Cheese tastings: they do exist

Today, I am leaving to go to Rome for the second time with a group of four other friends from the program who have never been before. This has made me the unofficial leader of what sites to go to, and we have quite a list compiled.

Tonight: Trevi fountain and surrounding areas

Tomorrow: Vatican City. Bright and early.

Saturday/Sunday: Villa Borghese, Roman Forum, Colosseum, etc. It's a long list.

We'll see what we get done.

Yesterday we took a trip through small towns in Tuscany with our art history class. We stopped first at a monastery, Monte Oliveto, and looked at famous frescoes and the rest of the monastery that was open to the public. Once there were a huge number of monks there- now my teacher said there are only 30 or so. We saw a few them. It was a very quiet place up in the middle of the hills, near a small town now but in the middle of nowhere when it was founded 700 years ago. They were very self sufficient way back, and we saw the place where they used to keep fish for Fridays and another building which our professor said they packed with snow and turned into a refrigerator!

After we saw this place we went to Pienza, a nearby small town that started off as a medieval town and is not entirely Renaissance, thanks to Pope Pius II who seemed to care a lot more about his own personal power than the Church, and had the whole town torn down and turned into the "perfect Renaissance town," complete with a focal point in the middle of a main piazza with his family crest everywhere. Even the church had several dozen more of his crest than any Christian decorations. Hist coat of arms is all over parts of Siena as well.

We weren't in Pienza very long, but we were there long enough to notice the smell of cheese coming from a lot of buildings. And it was delicious smelling cheese!

Fortunately for us, Anna planned a cheese tasting for us after the trip! We went straight from Pienza to a small cheese...farm? sort of? owned and run by only seven people. Four to take care of the sheep, and three to make the cheese. The man there spoke in Italian, and Anna translated for the words we couldn't understand and the students who have not studied as much. Then we tried six types of cheese. With honey and marmalade and bread. It was wonderful. All pecorino cheese, aged for different amounts of time so that they were all different flavors and textures. Some had walnut leaves on them to change the flavor. We ate ricotta (fresh ricotta, different than the kind you can buy in the states) with sugar stirred into it.

We were all in cheese paradise.