July in Florence

The dig ended in the middle of June, and I was sad to leave Radda to return to Florence.  One can stay relatively cool throughout the summer in the hills of the Chianti region with their wind, shade, and swimming holes.  In Florence there is no escape.  The stone city bakes day and night; even the breezes in its narrow streets are hot.  The apartment does not have air conditioning; it is too expensive to fit this ancient palazzo with the units and too expensive to run them.  The apartment neither have very good ventilation; its windows open into an inner stone courtyard that emanates heat long past midnight.  To the joy of the mosquitoes, I never shut my windows, allowed me to witness better the living apartment building.  The exposed pipes shuttle water noisily down the walls of the courtyard and couples bicker and argue through their open windows.  People sing, answer phone calls, and play music.  Sometimes, I am treated to Wayne Newton or "Sweet Home Alabama", and if I'm really lucky, I get to hear someone singing along in a thick Italian accent.

Other ways to cool down are null here.  Italians do not believe in ice.  I learned this the other week when I wanted to make mint juleps for a friend from England.  We found bourbon, fresh mint, and sugar, but could not remember anywhere we had seen ice for sale.  We looked for it at various bars and stores and asked in polite Italian where one can buy ice in Florence.  We were politely answered that one does not sell ice in Florence.  A woman a tabacchi was kind enough to explain that once one could buy ice, but that was fifty odd years ago before refrigerators, when large blocks of ice were packed and delivered to the community.  So we resorted to a foolproof plan.  I waited on the street while my friend entered a bar, flirted with its tender, and promptly returned with a large bag of ice.  If I want a large quantity of ice in the future, I will need a cute girl in tow.

The mint juleps were delicious, but I was still curious about the question of ice.  I asked a few Italian friends about it and learned that ice is, in fact, a deadly additive.  If a drink is too cold, it is bad for the stomach and digestion.  If a drink is ice cold, it is worse and, in fact, sometimes fatal: if someone drinks a Coke on ice, they run the risk of their stomach literally exploding.  Digestion is one of the most important  superstitions in Italy.  It has its own tastes and cannot bear cold, mixed wines of different colors, wine mixed with water, milk after 10.30, and coffee at any point before a meal is entirely finished.  While at any point of the day, cheese and raw meat can be consumed with abandon--in Italy, meat, often raw, is not only a course, but a condiment--a cappuccino after dinner or switching from white to red wine are bold moves.

On a side note, I have come to thoroughly enjoy eating raw meat.  One of my favorite appetizers is pork sausage stuffing and stracchino cheese mixed together uncooked on crostini.  If this seems nasty, remember that salami and prosciuto are nothing more than thin slices of cured, uncooked meat.

With ice out of the picture, I have come to accept sweating and constantly looking like the despot of some small Caribbean island.  If you want to cool down, you can either brave the hordes of Japanese in the museums or do laps in the grocery store, neither of which are very enjoyable.  I am looking forward to returning to Chianti at the end of this month, where it is cool and green.

I will write more later about London and the shenanigans that Alan Jackson and I have been getting into, but I needed to complain about the heat first.

Long dig post

We are in the middle of the third week of the excavation.  The first two weeks of the dig have mostly been preparation for finding the artifacts and pottery that will shed light on Cetamura and the Etruscans.  This involved surveying the units perfectly, removing backfill, and rediscovering where the last team left off in the units and in their notebooks.  From there the first locus of a particular type of dirt or feature, such as a stone wall, is measured topographically and drawn to scale.  Because we have had to remap and redraw the units that haven’t been excavated since the seventies, progress has been slow.  Although we have found a few interesting pottery shards and gaming pieces, nothing particularly interesting or important has been discovered.  At night, I have been dreaming about grandiose finds: full-size bronze figures and inscribed pottery, but so far, buckets of brown dirt and broken terracotta have marked the development of the excavation.

Regardless, the site is beautiful, resting atop a hill overlooking Chianti and shaded by oak trees.  It has been cool and sunny, and my trench mates and the entire group get along wonderfully.  The most excitement that I have had so far was last week, when I was exploring the well on the summit.  I was trekking through the underbrush, following the exposed stones that mark structures that have not yet been fully identified.  At one point, I stepped beside a stone and felt something writhe around my ankle, a feeling that I remember well from when I worked on the farm.  I would cleave a beaver dam and the ensuing current would lead a water moccasin to twist around my legs.  Feeling the snake against my calf, I leapt on the wall behind me, and looked down to see it struggling to get back onto its belly, which it quickly did.  As it slithered away, I recognized that it was a viper from its diamond-shaped head and triangular markings.  Hell of a feeling that was.

I had to cut the first week of the dig short in order to return to Florence.  My cohorts and I had to give our last presentations of the semester on our Master’s theses and take our last courses in paleography.  The former was a hoop-jumping exercise: the professors shot holes in everyone’s theses and research in order to spur us into working over the summer.  The latter was truly interesting, as we learned where to find and how to read primary sources in the Archivo di Stato.  The courses ended on Thursday, but I did not immediately return to Radda.  I stayed in Florence to attend the Friday evening the opening of the Caravaggio show at the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi.  While I like Caravaggio just fine, I was more interested in spending time in the Vasari Corridor that was opened for the night, a rare opportunity.  I came back to Radda on Saturday with a few friends, and we spent Sunday barbequing and strolling around Radda, La Villa, and Cetamura.

Sunday evening, I arrived early when I went to pick up the group of students returning from various places at Montevarchi.  A friend and I wandered to the main piazza and found a Renaissance festival.  Members from the community had dressed up as soldiers, ladies, and nobleman and oversaw the events, which included flag throwing, crossbow shooting, and falconry.  The falconry exhibition was the best, because it was a disaster.  It started well; a man and his girlfriend released a small falcon that flew to various posts and back.  The next bird was a larger raptor, a hawk, which once it was released, shot into the sky, flushing a legion of pigeons from the piazza and rooftops.  The falconer tried recalling his bird to no avail.  It had flown into the city, reappearing only every now and then over the piazza.  Pigeons and swallows darted across the open sky at full speed as the hawk circling above, occasionally giving chase.  A few streets away, a small dog began yipping excitedly from a high balcony, and I wondered what would happen if the bird took that for its prey and what reception it would then receive on its return to the piazza.

After twenty minutes of calling the hawk with clipped yelps, the falconer gave up, deciding instead that it was time for the next bird.  His girlfriend brought him a beautiful barn owl, and when he released it, it again flew away.  It reappeared only once when it soared into the open window of a building that was under construction.  Out poured more pigeons that the hawk then pursued.  The exasperated falconer signaled to his girlfriend to bring the next bird, an enormous eagle, nearly half the size of a man.  Luckily the eagle wanted no part in the other birds’ avian shenanigans.  He attacked the dead rabbit that the falconer’s girlfriend dragged behind herself.  The eagle pinned the rabbit to the pavement and perched and folded its wings around the dead animal as if it were a minister delivering a benediction, then tearing and bolting down strips of its flesh.  Many of the children were horrified, and once the eagle finished eating, the lord of the festival quickly announced the next spectacle, crossbow shooting.  The falconer and his girlfriend gathered up eagle and then began assembling a tracking antenna in the corner of the piazza.

This last weekend was the first that I have spent in Radda.  The moon was full on Friday night, and a few of us stayed up late drinking wine and smoking cigars on the balcony overlooking the vineyards.  Some of the girls think that the house is haunted; one in particular, a coed from the mountains of western North Carolina, is particularly adamant about the existence of the ghost, its diabolical intentions, and its agency to harm her.  She goes on and on about the villa’s nightly horrors, and to the chagrin of her roommates, sleeps with the lights on.  In my room, there hangs the stuffed head of a cinghale, a Tuscan boar.  About midnight, we removed it from the wall, and kneeling, I wrapped myself in a white blanket, holding the boar’s head in front of mine.  It protruded from the sheets that trailed and wrapped around it like a monk’s habit.  I shuffled into her room, grunting and hissing, and she woke up right when the boar’s head was across from her face.  She screamed and cussed us out as we ran from her room laughing.

We left the boar’s head facing up from the toilet in the girls’ hall, and a low partition wall kept it out of view from the rest of the bathroom.  The next morning we learned that a semisomnic coed went to use the bathroom at three in the morning.  When she stumbled upon the head lewdly grinning up at her from the toilet.  She let out such a frightened scream that she woke up the entire floor.  I now realize why Dr. Ewell highly recommended that everyone pack earplugs.

The next day, most of the group left for Florence first thing in the morning, and along with those who were staying in Radda, I took the van and toured the vineyards.  This week is the Classico e’ festival, which celebrates Chianti wine and culture.  While I was driving and abstained from drinking, we stopped at various vineyards and castles and the towns Gaiole and Greve in Chianti to sample wine from the local producers.  We came back that evening and cooked steaks and drank the bottles we had purchased during the day’s peregrination.  The tour gave me an idea for starting my own business, and I am checking on the details.

I spent today walking through Radda with my friend and former flatmate Nicola.  We both speak Italian and stopped in on various shops and shot the breeze with their owners.  Radda is a small town and not yet fed up with tourists; it’s much warmer than Florence.  We ate a late, lazy lunch and then drove to Siena to pick up the returning students.  On the drive, we discussed my plans after graduate school.  They are unripe ideas and hopes, and while I have time, I am unsure about the future.

All in all, life is good.  Hope everyone is well.

The site and Etruscan religion

The excavation is on a hill in Chianti that overlooks the surrounding patchwork of vineyards, olive groves, and forest.  The hill can be divided into three terraces, and we are digging on the upper two.  The middle terrace contained a crevice that leads into a limestone cavern below, which is now covered with earth.  The upper terrace contains a well that has been filled in, and although past excavations have dug within the well, they have only reached the strata from the medieval period.  Given the Etruscans penchant to throw things into wells, there is much left to be discovered there, but there is not enough funding for the machinery and experts to dig below the water table.

The site was established in the Paleolithic period, as evidenced by the tools found there.  The Etruscans turned the site into an artisan's workshop and sanctuary, likely because of the crevice on the middle terrace that leads into the caves below.  The Etruscans were pantheists and believed that the gods informed and charged each object and event.  Their religion was much more mystical than the Greeks and Romans, and their priests read the future and the will of the gods through lightning, portents, and the entrails of sacrifices made to the gods of the sky, earth, and underworld.

Sites where crevices or caves gave access to spaces below the earth were conducive for sacrifices to the underworld gods, who were often variations of sky and earth gods.  Additionally, the mystical foundations of Etruscan religion made these sites important.  Roman writers record that the Etruscans learned their religion from a child named Tages who resembled a withered old man.  The child came from and returned to the space below the earth.  Since Tages's revelations laid the foundation of much of Etruscan religion (much of it also stemming from Greek mythology), Etruscans priest tried since then to further uncover the spiritual underpinnings of the physical world through divination and other practices of revelation.  In Tarquinia, past excavations have found a child burial beside a crevice in the earth that became an important sanctuary for the founding of the city at Tarquinia.  As forensic evidence has shown, the child was an epileptic and likely suffered hallucinations; we can likely assume that he was considered prophetic and revelatory like Tages.  Whether the Etruscans were returning the child to the crevice in the manner of Tages after its untimely death, or whether they sacrificed the child is unknown, but the practice of human sacrifice seems to have been a part, though rare, of Etruscan religion and culture.

At Cetamura, the site where we are digging, Etruscan artisans created votive pottery and figure that pilgrims or passthroughs bought and dedicated to the gods of the sanctuary at the crevice.  There was a small habitation site around the sanctuary, which does not seem to be urban or aristocratic.  A few years ago, the dig team found pottery with inscriptions that revealed the names of the gods to which the sanctuary was devoted.  These gods are rare and obscure, and the only other evidence that we have of them are a few bronze mirrors identify them with inscriptions.  The gods are represented as wild and prophetic, often with bare chests, long hair, and their heads thrown back, howling at the sky.  In one mirror, one the gods is show examining a severed human leg in the process of divination, a curious scene.

Last year, during the excavations of the what was thought to be trash pits between the middle and upper terraces, the dig team found a slew of bones.  Some were common: cow, sheep, pig, but other bones, such as those from dogs, puppies, and suckling pigs, serve as evidence that animal sacrifices were made at the site and that the supposed trash pits were actually the depositories of the sacrificed animals.  The lab results also revealed that one of the bones was a human tibia.  Given that this leg was found with the other remains of sacrifices, it support the conclusion that Etruscan priests who were dedicated to the site's gods may have used human sacrifices and body parts for divination, just as the bronze mirror shows.  This year's team is itching to get more out the depositories and are currently removing the wall of an ancient Roman bath complex that stands above them to find what lies below.

Primo giorno

The dig began last Saturday in the rain.  I met Dr. Ewell and Dr. Taylor that morning at the rental agency, where I received the keys to a massive black van, stick-shift, that I will be driving for the season.  I drove the van from Florence to lunch at Dr. Hatfield's in the piedmont northwest of the city.  I had to pick up the archaeology students at the Siena train station at five, but lunch started late and I lost track of time.  Leaving late, I wheeled down to Florence, hit the Viale, and made my way to the Super Strada.  Unfortunately, I took the old road to Siena winds through the hill country in Chianti.  I realized my mistake and tried to make up for lost time, riding the clutch down the hills, bursting out of a switch-back or hairpin turns, and zooming past small towns like Greve and Castellina.  It was raining and the foliage that hadn't yet matured into the deep green of summer was wet and verdant, nearly neon against the grey sky.  The van lurched and bobbed through its tortuous path, the engine roaring, catching, accelerating.  I arrived at the station a only little late and full of adrenaline.  I then responsibly shuttled the students to Radda.

We are staying in villa built in the 1960's that is located a kilometer down the hill from Radda.  The villa overlooks the vineyards that produce Chianti Classico; it is cavernous and decorated as it was half a century ago.  It has been cold and at night, we light fires to keep the house warm.  We take our meals together there, leaving for the excavation site at eight and returning at five.  I have plenty more to write about all of this later.  Ciao.

Finito

A few more paleography and archival research classes aside, the semester is finished at last.  I have learned that just as discretion is the better part of valor, avoidance is the better part of scholarship.

The dig begins Saturday, and I need to finish the game-plan for the Symposium and a few books on the Etruscan site at Cetamura.  I have a few dinners this week, including a goodbye dinner for a friend and MAN FEAST(!) on Thursday night.  MAN FEAST(!) will be held at an undisclosed location; early reports indicate that there will be a lack of glasses, muliebrity, utensils, vegetables, time, and possessions.

It's been raining and cold since early last week, and this weather is supposed to continue until the end of this week.  When the sun emerges briefly, I have been escaping to the Boboli Gardens to read there.

St. Mark's Apartments

I've launched the website: http://florenceholidayapartments.org/

Please take a look and feel free to contact me about it.

La notte bianca e il capanno di birra

Last night was La notte bianca, The White Night, when most of the shops and museums in Florence stay open until dawn.  I made dinner with Caitlin and Nicola: pasta with a sauce made with curry, fresh zucchini, and shrimp.  After drinking copious amounts of Chianti, we met more friends and hit the streets.  The centro storico was packed.  It was midnight, and the city felt like a carnival.  We pushed through the crowds to various piazze to see the concerts and events happening there.  It wasn't long before playing rugby with half of Tuscany became annoying, so we headed to the Palazzo Vecchio and spent a few hours there exploring.  Many of the rooms that are not regularly open, like the Terazza di Saturno, were open last night, and wandering through the darkened palazzo, with its grotesques, mythological scenes, and complex architecture, was dreamlike.

Today, we walked to San Minato al Monte.  The organist was practicing Bach inside the church, and we sat outside the facade, listening to the music while we soaked in the sun and looked out over Florence.  We meandered to Vivoli for gelato and wandered through the market in Santa Croce.  I am headed now to the Oblate to finish a paper for restoration.  I'd rather be taken out back and beaten.  I have finished two of my three major papers for the semester, and this is the last one.  It's due on Monday, and Tuesday night, I am planning to go at last to Beatles night at Bee Bop.

Otherwise, Rosa's hut has reopened last week.  Rosa is a Dominican woman who sells apertivi from an octagonal metal structure in the northwest corner of Piazza Savonarola.  When I was studying abroad as in Florence an undergraduate, my friends and I often bought beer from Rosa after classes.  Sipping Heineken tall-boys, we would sit in the piazza and watch families and children from the neighborhood talk and play.  Last Thursday, after two major deadlines, Maggie, Gigi, Caitlin, and I decided to get a few drinks at the hut.  I went to buy the first round, and when I saw Rosa, I reintroduced myself and told her how sweet she was to me and my friends five years ago when I was an undergraduate.  She looked at me sideways, but suddenly a flash of recognition spread across her face.  She laughed, told me that she remembered us well, and we chatted briefly.  She popped the tops off of three beers and pushed them across the bar.  When I reaching for my wallet, she stopped me and said that this round was for old times' sake.  I thanked her, and walked back to my friends sitting under the statue of Savonarola.  Like old times, we sat, sipped our Heinekens, and watched the families and their children in the piazza.