AAR CSS: Day 5

We had the world's worst driver today. His name was Paolo. Everything was fine when we took a brief stop at the "Servian" wall, remnants of a wall rumored to have been constructed in the time of Servius Tullius, sixth king of Rome. An artillery arch (the ballista would go on a platform just behind it and shoot at people from there):

We started to suspect something was not quite right when Paolo missed the exit on the highway and took the one after it. On the upside, we got the unexpected bonus of seeing the walls of the acropolis of Ardea. Our actual goal was Lavinium, the town named after Aeneas' second wife, Lavinia (so say Virgil and Livy, among others). There we saw the Heroon (~hero shrine) of Aeneas:

...the Thirteen Altars (as well as numbers Fourteen and Fifteen):

(where Julia Scarborough extemporaneously recited the first 11 lines of the Aeneid from memory):

(area for a basin to collect the blood):

...and the archaeological museum, which was designed by someone who worked on the special effects for ET. Another no-photo museum --> another photo taken before they told us no photos (Minerva Tritonia):

The diorama show on the third floor, which prompted calls of "ET phone home":

From there we went to Lake Nemi, a place associated with the cult of Diana Nemorensis (and the Golden Bough of James Frazer fame):

There's a "Museum of the Ships" there, but no ships - they were noticed buried in the lake bed in the late 15th century, finally excavated in the 1930s, and burned (probably out of spite) by the Germans during World War II. The Italians in this area still hate them - we were warned not to speak German there (though I don't see why we would. Of course, a few people here like holding conversations in Latin, so I guess anything could happen). There's still a bit to see in the museum, including photos of the ships at various points in time and reconstructions of bits and pieces, as well as scale models (1:5 scale) and the lead pipes with the name CAESARIS AVG GERMANICI, which lets us identify the owner of the ships as Caligula. No photos, sorry - but here's one outside the museum. At the bottom is part of a project to reconstruct one of the ships, now abandoned; you can probably tell what's behind the tree (scratching up the far side of it, actually):

Lunch at an out of the way osteria in Genzano, the nearby town. This amusing-yet-disturbing construction was photographed from the bus:

Then onto the Park of the Aqueducts near Cinecittà (Rome's Hollywood: home to the now partially burned sets of HBO's Rome, among many, many other productions). There were a few moments when Susann and Seth wondered exactly where Paolo was taking us, but we ended up where we needed to go, complete with backing down a one-way street in order to park (in Italy, apparently, the rule is you're fine going in either direction so long as you're facing the right way). Got to use a digital SLR for the first time when one of the people in our group asked me to take a picture of him in front of the aqueduct. I might be addicted now.

An aqueduct:

Dinner: Gnochetti al pesto Genovese | Filetti di salmone con grigliata di verdure | Bomba al cioccolato