Month: June 2019

On Sunday, we spent a day in Sorrento and Pompeii, which is an absolutely beautiful region. There’s a reason so many people lived in Pompeii (close to 15,000), which is hilly surrounding a large harbor which is spectacular. There’s lemon and olive groves everywhere. The Sorrento lemons grow the size of a football, they are huge, and almost everything is flavored with lemons.

On a side note, driving here is super crazy, I am so glad we paid for drivers or are taking tours. If they have traffic laws, they seem to uniformly ignore them. Crossing streets is a treacherous adventure.

We live in Colorado so we are used to stunning vistas, but Sorrento took our breathe away. We spent a long time just sitting in stunned silence.

Mt. Vesuvius is centered in the bay and dominates the landscape. Pompeii was originally a seaside town but is now about an half an hour from the sea and is above the city of Napoli. The site of Pompeii is absolutely huge. I had no idea it was such a large town. In 90 minutes, we only walked about a 1/4 of the site.

Another really interesting point about Pompeii is that they found about 2,000 bodies but they think 15,000 people lived in the town, so they estimate that 13,000 people escaped.

I was fascinated by the streets in Pompeii. They had no underground sewer system, but the entire town is on a slope so the down hill streets were the sewer system. The cross streets were set higher and there were large rocks for people to cross over without stepping into the dirty streets. There were drinking fountains every so often and were designed to spill over into the street to continually clean the sewage. My kids laughed at my fascination. It was just such good planning!

I also didn’t realize how long it took archeologists to find Pompeii. They knew Pompeii existed from historical records, but as it was so buried, they couldn’t find it. If you look at the picture below you can see a more “modern” building (in Italy, more modern is 1700) and is so much higher. Many of these historical sites, like the Roman Forum, were entire buildings underneath entire buildings.

The remaining mosaics were amazing and the kids were impressed by their level of detail. Much more detailed than the mosaics they made in MFW CtG.

So much to see and do in Rome, but today we did the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum. We got a guided tour and it was fantastic. The tour guide is an architect from Italy so he knew much about the actual building of these ancient wonders. However, all I could think about and point out to the kids was, “Do you remember making the Roman arches out of jello boxes?”. They liked the reminder the first time, but by the 5th Roman arch, they were over it.

The Pantheon – that’s original, perfectly proportioned concrete from 2000 years ago. Amazing!

The Trevi Fountain – Beautiful!

The Colosseum

See the arches? It would take a lot of jello boxes for that arch. (MFW RTR)

My husband, Scott, is a huge nerd, I mean fan, of Rome so he was incredibly thrilled.

Did you know that the laurel wreaths worn by Caesar and given out at the original Olympics were bay leaves? There’s entire groves of laurel (also known as Bay) in the Roman Forum.

They are excavating under the Colosseum and saving the underground portion which held the animals and criminals waiting to be executed. They estimate that there was over 66 elevators that created trap doors in the floor to surprise those fighting.

All in all, an amazing day!

After graduating one kid from college and two from high school, we decided to take them to Europe. Our version of a Senior Trip.

I am finding it funny the ways my little homeschoolers are reacting to International Travel.

1. My kids are most looking forward to the art in Europe. Is that normal? No, I don’t think so. Today, we spent an amazing amount of time walking through Triptychs in the Vatican.

2. My kids Bible knowledge is fantastic. However, we clearly don’t know the Catholic Saints. Who is St. Judith and why is she consistently holding a severed head? Why is St. Jerome depicted in a red hat alongside a lion? These are our burning questions from today.

3. Michelangelo art projects from 5th grade clearly held more weight than I expected. I just read a book and taped paper to the underside of a chair and had them draw. Looking up at the Sistine Chapel reminded them.

4. Art History is important. They explained to their Dad how they could tell the era of the painting from the elongated figures and the halos.

5. Art Astronomy is pretty awesome. We like the series of painting that not only accurately depicted the phases of the moon but the placement of the planets. MFW’s RTR was used a lot today.