At the Big House

So, it's just after 11 in the morning at home, but we're already back at the compound for the day. Tee-hee!

Today's adventures took us to two completely different villae. The first was (supposedly) Horace's Sabine Farm. Horace was a Roman poet. He wrote odes, epodes, and some satires. The ruins were not that impressive. Robyn joked that Horace must only have been about a foot and a half tall. The walls were only about that high off of the ground. And they all had asphalt or something on the tops of them, presumably to keep them from eroding or something. It was all very nicely laid out, with an easy-to-read map. Quite lovely.

But it didn't really seem real. Like, it was too perfectly ruined. I dunno. And we weren't allowed to take pictures there. At all! Greg even had to ask permission to take a picture of the sky! But he did take some on the sly. Shhhh!

Then we went up to a fons. That's a fountain. It was a waterfall! It was a loud waterfall. But it was very pretty. And we were allowed to take pictures of that. I took a couple.

Then we got back on the bus and headed over to Hadrian's Villa. Hadrian was an emperor a while back. Obviously, he had more money than Horace. Well, he built this villa out in a place called Tivoli, out of the city of Rome. You know, even an emperor has to get away sometime!

It was magnificent! The walls were about 3 times the size of normal house walls. And there were so many different parts. It wasn't all one big villa. There was the library area. One library for Latin authors, one for Greek authors. There were TWO bath complexes. And remember that when the Romans took a bath they had three different rooms and lots of stuff involved. (See this previous post.) He also had a stadium, where they could have entertainments and races; TWO large reflecting pools; a winter triclinium (dining room); a summer triclinium; not to mention the private parts of the house. WOW! I took a lot of pictures.

I am planning to load my pictures to my computer today, so I hope to be able to upload some tonight. Get caught up, ya know?

We still have our translation and presentation stuff to do tonight. I'm off the hook, but I think a couple more people still have to go. I hope it doesn't last too long, I'm a bit tired and don't want to be rude and fall asleep!