If all goes as planned

I should be winging my way to Rome in about 2 months. My dear friends have extended the invitation to stay with them at their villa and the best part is my best friend in the entire world will be there with me.

Bettona

A view of Bettona



And here is another view of Bettona, sitting atop the hill:

Bettona is in the Perugia, Umbria. Umbria is in Central Italy and is a land locked area. It is known as 'The Green Heart of Italy". Perugia

Umbria-Wiki link
Welcome to Umbria

One great things about visiting is that I will be near my favorite olive oil, coffee, and porcelain. All located within this region and my dear friends are friends with these people. I have links to each of these here on my blog. Capoccetti Coffee, Cufrol Olive Oil, and porcelain in Deruta.

Another great thing is of course the historical aspect. I am such a history geek it is not EVEN funny. I know that when our plane lands in Roma, I will likely cry. Not boohoo sobbing, but tears that I am finally in the land I have wanted to be in for longer than I can remember. I could so picture myself calling my mom and telling her to go about procuring a passport for my youngest as I am not returning.

A third great thing is that we have both been invited to work with others in our industry and learn the true Italian way, not the Americanized version of Italian. I hope I'm not jinxing anything by posting, but I am so excited that I am finding it quite difficult to contain.

The villa I will be staying at in Bettona is over 1100 years old. To be able to touch, see, smell, history in this way, well, it is indescribable. I'm not Catholic, but to be RIGHTTHERE, the Vatican, St. Peters Square, the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps. The archaeologoical importance is mind boggling. Crap, I'm tearing up thinking about it all.

To be so close and be able to visit Pompeii, HOLYCRAP.

The markets, the restaurants, the pastries, the cheese, the truffles, the coffee-Ohhhhh the coffee, the meats.

I just cannot wait. I have always felt I was born in the wrong place and should have been born in Italia. But perhaps if I was born an Italian, I wouldn't have the appreciation I have for it, much like I probably do not have the true appreciation for where I live.

Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one

Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one

A controversial research project is trying to trace all human language to a common root.

Around 50,000 years ago, something happened to our ancestors in Africa. Anatomically modern humans, who had existed for at least 150,000 years prior, suddenly began behaving differently. Until then, their conduct scarcely differed from that of their hominid cousins, the Neanderthals. Both buried their dead; both used stone tools; and as social apes, both had some form of communication, which some think was gestural.

But then, "almost overnight, everything changes very rapidly," says Merritt Ruhlen, a lecturer in the Anthropological Sciences Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Humans began making much better stone tools. They started burying their dead with accouterments that suggested religion. And perhaps most telling, Homo sapiens, the "wise" apes, began creating art.

"People started having imagination at this time much more than they had earlier," says Dr. Ruhlen.

Mysteries of 3,000-year old kingdom of Jinsha

Mysteries of 3,000-year old kingdom of Jinsha

A construction site in the western suburbs of Chengdu in China's Sichuan province looked much like any other. It all started when a bulldozer driver heard a scraping sound as his machine hit deep into the ground. He struck a collection of golden, jade and bronze objects.

Workers and passers by snapped up the treasures and scurried off. Those too late to get anything, disgruntled, report the find to the police. And that's how, in February 2001, the world learned about the relics of a mysterious 3,000-year-old Jinsha kingdom in the mountains of southwest China.

'Jinsha culture is unique, quite different from cultures in other parts of China, but is scarcely mentioned by Chinese historians,' said Zhu Zhangyi, a veteran archaeologist in Sichuan and deputy-curator of the Jinsha Museum. 'The harsh geography made it difficult for outsiders to enter the kingdom and so it was able to preserve its endemic culture.'

Pharaoh Hatshepsut Died in Pain

Pharaoh Hatshepsut Died in Pain

Obese, plagued with decayed teeth and perhaps a skin disease, Queen Hatshepsut might have spent her last days in pain, according to a preliminary examination of the 3,000-year-old mummy thought to be that of Egypt's greatest female pharaoh.

Bald in front but with long hair in back, the mummy shows an overweight woman just over 5 feet tall, who died at about 50.

This was Hatshepsut, undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary women in recorded history.

Revolutionary? Authentic? Stolen?

The Story of the Archimedes Manuscript

For 2,000 years, the document written by one of antiquity's greatest mathematicians was ill treated, torn apart and allowed to decay. Now, US historians have decoded the Archimedes book. But is it really new?

When the Romans advanced to Sicily in the Second Punic War and finally captured the proud city of Syracuse, one of their soldiers met an old man who, surrounded by the din of battle, was calmly drawing geometric figures in the sand. "Do not disturb my circles," the eccentric old man called out. The legionnaire killed him with his sword.

That, at least, is the legend.

Ok my little history buffs

Have ya seen this?

Rome Reborn

June 11, 2007 - How do you say megabyte in Latin? Ancient Rome was reborn—as a virtual city—today, when a team of American and Italian academics unveiled Rome Reborn, a real-time 3-D computer reconstruction that allows visitors to navigate the ancient city as if it were 320 A.D. again. Thanks to the complex software run on PCs, modern visitors can fly over the ancient city, pan down into the Colosseum, cruise the Roman Forum and stroll into the Senate building. The aim is to provide a new tool for scholars of the ancient city to imagine how the buildings may have looked in greater detail than two-dimensional models afford.

Holy Sarcophagus Batman

This is too freakin cool and cool really isn't even the adjective for it, cooler than cool.

Archaeologists find tomb of King Herod

Under a baking sun, pieces of limestone carved with borders of rosettes and geometrical designs lay in three excavated pits Tuesday — a desert site Israeli archaeologists say is the tomb of King Herod, who ruled the Holy Land when Christ was born.

snip

Last month, his team started unearthing limestone fragments, from which emerged the picture of an ornately carved sarcophagus with decorative urns of a type never before found in the Holy Land.

"It's a sarcophagus we don't just see anywhere," Netzer told reporters at the university. "It is something very special."

Text reveals more ancient secrets

This is freakin cool!

Text reveals more ancient secrets

Experts are "lost for words" to have found that a medieval prayer book has yielded yet another key ancient text buried within its parchment.

Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hyperides had already been found buried within the book, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest.

Pakistan's Cultural Heritage in Peril - Part 3

Here is part 3 of the article by Joachim Hoelzgen

A Fight against Time and the Water Level

In a recent presentation at the Aga Khan's Serena Hotel in Islamabad, Hauptmann outlined to the city's elites the harm the dam project would cause to the cultural legacy of the upper Indus River area. Senior officials from Pakistan's Culture Ministry attended and were surprised to hear what Hauptmann had to say about the remote river canyons. "They were completely taken aback to find that they hadn't been made aware of the cliff drawings before," Hauptmann recalls. It wasn't the kind of event that happens often in the Pakistani capital. With such heavy German involvement in the project, the country's ambassador also attended the event, serving as its chairman.

Raiders of the Lost Codex

Now this would be absolutely freaking cool to see. I can imagine the translation of now would be much different from the translation of the first Bible. I do hope these various people can come together long enough to do this.

Scholars Piece Together Ancient Bible

Parts of the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus -- which includes the world's earliest complete New Testament -- are scattered between Leipzig, London and St. Petersburg. Now researchers want to digitize the fragments and publish the whole volume on the Internet. But controversy still rages over the proper ownership of the relic.

Pakistan's Cultural Heritage in Peril - Part 2

I posted the link to part 1 of this story yesterday.

A Fight against Time and the Water Level

It now appears inevitable that Pakistan will construct the Basha Diamer Dam, imperilling a cultural legacy that goes back to the end of the Ice Age. With time running out, German archeologist Harald Hauptmann is racing to document the area's thousands of cliff carvings before they are lost.

Pakistan's Cultural Heritage in Peril

Dam Threatens Ancient Buddhist Stone Carvings

Some 35,000 petroglyphs located in Pakistan's Indus River area will soon be flooded by a giant dam. An archeologist from Heidelberg is trying to save as much as he can before encroaching modernity destroys the remote area's cultural history.

I do hope this archaeologist is able to save as much of this history as is possible. It is such a shame when history is destroyed like this. It's terrible enough that such historical objects were destroyed hundreds and thousands of years ago before their importance was realized. Now that we know the importance, we need to be doing everything possible to save sites such as this.