Zivia Rich Italy Blog

  Within the Duke's Palace in Venice is a room where the court that oversaw the prosecution of sex crimes during the 1300s made their judgements. While there I couldn't help but think about the person accused being walked through these unbelievably ornate walls into a dark and equally ornate wooden room, where their fate would be decided by the forty judges who sat lining each of the walls. There's a frankly ghastly painting of Jesus' corpse being helped off the cross on the far wall, and I wonder if it was placed there as an intimidation tactic.  The Duke's Castle was also attached to a prison. To me this seems like a security risk, but what do I know. It seems asinine to belabor the fact that medieval prisons were not nice places, but they were not. If a guilty verdict was given, down you'd go into the bowels of the earth for however long your sentence was. It's difficult to imagine existing a single day in the cells below the castle, much less months or y...

 First and foremost I know I am expecting Italy to be warmer than it is going to be. It's hard to blame myself here, as basically all photos of the country are taken during summer and feature beautiful blue skies and golden sunlight. I know this is not to be.  Setting that aside, I expect Italy to feel old. It's the birthplace of the Roman Empire; I can't help but want to feel exactly how ancient the places I'm visiting are. Everything is so young in America. I don't think we realize it until we leave. Tens of thousands of years of civilization crumbled under our 100 year old houses and buildings and we call them old because to us that's how they feel. I want to see things that are actually genuinely old again.  I expect the people to be similar to people I know. They aren't aliens, they're from a different continent. Largely, I expect things to be more orderly than they are here; whenever people in the United States want to make changes to our society, ...