Geocaching through Tuscany

While Mark works on catching you up on all the adventures we've had in Israel, Greece, and now Italy, I figured I'd write a quick post on the joys of geocaching.  It's a great family activity that you can do almost anywhere - and, for us, it was a nice switch from all the museums and churches we've been seeing lately.

Some of you might have heard of geocaching (or letterboxing which is another similar activity).  Both are, essentially, worldwide, ongoing scavenger hunts.  All around the world, fellow geocaching enthusiasts have hidden little "caches" (usually in a small, plastic tupperware-type container) that typically include a logbook, a pen, and maybe some other items that have been left by fellow geocachers to be traded and to travel to other cache-boxes around the world.  The caches are hidden under trees, in walls, in caves, in cities, in parks, in forests - anywhere there's a small, hidden-away place where "muggles" (non-players) won't meddle or find the booty.  And they are everywhere.  You might have walked or driven by one today, in fact... There are about 20 in downtown Siena (and this town is not that big).  There are about 60 in downtown Florence and even 60 in our own downtown Philadelphia, PA!  (Go to geocaching.com, join for free and join the fun.) 

So, we took a day recently to venture into the Tuscan countryside, armed with our Rick Steves' "Hilltowns of Tuscany" book, and a list of geo-caches to find in various towns.  We don't actually have a hand-held GPS unit but we seem to do okay without it most of the time.  You can get really close to pin-pointing a cache's location online before you leave the house (you can enter the GPS coordinates into a website that converts them into a location on a Google-type map and drill in pretty closely).  If the cache is in a city or town, it's pretty easy to get within 50 to 100 feet or so and narrow down your search.  Even in the woods, it's a little harder, but sometimes doable.

This was a great activity that allowed us to see these quaint, old towns that are just dripping with character, and enjoy a treasure-hunt that actually led us to some parts of the towns we wouldn't have normally sought out.  Even though we found a few the other day, we have a lot more caches to find..wish us luck!

Here's the outer gate of Monteriggioni, an old hilltop town that was actually mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy.  Its 14 commanding towers provided Siena with its northernmost defense against an ever-impending invasion from Florence in the 13th century. (Siena and Florence have a continuing 800+ year old rivalry...although there's no longer a threat of invasion!) 

Here's the central square of tiny Monteriggioni...its well and church.  The town was very quiet...not a soul around.

A cute alley/street inside the Monteriggioni city walls.

These cool, angled stones mark the entry through the other gate of Monteriggioni into town (this is facing out of the gate)

Here, the kids are updating the log book in a geocache we found near Monteriggioni's city walls.

San Gimignano is THE quintessential Tuscan, medieval, hilltop town.  It is quaint, filled with narrow stone streets, colorful, touristy shops, and tall stone towers and beautiful views of the Tuscan countryside all around.  Here, Ari stands in the doorway of a bakery/pasta store with a pair of matching (stuffed) wild boar to commemorate his adventurous lunch of wild boar meat...which was surprisingly tasty (didn't taste at all like chicken).

The old well in the center of San Gimignano's town square has hundreds of distinct marks inside its upper "lip" where you can picture hundreds of years of young maidens dragging up their buckets day after day to bring home the water.  The Thursday morning market happens in this square each week - as it has every week for over 1000 years...

14 of San Gimignano's original 70+ towers remain, giving it a unique and beautiful skyline. 

Here's the view from one of San Gimignano's many church towers.

Here, the kids are updating another logbook after finding another geo-cache.  Later, we go home and update the website to let the "owner" of the cache know that their treasure is still in its place.

One of the many quaint alleyways of San Gimignano

San Gimignano's main street at night - kind of magical

Es blubbert, zischt und dampft

As soon as you step out of the car in the town of Hershey, PA, your nostrils are filled with the aroma of chocolate.  The whole town literally smells of chocolate.

We have discovered that there is a town in Italy where you can have a parallel, although not similar, experience.  Ari was the discoverer of this not-so-well-known tourist attraction, Volcano Solfatara.  He even found a review of it on Trip Advisor entitled "Es blubbert, zischt und dampft" giving it 5 stars.  We don't speak German,  but we didn't need to know - we had to go.

Sure enough, as soon as we pulled into town, an incredible aroma wafted into our car -- even though all the windows were closed...and it wasn't chocolate...far from it.

Here is Ellie on the Scene:

Ari also has a video on his blog about our visit.  throughariseyes.blogspot.com


It is hard to tell from the videos, but we were really inside the crater of an old volcano.  There were geysers, fumaroles and hot pots all over and we could pretty much walk right up to them.  It was like the Rincon de La Vieja of Italy (which, for those of you who don't remember, is the Yellowstone of Costa Rica).  Here's a link to our old blog entry about that from a few years ago: Costa Rica blog (take a look near the bottom for some pictures and a description of our visit.)

Catching up

Sorry we haven't written in a while -- a bit of writer's block and a bit of busy schedule.  So our last posts were Ellie on the Scene videos in Pompei and Vesuvius.  From there, we hit the stunning Amalfi coast, a few days in the countryside outside of Rome and now, Siena.   We arrived here last Saturday.  This is going to be our "homebase" for about a month and from here we can take day trips or overnights to visit all the great sites in the area.

As you could see in Ellie's video, Pompei is a pretty incredible place.  Even though it was rainy and cold, we spent almost the whole day there walking through the ruins and really getting a feel for what life was like in 79A.D.  Except for feeding people to the lions and other ghastly ways of treating people, it is incredible to see how civilized the Romans were.  As I mentioned before, there is a lot of stuff in the history books, but it doesn't really hit you (at least it didn't really hit me) as it does when you're standing on the spot.

Rome and Pompei were Roman centers.  Now we've been in Siena for a week and yesterday we went and visited a couple other nearby towns.  This is more a medieval area.  In just a week, we can really feel the contrasts between the two.  Romans had their act together.  Cities were laid out in organized grids centered on the forum.  Streets were wide (as you saw in Ellie's video, they had sidewalks and even washed the streets regularly and put stepping stones in them so people could cross without getting wet), buildings were bright and airy, there were many public baths so people could keep clean and more.  Medieval cities seem to be the opposite -- the result of having to be contained inside high thick walls to keep the invading neighbors out and lack of a strong central authority.  The Dark Ages must have been pretty dark.

As we have the chance to explore this area more, we will be heading more into the Renaissance.  It will be interesting to see the changes.

A wide, main street in Pompei.  The stones in the street are original.  The way they were fit together is amazing -- they haven't done anything to restore this street because they haven't had to.  The city is huge, with thousands  of homes, tons of bakeries, fast food joints, bars, etc found throughout. 

 

As Ellie mentioned in her video, archeologists used plaster to create these horribly sad "statues" showing how people died in the eruption 2000 years ago.  People we're caught in shower of ashes and buried almost instantly.  Over time, their bodies decomposed and left spaces.  As archeologists were excavating (excavations started over 300 years ago) they found these spaces and realized what they were.  So they filled them with plaster to make these casts.

There is beautiful artwork all over Pompei... mosaics, frescoes, columns, statues.  This mosaic, found in the entryway of a home, shows a dog and says "Cave Canem", or "Beware of the Dog" in Latin.

This incredible, original mosaic was also found in the entryway of a home in Pompei. 

The original of this beautiful, little statue is in the museum in Naples, but this replica stands in the middle of a fountain in a garden.  It is about 18" tall but in no danger of being trod upon by dwarves (wow, we can even weave cinematic allusions into our flowing prose!).

This is a garden with a fountain, surrounding columns, and patios with mosaics on the floors and frescoes on the walls.  Roman homes were relatively spacious, airy and bright.  They had central courtyards (even the not so rich people) that the rooms opened up onto and they were full of art -- mosaics, frescoes and statues.

As Ellie mentioned in her video, here is one of the many bakeries that were found in Pompei - Oven on the left, grindstones on the right.

A bar made of marble pieces shows where one of the many "fast food" joints used to stand in old-time Pompeii.  This wasn't a wealthy town (although that's hard to believe with all the amazing artwork around), and many Pompeians didn't have their own kitchens in their small homes, so they'd often stop at the corner joint to pick up something to eat. 

This is one of the main roads heading out of the city through one of the gates.

A beautiful fresco in the traditional yellow, red and blue colors...amazing.  You can still see a lot of the scenes and colors in the frescoes throughout the city.

I just really liked this little guy.

Another original fresco

Ellie on the scene...Mt Vesuvius!

Hope you enjoy this post!

Ellie on the scene...Pompeii!

Ellie's doing a better job at keeping up with what we've been doing both in her journal and in her videos than we are...too much running around.  We'll be settling down in Siena in a couple of days and THEN we should be able to get you all caught up on what we've been doing.  In the meantime, here's an update from Ellie on Pompeii...

Ellie on the scene...GELATO! and the Trevi Fountain

Ellie's doing a great job of keeping her classmates in Yardley informed about what she's been doing.

Thought you all might like to see these too...Enjoy!

Roma v Lazio

So, I know some of you probably couldn't care less about ancient Roman ruins...and some of you would probably rather have your toenails pulled then spend a half of a day wandering through a museum of Renaissance art... so for those of you: here's something that you would LOVE to experience.  NOW, you'll be thinking to yourself, NOW they've arrived.  (warning: those ruin and art lovers might not care too much...)

We'd been looking for a soccer game to go to -- what a great way to experience the local culture, right?  By the way, they call it calcio in Rome (it's futbol everywhere else).  So, when we arrived in Rome, we tried to check the schedule to see if we'd be able to find one.  We were in luck (and believe me, it took plenty of luck to try to decipher the schedule) and found out that on Wednesday night there was a Roma v Lazio soccer game.

There are some sports rivalries that are so traditionally ferocious, so ingrained in the culture, so "fanatical", that support for rival teams would make a budding relationship untenable - no marriage could bridge that divide and survive.  Think Yankees - Mets on steroids.  The Roma - Lazio rivalry is one of those.  Roma is Rome's city team, while Lazio is the regional team.  Both play their home games in the Olympic Stadium in Rome, and a couple of times each year, they play each other.  As Rick Steves says in his book - "When Romans are introduced, they ask each other, "Laziale o romanista?"   It's even more important than Yankees - Mets maybe because there is no football, basketball and hockey to temper the emotions and they only play each other once or twice a year.

We debated whether to go -- would the rivalry get out of hand (I'm sure you've heard soccer hooligan stories)?  Would there be tickets available (and reasonably priced)?  Could the kids handle it (aside from the perils of the crowd, the game didn't start until 8:45PM)?  Would the weather be ok (nothing worse than watching a sporting event in the cold and rain)?  After asking around, we discovered that we could buy the tickets at the bar around the corner from our apartment.  As a security measure you need to show your passport or some sort of identification to buy the tickets... and not just the adults, the kids too (never had to do that for an Eagles game).  We paid 15 Euros for each ticket in the end zone of the Lazio section -- it turns out there were plenty of seats available, especially the expensive ones.

The security was insane.  They checked our ID (yes, we had to bring the passports to the game also) and did body/bag searches twice on the walk toward the stadium.  At the stadium, the ticket machine flashed up your name as you entered so the guards could check, once again, to make sure you were who you were supposed to be.

Here's the guy who checked each of our passports at the entrance to the stadium.  Behind him was another line of policemen doing body and bag searches.

The crowds were immense and as we got closer to the stadium, the noise was incredible.  There were cheers and chants and screaming...it was nuts.

In the end, Roma won the game 2 to 1.   We enjoyed the loud rowdiness of the crowd - there were some other kids right near us too that had flags, and sang all the cheers and jeers (There must have been 10 or 15 different songs/cheers they screamed during the game.  I'm sure there were plenty of bad words in the chants but we didn't understand any of them so it didn't matter.)  We really didn't ever feel that we were in danger in any way from fans, although a guy did get thrown out not far from us for causing trouble.

Before and after the game, the show of force by the local Rome police department was incredible. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of policemen in combat gear with riot shields lining the exits and the roads leading out of the area.  Fans of one team were strategically kept separate from fans from the other team with exits and paths blocked by rows of officers forcing people to walk directly out of the stadium and WAY around outside to ensure the crowds were disbursed before any trouble could occur.  We ended up having to walk at least a mile out of our way because our seats were on the north side of the stadium but we needed to get to the south to get a bus back into town.  We almost missed the last buses of the night at midnight because traffic was so disrupted and the detour around so long....but it was worth it.

Teams line up before the game

At four sections in the crowd, there were cops lined up and down the stadium to make sure fans from one team didn't "accidentally" mix with fans from the other side.  As you can see, the seats near these guys are completely empty...those are the expensive seats.  The end zones were packed but most of the rest of the stadium wasn't.

Final score - Roma 2, Lazio 1