Nord

Saturday we traveled north, through Lecce, Brindisi, and Bari, to il Grotte di Castellana, a magnificent cavern and large tourist attraction. While we waited for our tour to start, we meandered through the many touristy shops that surrounded the actual entrance. We met with many friendly shopkeepers (“you look at this wine? Sei buono! You try! Taste! Taste! Goes well with this kind of biscotti, you try that too!”), and found such exotic gifts as pyrite samples from Illinois, and small cubes of polished coal. I guess gift shops are universal in the relevance to their actual location.

Our tour began- we all got excited when we gathered at the meeting point for the English tour, but no such luck. We were led down into the cavern by a small Italian woman who babbled in high-speed Italian while walking, so I only caught words here and there (was that something about 500 steps?). Even our translator could barely keep up, and since there were several other Italian tourists thrown into the tour with us, we couldn’t slow down for bilingual versions of everything. I made do with the humorously translated pamphlet on the cave itself (they’re very enthusiastic about karstic concretions), and assuaged my frustrated comrades by “translating” the tour as best I could, rambling off everything I knew about caves, stalactites, and stalagmites, as well as naming formations (We like to call this room the broccoli forest, and over here are the wizards fighting with candlesticks…), and reminding them to watch their step and head every time we moved. All in my best foreign accent. We may not have learned much from the tour guide, but we certainly had a fun hour- and the cavern was quite impressive in itself. The first cave on the tour was definitely the tallest cave I have ever been in, and it had a natural hole at the top with sunbeams streaming in, only adding to the effect of the height. I don’t know whether it was all the stairs down or the staring upwards once we came out into the main room, but we all found ourselves with shaky knees when our tour guide came to the first stop. I didn’t realize until afterwards, but that first stop was at the grave of the founder (finder? discoverer?) of the cavern- he didn’t simply fall into the hole first, but actually explored the whole cave long before his death, and requested to be buried there, in the knee-shakingly tall cavern. It does seem to be a fittingly solemn and ancient place to rest, with stalagmites growing up from your grave.

When we were once again back on the surface, readjusting to the shimmering heat and sun, it was announced that we would now go on a “zoosafari”. Zoosafari? Well, okay… Italian zoosafaris (read:zoos) have some interesting differences to American ones. While the basic idea is the same, they have both a “safari” portion (in which you drive through larger enclosures, with large groups of, well, large animals) and a pedestrian part, which includes some buildings (reptile house, aviary, etc), but also some ride-through exhibits- to see monkeys, polar bears, kangaroos, or penguins, you had to board a small cage on wheels, and ride through mysterious doorways and curtains to the animal exhibits. In addition to this, almost everything had a separate cost- our tickets got us into the reptile and bird house, the “large mammal” ride, and anything that you could walk to. Any other exhibit or ride cost €2 or €3 more. After driving through the safari and seeing bears, giraffe, lions, tigers, panthers, and all manner of deer-like species, we were given an hour and a half to explore the rest of the park. I found the group of students who weren’t planning on spending any extra money, and walked around with them until we had seen everything we could, then sat in the shade and enjoyed €1 granite lemone until everyone else filtered out to the bus in their chronically late way.

Our last stop of the day was Alberobello, a little town that called itself the “Capitale di trulli.” I have seen trullo here and there since we first drove down to Otranto from Rome: they are funny little cone-shaped buildings, white-washed bases with the cone built on top from flat bricks of limestone, carefully stacked inward without mortar, then held in place by a plastered keystone at the very top. They are old, with mystical symbols painted on the roofs, and messages hidden in the shapes of the keystones. The ones I had seen before always stood alone, in olive groves or along the coast- Alberobello had a city of them. Disappointingly, most of our group didn’t want to explore them: they stayed in the bus and pouted like children at being torn away from the zoo so soon, while those of us with some appreciation of culture and history (i.e. the cool people) ventured out with the translator and Francesco, who’d skipped the zoo but somehow caught up with us in his sleek BMW. We climbed steep winding streets lined with the little houses, many of which were converted into tiny shops, to the top of the hill where the church sat with the same stacked stone roof, but tripled in size (I think they might’ve used mortar on that one). I felt like I was walking through a hobbit village of sorts, because all the houses had doors I had to duck through, and the streets were too narrow for any American car to get through. Cats and dogs sat on almost every stoop, enjoying the afternoon sun and the appreciation of gullible passing tourists. Trumpet vines, wisteria, and other flowers draped many of the roofs and doors, although I could never see where they found the earth to start from. I think out of the entire day, I enjoyed walking through the trulli village the most, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for (if not disgusted with) those who had chosen to stay behind.