Sorry for the lame Rocky spin. I love Rocky. But this isn’t about his awesome boxing skills. It’s about our trip to Hadrian’s Villa. Our trip to Hadrian’s Villa was a pretty good one. It’s through Temple that we went, so if you’re someone looking for the trip and you’re studying abroad, you can go with the Temple art history classes. If you’re not going to Temple, don’t fear, I’m sure there’s a bus trip that goes there. There’s bus trips pretty much everywhere. I’ve found this out recently when planning my parents’ vacation. Day trips here, weekend trips there. Everywhere. We got a wine tour through Tuscany leaving from Rome and I’m keeping my sweaty little fingers crossed that our group isn’t another big tour group in a sea of big tour groups at the farm that we’re going to. It is a farm, so hopefully the heavens will open up and shine some love down on me and grant my wishes. Keep your fingers crossed too. Enough of my hopes and dreams though. Hadrian’s Villa. I remember sitting in that lovely dark air conditioned dungeon art history room my first semester at Tyler in what I think was Dr. Kline’s class. He showed us slides and talked about them in a way that got your imagination going. He described them that they were interesting, not boring memorizations. He’d say things like “when you go to Italy you’ll have to see this” or “you could take a weekend trip to Rome and see this”. It’s funny now that I actually did. Hadrian’s Villa was always one of my favorite slides. It looked magical in some way. Like I’d like to go there and hang out by the pool. Although I could be making this up, my memory does that sometimes. But I’m pretty sure this is real. Most of the Villa is destroyed and unrecognizable as to what it once was and unfortunately Dr. Kline wasn’t there to help color in the pages. But the section that I remember most did not disappoint. It’s a little pond area of water, giant fish, tadpoles, and statues. The water looks radioactive and the fish look like they’ve drank too much of it, but I loved it. It really was still beautiful.
There’s columns and statues all around. Many nude, and of course the people that I was with had to get in the risqué pictures with the butts. There’s this funny running joke with the people we’re here with about taking weird, somewhat inappropriate photos with statues while in Rome together. That gradually led into incorporating the couples in the park that express a little too much enthusiasm about PDA. My friend likes to somewhat discretely sit or stand pretty close to couples that are pretty intensely intimate and pretend like she’s kissing someone. We’re probably pretty weird, but I thought it was hilarious. The Italian culture likes to let it all hang out from what we’ve observed, especially in parks.
Anyway…back to the villa. It’s definitely a place worth visiting. We had a lecture there that was really not the most fun thing to do…sorry to say, but I’m sure a tour or information that’s meant to be entertaining would be awesome.
