Day three was a special one.

  Here’s a photo from our fantastic excursion to Segesta, where we saw a beautiful Doric temple — my first Greek temple, in fact. We cooed at stray dogs while Professor Boyd showered us with knowledge and teased out the eccentricities of this particular temple (columns not fluted! weird lifting nubs still visible!).
We then walked through the rolling hills to the Greek (and then Roman) amphitheater that overlooks the sea, and I was always looking back to see the temple from afar. Although the Greeks were sometimes  overcompetetive and overambitious about it, the architecture of these temples always makes sense — strong, simple, and imposing. It was a quiet area, the hills were green and overgrown, and the from far away it was hard to see the temple’s centuries of wear — we were seeing views that were almost exactly what the Greeks used to see. The inspiration and power of the temple was obvious, as was its subtlety and willingness to work with its natural surroundings.  –AG 

  Spotted between a visit to the stunning Cappella Palatina and my first serving of pasta on our trip, signs of this sort are oddly common in Italian cities. The relevance of Homer Simpson to delicious Indian food served in Italy seems indecipherable to me — I’ll leave it that way and remember that America is the king of specious cultural “fusion.”  — AG

  (Behold my first blog post, a blurry photo of a poster.) After doing some research about the impact of cosa nostra — the Sicilian mafia — on Sicilian life in the 20th and 21st centuries, I was struck and moved by how immediately these traumas became apparent. On the drive to the city or Palermo from the airport, for example, you can’t miss the large memorial to Giovanni Falcone, an anti-mafia judge whose car was blown up by the mafia while he made that same drive in 1992. This is a  Falcone quote I loved from a photography exhibit featuring the mafia-related work of Letizia Battaglia, a Sicilian artist known to take photos of mafia crime scenes. A rough translation: “To this city I’d like to say: while men pass through, ideas stay, their moral tensions stay. They’ll continue to walk on the legs of other men. Each man has to continue to do his part, small or large, to help create in this Palermo more humane living conditions.” -AG