The God of the 41st Chunk of Sacrificed Lamb's Liver says it's Going to Rain

yep. That's right.

The day after the show was a Monday. Class started up again. This time, we bussed back to Bolsena, but to visit the Etruscan ruins. Basically, at the time, the Romans were wrapping up the different villages of Etruscan peoples and were relocating them in other places to live as a community near the Romans (sounds a lot like concentration camps, if you ask me). After a long lecture on the history of these Etruscans (which included much about the art of divination and how the priests used to cut up a sacrificed lamb's liver and split it into 42 or 43 equal parts to which a God was attached for each piece. They read the weather, people's fortunes, made decisions about moving, or going to war, or building something, all according to the amount of blood, or the color, or the arrangement of the veins on each chunk) we finally descended into the forum, then the marketplace, then followed the road to the house of an acient wealthy family. It was breathtaking. I was standing in the middle of a field with carved rocks of more than 2300 years old. OMG. I saw where they used to store wheat. I saw where they used to pray to God in secret basements, where they peed, slept, and the marble floor on which they ate during parties. I looked at that dusty marble flooring and wondered what it must've looked like back then when people still lived here, and then the teacher threw a bucket-load of water on the ground and washed away the dust- the colors brightening up to what they would have looked like originally- the whole place came to life. The rest of the week was particularly bleak compared to this event.

That Friday, though, we took a private bus to Tarquinia and Tuscania. 

After the motion sickness due to the winding roads and the many hills and valleys combined with a speed-loving bus driver, we landed in an Etruscan museum with many sarcophagi, Grecian plates, and stone urns. The art and development of these people is fascinating. We went to see their Necropolis not long after: fields upon fields (about 6000 little houses found so far) of underground tombs richly painted and very well preserved. Ducks, lions, people in togas, Caronte (Satan), etc. were decorating the walls of the crypts. We hopped back on the bus to Tuscania and saw the two oldest churches there.

I'm being kicked out of the internet cafe now.

More to come later...