Goodbye Italy

Now I have some sad news for you. Dill has decided to stay in Sperlanga. It is a beautiful beach area with that interesting Villa built into a cave. He must have really liked it.

We can’t go on without a mascot, so I was happy to find this Buffalo. The Professor has named it Buffy. In southern Italy people raise water buffalo for the mozzarella cheese that they can make from their milk. In many places you will find ads for buffalo mozzerella. This picture shows Buffy on an altar. It is a small one built right into the corner of a street. Besides the big temples where there were priests that did special sacrifices to gods there were also smaller alters like this one that were for more ordinary people to use for smaller sacrifices. We took this picture when we went to visit Pompeii for one last time. The day before this most of the group also visited a place called Herculaneum. It is smaller than Pompeii, but also was effected by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. They are doing lots of preservation work at Herculaneum and there is a lot of really fascinating stuff to see there.

In Pompeii I saw a few more things that I want to share with you before we go on to Greece.
Flour Mills-This is a picture of a flour mill. We saw places that had several really large ones and also smaller ones. People would bring their wheat and pour it into the top. Then a wooden rod would be put into the slot on the side and the top part would grind around the lower part and the wheat would turn to flour. Most of these places also had ovens, so you could tell that people came for their flour and also the baked bread to these places.

More evidence of people-This is a picture of one of the bodies that was found here. They did not actually find the body because it would have burned up, but they found places where people had been and they were able to fill the space in with plaster and then it was like a mold that showed the people. The ones that were left there had died of asphyxiation because they could not breath and then when the ashes fell they were buried right there. You can actually see the skull and teeth of this person.

A Puzzle-I saw this piece of a column and wondered why it was slanted. Did people use slanted columns for something. I asked the professor and he figured it out. Can you? It is sort of a geometry problem. If you need a clue click here. Tomorrow I will post the answer.

Today the Professor and I have been traveling from Italy to Greece. We will miss Italy. It really was a great place to visit. I am only on this trip for a few more days. I would really like to write more about what my readers are interested in. Write a comment to let me know what questions you have!