Coo koo kachoo, what’s new with you?  Why, thank you for asking!  Yesterday we had been to the complete outskirts of Rome and back.  First we went to a large, ancient Roman estate called the Villa Quintili and then followed it up with aqueducts and a massive food market.  Sorry this is going up a tad bit late, I was one step away from completing the post last night and then the internet cut out on me.  But anyways, let’s get to it.

 

The Villa Quintili is a large estate that contains everything a Roman could want like baths, personal water supplies, and their very own circus for racing.  Sure, it may not sound like much to us today, but back then that was the top of the top and only the elite could own something like that.  In fact, one of the emperors killed to obtain the property.  Oh, what rascals those Romans were.  So the villa sits right off of the main road, Via Appia, or at least the ancient portion of it.  It’s on top of a small hill overlooking vast fields of wheat.  From a distance, it doesn’t look any more impressive than, let’s say, everything else in Rome.

 

Going up to the estate is a nice, brick and concrete pathway at a slant for small carriages and horses, which would be quite convenient to the wealthy.  Up close inside the structure you can still see the mosaics and rooms that the main building of the estate covered.  You could very easily get lost in it if you didn’t know where you were going.  Since only a few rooms still existed somewhat in tact, there was little to no chance of actually getting lost since we could see across most of the area, but just humor my imagination, will you?  I would have been able to paint a better picture for you if not for a certain photobomber *cough Cole cough*.

 

Anyways, the next portion of the villa was a distance aways since the estate was super spread out.  The remains of the circus could no longer be seen, but the area set out for it was fairly clear.  Trekking across the first large, open, grassy space we’ve encountered, we came upon the water storage.  There were about 4 large stone “tanks” that an aqueduct poured into.  They were each about 1.75 times the height of us and about as wide as jeep or so.  Continuing further, there was a modern fence that guided us to Via Appia which was on the other side of a large set of bushes and a gate.  Swerving to the right, the paths branched off, but in reality we could just see both directions to a loop that went through some building which for the life of me I cannot remember its purpose.  I most likely can’t remember the purpose of that building because of a furry companion.  While most of the group trekked ahead following Gino, another student and myself kept behind to get some attention from a local german shepherd.  It was a shy dog, but eventually we got it to tag along with our group and play some fetch.  I think sometime in the middle of our dog endeavors the tour ended and people started heading back.

 

One brief bus ride and a coffee stop later, we arrived at a local park.  It was relatively long, but short in depth with a strange concrete bump going through the middle.  That bump happened to be one of the remaining working aqueducts and we promptly climbed it to discover the looming broken aqueduct in the distance.  We had to reach it.  Clambering down from the relatively small one, we hustled over to the massive one in hopes of scaling it.  Alas, we could find no easy way to the top.  But still, it was good looking.

 

Somehow in the midst of our adventure, Gino managed to find an ancient nail, mosaic piece, and some brick, or so he claimed.  Good on you, Gino.  We all marched on back to the bus and it was at that point Gino mentioned the affinity for drugs that park notoriously has.  Some details are best left out my good man.  Whatever, that couldn’t spoil our fun.  The bus took us onward and upward to our next stop, Eatily!  No, I didn’t spell that wrong.  It’s really a play on Italy by using the english word for eat.  It obviously catered to the english tourists.  From a distance you would have thought it was a shopping mall because it was four stories tall and was more window than supporting structure.  Well, it kind of was a mall, but everything inside was food!  It was heavenly.  On one floor they had breads and deserts, the next beers and pasta, the third fine drinks and spices, and at the top cooking schools and the fanciest of restaurants.  In total, we spent an hour and a half exploring and eating our way through the building, but we could have easily spent far more time there.

 

Being done with the scheduled stuff, we trucked on back, had a small break, and then had our class.  Mission accomplished.  That’s all for yesterday my faithful readers!  We’ll be back later today (or tomorrow depending on how late we’re out) with more chronicles on the adventures of our squad.

 

– Chris Apfeld