Since we were based in Grottaminarda, and we had a castle with a basamento (basement), we decided it would be a good place to set up our first station.
From pictures I saw taken before the restoration of the castle a lot of work was performed to make it habitable. You can see a bit of it in the picture above. The area above the window, as well as most of the upper portion of all of the walls had to be rebuilt. In most cases the rocks used to rebuild the walls were larger than the original rocks. I guess people had more patience hundreds of years ago, or maybe rocks were smaller back then.
When you went outside through the conference room door you came to a small enclosed cortile (court).
Below the ground floor in the picture above was yet another level. For the sake of storytelling we will just call it the dungeon. After all it WAS where dungeons were normally kept. Access to the dungeon was through the dark, of course, doorway to the right of center.
The staircase down was quite narrow and partly spiral. Like all dungeons of good reputation it was nice and dark down there.
Nano and John had headlamps that used LEDs for bulbs. They were quite handy and they used them quite a bit during our time in Italy. It helped since it was dark by 16:30 during the time of the year we were there, and we were not a 9 to 5 operation.
A small area on top of an outcropping of rock was chiseled flat as a place for the sensor to be set up. The sensors have adjustable feet, so it did not have to be perfectly level. An STS-2 sensor was placed on the pad and then covered with one of our quasi-patented sensor-under-flowerpot covers to minimize the temperature fluctuations as the temperature in the dungeon changed. Did I mention that this was one of the installation rules? The sensors are also sensitive to changes in temperature. If the sensor does not pick up the vibrations as you approach it you will still be able to see the effects that just your body heat will cause from several feet away if the sensor is not covered and insulated. It takes an STS-2 roughly three to four days to thermally stabilize and settle down.
One down. Thirty-nine to go. This station was initially just on battery power, but after a few days an electric line was run down to the yellow battery charger in the foreground.
While this dungeon may have actually been used as...well, as a dungeon...it appeared as though the last thing it was used for was wine making -- the drinking of which could hardly be considered torture. The objects in the picture above that Nano and John were kneeling on were parts of a giant wooden wine press that would have been over two meters tall when assembled. There were several large vats and casks down there. Unfortunately they were all empty.
2018-03-05