Roman Holiday

It has been awhile since my last post because internet is sparse here on the wide open road in Italia. But, now I am living in a flat in Rome for the next three weeks, so I am a bit more stationary at the moment. YAY!

Since I last posted our team has had many adventures. We were tucked away in the beautiful mountains in the small town of Paderno del Grappa. I fell in love with the city of Padova and the charming town of Vicenza. I wrote on the wall at Juliet’s house in Verona and touched her (well, the statue of her) breast for good luck. We trekked up to a castle found in Soave and watched the sun set over the city. We spent a day in Firenze enjoying the sun and admiring the gorgeous Duomo.

We have been in Rome for a week now and it has flown by! I LOVE Rome so far, what little I have seen. There is a really nice park close to our flat that is a sea of green and daisies, with ancient trees, people playing football and dogs running free and playing together. Over the weekend we walked downtown by the Colosseum and the Spanish steps and the Pantheon. It was the perfect sunny day to walk through Rome pretending to be Audrey Hepburn in ‘Roman Holiday.’

We have had some pretty good schools since arriving. One day in particular we played jump rope games in the schoolyard with the kids and it was so much fun! Later that day we were in the mountains of Nemi which overlooked a crystal-clear lake and we sat outside in the sun eating wild strawberry tarts and gelato- perfetto!

Every night since our arrival in Rome, the sounds of tribal drums have been echoing through the neighborhood where our flat is. Curiosity had been building in me to find its source, so Abie and I went on a run (the night of the wild strawberry tart day) and began a mission to find the source of the drumming. We followed the sound to this old building and tried to ask some children outside (in very poor Italian) what the drumming was about. Luckily, some English-speakers walked by soon after and told us we were invited to come inside the building to check it out. Inside was a group of young Italians who were rehearsing West-African dance and drumming for an African festival later this year. All the men were drumming and the women were dancing. Abie and I asked if we could sit and watch, and then they asked us to dance with them. It was really lovely and so fun… all of us were in a circle, and one woman would start a repetitive movement and then it was a ripple effect where everyone in the circle would join in and do the same movement until someone else wanted to lead something.

Well, I must be off!

Con tanto amore