Agroturism - B&B in Paestum Gail and Neil from Scotland

I arrived at Paestum yesterday after a very long day's drive from Sicily that took over 8 hours and probably the most kilometers I've ever done in a single day of motorcycle travel outside of the United States. I decided to treat myself and stay at a Agroturism place (bed and breakfast) that was recommended to me by a travel writing friend in San Francisco. I left the campground in Sicily at 8pm, arrived on the Italian mainland at 10:30am and rode the A3 Autostrada until 5pm when I turned off the Paestum exit, rode a paved country road for 20 km and turned down a dirt road to the B&B. It's beautiful here, very bucolic, a real working farm run by a real baroness, whose culinary skills are so famous that even our Bay Area's Alice Waters has come for a look. Baroness Cecelia (Che-chelia) I barely remember the gourmet meal I ate family style under the grapevines in the garden with 10 other guests, or the wine or the potent limoncella liquer with my creme caramel, except for the other guests were talking about the United States bombing Afganistan for the second time today. I was shocked. For some reason I didn't think it would happen. Horrified, I asked if civilians were bombed, too, and one man, at the other end of the table, actually laughed when he said, "Well, you know those people, they always put their military targets right in the middle of cities." "What do you mean?" I asked. "Well," he shrugged, "if they put their military targets in the middle of their cities what can we do about it?" The table was silent for a split second before someone tactfully asked about the wine, and conversation resumed about other things. I sat there and played with my food. Another American asked the Scottish couple if they were from England, and when they said no, they were from Scotland, she said "Well, what's the difference?" The night before I'd camped between two German men of 22 years old who'd visited several countries I'd never even heard of, and a lesbian Italian couple who rode a Yamaha into camp who both spoke German, French, and English. After the past two days of my own company, extremely different social-cultural traveling companions, Palermo in the heat, and the day of riding at 120km/hr on the autostrada through the mountains, I was not only physically, but mentally exhausted. I fell into my room--the turret of the villa-- and into a deep sleep. This morning I woke to pigeons cooing outside my window, caught up on my email and my photo indexing, and rested. At 4:30 I rode two km down the road to the Paestum temples with Gail and Neil, a couple from Scotland, to see the Greek site at sunset. Paestum originated as the ancient Greek city of Poseidonia in the 8th century B.C. but was inhabited as early as the Paleothic age. The city flourished in the 5th century B.C. and the largest temple, dedicated to the god Apollo or Jupiter, was built then (even though it is mistakenly named the Neptune temple). After wars with various peoples the city of Poseidonia was lost and the Latin people took it over in the 3rd century A.D and called it Paestum. The main diety worshipped here was Hera/Juno (the warrior goddess and/or Zeus (separately or as a divine couple). The guards--four older Italian men who wouldn't have looked out of place in the CIA--kicked us out an hour before sunset, so we sat at the bar across the street for a glass of wine, and then climbed the fence to photograph the site at sunset... perhaps a bit too precarious a proposition, after all... Tonight at dinner we talked about the ruins, the importance of religon and ritual and perhaps of the need for sacred architecture as almost a required sanctuary for the human soul. As priests as spiritual guides, to lead the mind into directions of its own. I thought again about walking the circuits of Damahur in readiness to visit the temple, and how traveling the world is like walking the circuits of the world, readying the soul for living in the world successfully. And how enlightening this trip has been because, after all, this culture is the foundation of my own and perhaps understanding its orgins is the key to changing some destructive pattern that was put in place all these years ago... to fine-tuning, to integrating, to aligning with the needs of all cultures... to evolution. It has been a difficult time to be away from home. < previous | next >