Just to get you thinking about some of the things I will be seeing I am linking to two videos. Wow! The first one is about over 600 caves that have been found under Naples: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8030348.stm
And the second about new technologies being used at the Catacombs in Rome:
Paintings which have not been seen in nearly 2,000 years are now visible
My husband just sent me this info about something we will be doing on the trip.
Nicola Denzey Lewis will be taking us down underground to a couple of theearly Christian catacombs (2nd-4th centuries). No one knows how many milesof underground tombs there are around Rome from that time period. There areburials for all kinds of people, not just Christians. Because these tombswere underground, they were hidden and preserved. So wall and ceilingpaintings in the (the image is from amazon.com and links to the listing)
Christian tombs provide us with some of the earliestexamples of Christian art.Nicola is the author of *The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of EarlyChristian Women*. Since women were often in charge of burial and mourning,the catacombs also provide us with important evidence for the activities ofwomen in the early churches.