News Flash

WE HAVE BREAKING NEWS!

A bushfire has broken out on a mountain near Positano.
The fire is inaccessable by emergency ground vehicles because it is burning on a 45 degree angle mountain on the coast.

This reporter was on a ferry heading toward Sorrento when he saw 2 helicopters collecting water from the sea and dumping it on the fire with outstanding accuracy considering the fact that it is seriously dangerous.

Despite the helicopter's hard work, the fire was still burning 3 hours later.

Positano / Grotto

The Word "Grotto" comes from the word "Grotesque" which normally means ugly or unbearable to look at.
In Italy Grotto means underground caves or catacombs.

Today we visited a grotto that could not have been further from "grotesque"
........Il Grotta dello Smeraldo, translated means "the emerald grotto".

It is on the coast of Amalfi.

It wasn't called the emerald grotto just because it was a good name, but for the fact that sunlight reflects an emerald colour in the grotto.
The sunlight enters a tunnel under water 13 metres outside the grotto and travels through the tunnel to the inside of the grotto.

There are stalactites and stalagmites in the grotto, one of which is shaped like the leaning tower of Pisa.

Positano

After leaving Rome our first stop was Positano, a lovely town on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Mediteranean sea.Positano is in fact the "soul" of Italy because it's at the bottom of the boot.

While we were at Positano we didn't do anything special, we only did your everyday things, like; climbing Mt. Vesuvius, visiting Pompeii, exploring a grotto, you know what I mean.

Although climbing Vesuvius was the highlight of this entire trip, said my mum and I.

We climbed about a kilometre up a fairly steep trail and around the rim of Vesuvius' crater.

This is my mum and me standing on the crater's edge.

This is the crater itself above.

Apparently "Vesuvio" is still dormant (alive but not erupting) and if you want proof, look for the wisps of smoke coming from inside the crater in this photo...
Now wind the clock back 1,928 years ago to the 24th of August, 79 AD.
In the afternoon on this day the summit of Vesuvius erupted, exploding with an annihilating, ear-busting roar.

The ash and lava did not descend the mountain towards Pompeii, but toward another innocent town known as Herculaneum.
The wind, however, was blowing in Pompeii's direction; blowing all the deadly toxic gasses and ash and pumice all over Pompeii.

It was these gasses and liquids (pumice is a toxic liquid) that killed the Pompeiians.
The once elegant town of Pompeii was covered in (in order from bottom to top); lapilli, (rocky soil) pumice, volcanic sand, more lapilli, sandy ash, even more lapilli and then ash to a total depth of six or seven metres.

For nearly 18 centuries Pompeii was forgotten until an architect excavating found the amphitheatre of the buried city.

It was in 1860 that Giuseppi Fiorelli invented the ingenious system of pouring liquid plaster into the spaces left in the bed of ashes.

Pompeii then returned to life in plaster form.The body is plaster, the skull is real.

This last paragraph about pouring plaster into bodies is bullspit, it is legend, and is believed by at least 90% of all humans. It is believed that pumice settles around bodies and preserves them, even once the bodies have disintergrated, that is when they pour the plaster in.
Our tourguide told us the truth; the pumice does settle around bodies and does disintergrate the flesh, but, pumice is so soft that when the flesh disintergrates, the pumice around it collapses.
The bodies you might have seen in films and volcano books were created by archaeologists and are in fact "fake" one of these archaeologists was our tourguide, so what everyone (nearly everyone) tells you about the bodies are completely false.

The reason you have probably heard different is because most tourguides only "tell you what (they think) you want to hear". And this legend promoted the tourism business.

Along with hundreds of other tourists we toured the excavations of Pompeii. Did you know that after the Pyramids of Giza, Pompeii is the most toured location in the world.

This photo shows me at the remains of the Pompeiian Forum with Vesuvius in the background.

We also toured the houses, temples, a theatre and the bakery of Pompeii which actually had a pizza oven.
In this bakery, archaeologists found 81 carbonized loaves of bread.

I gave the entire day a "99.99999/100".

Rome / The Vatican

The Vatican is the capital of the world Catholic church, it is the world's smallest sovereign state (say fast repetativly).

This is me standing in the Vatican.The Vatican was proclaimed an independent state in 1929 by the dictator Mussolini.

Pope Benedict XVI is the head of the Vatican state and he lives in a palace next to St. Peter's Basilica (which means temple, although basilico means basil, so don't get confused).
St. Peter's Basilica is behind me in the previous photo.

There are 500 people living in the Vatican state and it has its own post office, bank, currency, legal system, radio station, shops and even a daily newspaper "l'Osservatore Romano".

St. Peter's basilica was built in the 15th century (1400s) on the site of an old church and was built where St. Peter was matyred (murdered for his Christian beliefs) in 64 AD.This is us standing with my dad's good friends, Izzy and Betty Kranz.
The Vatican has 1,700 rooms filled with everything from art treasures to statues valued at over 1,000,000 Euro each (1 Euro is 1.7 Aussie dollars). We walked through only 7 or 8 of the rooms.
The dome of St. Peter's basilica is the largest in the heart of Rome, it is 136 metres high and there are 537 steps to climb up if you want to go to the top. The dome itself was designed by Michelangelo, the famous renaissance sculptor. Most of the marble in the basilica was stolen from the Colosseum because a couple of idiots were told to steal it by god in a dream.
You can see the dome up the top in this picture of my cousin, Tess, outside St. Peter's.

Michelangelo thought he was not much of a painter and didn't like painting anyway, however, he had no choice but to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It was Pope Julius II, who my dad was really named after, seriously this time, who threatened to declare war on Florence if Michelangelo did not paint the chapel. It took Michelangelo four years from 1508 untill 1512 to paint and in the end he had a swollen neck muscle from constently looking up when he painted and had a swollen neck for half his life (he did not lie on his back as Hollywood filmstars said he did). He painted 18 hours a day on scafolding, eating and sleeping on scafolding too.
This is my dad and I looking up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.There were 33 paintings showing: Creation of the land and the sea, the sun and the moon, and light & the dark. In the painting where god creates the moon we realised god did not wear underpants and therefore had two moons in the painting.The back wall behind the alter is completely covered by another massive Michelangelo painting called "The Last Judgement" showing Christ splitting heaven and hell.

Unfortunately we did not get a photo of it.

After we left the Sistine chapel we went to enter St. Peter's basilica but were refused entry by a very unchristian man because we were wearing shorts. My dad said "Why would god be worried about what we're wearing when he doesn't wear anything at all?" We were denied entrance to the basilica and could not climb the famous stairs.

In our last week in Rome I was living in an apartment with my mum, dad, and cousin, Tess, and were given the opportunity to cook, we made prawn spaghetti and pannocotta with blackberries from recipes that were given to us by Diane Seed, our cooking teacher.

And we went on another Segway trip, our third, this time in the Borghese Gardens. We went around the gardens on the Segways and I am an advanced rider now.
This is my mum, Tess, and me on Segways in the Borghese Gardens.

Rome / Movie

This isn't worth putting on my blog but what the heck.

On Friday the 15th of June I went to Piazza di Popolo to watch the new release movie:
"The Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer" which I gave 10 out of 10.
The graphics and animations were top quality and the actors,

Ioan Gruffud, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis, Doug Jones, were better than I've ever seen.

I recommend you see it when it comes out. It comes out on the 21st of May in Australia.

Rome / Domus Aurea

There is a well known legend about ancient Rome that the hated emperor Nero "fiddled while Rome burned" some historians say that he didn't play the violin but sang like a madman while watching Rome burn.

Today we found out that neither of those were true.
An archaeologist discovered that Nero wasn't even in Rome while it was burning.
The archaeologist took us on a tour of the "Domus Aurea" which is latin for "golden house".It was unbeleiveably enourmous! It contained rooms upon rooms upon rooms, hundreds of them, 3 mile-long porticos, retractable ceilings of ivory inlay, and, in the atrium, a 115-foot (35-meter) statue of Nero in the buff (naked) modeled on the Colossus of Rhodes. the palace was painted in gold leaf and as guests entered the palace they were sprinkled from above with perfume and rose petals.

It was known as the mad emperor's pleasure palace. Not anymore though.Archaeologists are currently excavating the remains of the palace after 2,000 years of being buried which is why we're here in hard-hats. (That's dad falling out of the picture on the right.)After Nero suicided in 68 AD, the people of Rome took back the area of Nero's Garden and built the Colosseum on it.

Rome / Roman Kitchen

One of the most anticipated things we did in our third week in Rome was cooking classes.

Dad and I had cooking classes with five other people as well as our teacher, a very famous cook and author, Diane Seed.
We had five four hour lessons Monday - Friday, all inside Diane's Apartment.

Here is a photo of me cooking - or grating a lemon to be precise - in Diane's kitchen.On the Tuesday we went to Campo di Fiori - Rome's
largest fresh produce market - to get ingredients for cooking a great many Italian dishes.
This is me at Campo di Fiori.My favourites were the "Spaghetti Bolognese" and the "Pasta cresciuta (Fried zucchini flower stuffed with mozzerella and anchovies)".

We put on a fair bit of weight eating 11 and a half gallons of Olive Oil each, which Diane put on every dish.

I have now got some excellent recipes to cook up at Clunes, which is my yr 9 camp.

This was a very unusual highlight of my trip.