My day started with Neal wrapping up my knee around 7:45am. Although this sounds serious, I would like to emphasize—particularly to my parents—that I’m fine. I probably just pulled a muscle from walking ten miles per day for a week. After struggling to pull my leggings down over the handmade brace, I was rewarded with delicious breakfast, which for me, mainly consisted of pure Italian Nutella.
After a quick potty break, we made our way onto the bus and drove two hours to Paestum. I mostly just napped and and aggressively lip synced to my hype alternative playlist on Spotify. We arrived at Paestum and were greeted by rain clouds, but the true storm started midway through our tour.
The Greek temples of Paestum amid Roman ruins.
There were two main differences that I immediately noticed between this site and the ruins we visited previously. One being the Greek temples, and the other the less thorough excavation of the city—meaning that the ruins we saw, aside from the temples, were much shorter than those of Ostia, for example.
For me, the temples were by far the highlight of Paestum because of their differences. I am not an art history student, so seeing temples other than Roman ones was a new experience. Even though the countries are so close together and have such a similar culture, their architecture was strikingly different.
Greek temples have entrances from all sides and the altar is inside as opposed to out front or built into the stairs. Greek architecture may have evolved after Paestum was conquered by the Roman Empire, but the temples we saw were far less elaborate and were made solely from tufa and were not covered in marble.
The other main highlight was the amphitheater, but only half of it was actually excavated. Although I did not participate in climbing the stairs because of my knee, we are rowdy American teenagers, so we had to do some exploring.
After some more free time to explore, we boarded the bus again and traveled to a lovely bed and breakfast where we had a filling lunch.
[See Matt’s post for details about our special lunch at the Agriturismo Seliano!]
After lunch We the took a short bus ride to the connected water buffalo farm where we were given jars of homemade kumquat marmalade and interacted with various water buffalo-at a distance, please don’t come after us customs! [We never touched any animals for that reason.] These water buffalo produce the milk that makes the local specialty, mozzarella di búfala.
My favorite part of that experience was seeing the week old babies and witnessing a water buffalo drinking water dripping from the water pipe in midair.
Mama buffalo.
Recently born calves.
Pregnant water buffalo in a special pen ready to give birth any day.
After traveling another two hours back to the villa, we had another delicious dinner and are now currently relaxing with games of werewolf and a puzzle.
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