professor Dr. Nicholson. He teaches my Art in Rome class as well as my Baroque Art class. Before we left he warned us about the recent volcanic activity with Pompeii. Volcanologists were predicting an eruption at any time. We read the articles and listened to him, but didn't take the warnings too seriously. We took a bus down to Naples early in the morning to get started. We went through Pompeii, houses and piazzas, gardens and brothels. That was when the alarms started to ring and the ground started to shake.... just kidding! Haha! But I did have alot of fun with Photoshop!!

One really interesting thing about Pompeii is that biologists have recreated the gardens as they were before the eruption. All of the same flowers, fruits, even the colors are supposedly the same as they once were. Thats pretty impressive science!

The coolest thing about Pompeii, what differentiates it from other ancient ruins, is the body casts. When the first excavations were happening, the archeologists realized that the pockets of air they found with human bones at the bottom were actually bubbles that were the exact shapes of human bodies! So when they found a pocket of air, instead of digging around more, they would fill the pocket with plaster, let it dry, and then chip away the lava from around it. Some of the impressions were so precise that I could see belts and pleats in clothing! One body was actually screaming, and I could see his teeth!

We also saw the bath building. The towel hooks were still on the walls! The bath building has the oldest known person-made dome ceiling. It has a hole at the top, just like the Pantheon, but I think it was designed to let the steam out.
All-in-all, Pompeii was sweet. Thank goodness we survived the trip! Haha!! I am still planning on going back to actually see Naples at some point before I leave. I have to try this pizza place I'm reading about in Eat, Pray, Love and see Herculaneum, which my Uncle Ron and Aunt Cindy have convinced me to see ;)

Venice- Carnivale!!!

This past weekend I traveled to Venice with my friend Lauren and her mother, Suzanne. Lauren and I met back in St. Louis where she lived at Grace House Catholic Worker down the street from Karen House Catholic Worker where I spend time. So Lauren emailed me last Tuesday asking if I would like to join her in Venice for Carnivale, and naturally, I accepted.
We took the train out on Friday morning and went to our hotel to settle in before we set out to explore the city. We stayed at a beautiful hotel outside of the city called the Villa Odino. We settled into our room and then got on the local train into (or rather out-to) Venice. We didn't see much of the carnivale partying, but word on the street was that due to the weather there were a lot fewer people venturing to the festivities. We only made it to one sight: the Scuola of San Rocco. It was beautiful. It is called the "Sistine Chapel of Venice." It is filled with huge paintings by Tintoretto. We wanted to see other museums and churches, but we did not account for how incredibly hard the city is to navigate. Nearly every street is only two blocks long, and they all just dead-end. We tried to visit the Peggy Guggenheim collection for hours and when we finally got close enough that it was a possibility it had already closed. We did see alot of beautiful art galleries and shops though. I got my first major purchase (major being over €5), a glass dish that now holds my change on my desk. It is beautiful.
All-in-all, Venice is beautiful, but it is so hard to get around that I don't think I'll go back. And the gondola rides cost about €70 per person... translation: $100 for a gondola ride for one person. Sounds like a rip-off to me! Also, the water-taxies cost about $10 per ride. They offer a year-pass for €200, so if you don't buy that then you are clearly a tourist, and a sucker I guess. What a bummer!

Papal Audience

So, it is a JFRC tradition to go to a papal audience together as a student body. We all woke up at the crack of dawn and tromped down to the Vatican to stand in line. When they started accepting people into the hall we were all towards the beginning of the line. Everyone raced to get inside the hall first. We had heard that Benedict walks down the center aisle and shakes the hands of the people sitting there. So... everyone hurried to sit on the aisle. They load up the far side first and then load up the near side, but since all the aisle seats were taken by the time I got up there five of us went to sweet-talk a Swiss Guard into letting us take the good seats on the other side of the aisle. Luckily, this worked, haha and so we ended up with five of the best seats in the house (for us lowly people who didn't qualify to sit in the first 40 rows of reserved seating). So I ended up on the aisle in row 41!! Woo hoo!

The audience was interesting, for the most part it was anti-climactic after our four-hour wait to get our seats. But, Loyola University JFRC was mentioned and we all stood up and cheered. Unfortunately though, Benedict decided not to walk down the aisle, so I didn't get to shake his hand across the wooden barrier :(