Tons of people that come to Roma get to see things like the Coliseum and the Vatican, but how many get to spend the night at an authentic Italian home with homemade pasta, bread, and vino for cena (dinner)?
Leonardo "Nano" Seeber, one of the PI's for this project from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, was born and raised in Italy and had family that lived near Roma. We stayed the first night in Roma at his family's house in the town of Lanuvio which was about 30 kilometers from the center of Roma.
I did not get any pictures of the insides of the houses, but they were very nice. They were very cozy and inviting.
The property was on the side of a volcano, Colli Albani, which about 20,000 years ago was not as quiet as it was the night that I spent there. According to Nano none of the apartment buildings in the picture above were there when he was young. They probably were not there 20,000 years ago, either. Suburbia continues creeping in.
From the building where we were staying, looking out over one of the vineyards, you could see the rim of one of the volcano's craters. The volcano is not extinct. It just has not erupted in 20,000 years. It will probably wake up a few people when it does.
Italian dogs seemed friendly enough. Lucky dog...literally.
The chairs on the veranda of the building where we slept were waiting for warmer weather.
The next morning John Armbruster, a research assistant also from Lamont, Nano, and myself stuffed all of our baggage and ourselves into a Lancia sedan which belonged to Nano's sister. This vehicle would be our trusty field vehicle for the next few weeks. It did a great job, but I would have rather had a Range Rover.
2018-03-05