Yesterday we took the students on an excursion. We left at 7:15 a.m. and headed for Loreto, about 45 minutes away. Once again, my pictures are all exteriors because interior pictures are not permitted, but this slide show contains 14 pictures of the interior that are better than anything I could take.
The reason Loreto is special is because it contains the remains of what is believed to be the home of the Virgin Mary at the moment of the Annunciation. I know, you might wonder how the remains came to be in Italy, since Mary was from the middle east. During The Crusades, the remains were "rescued" to keep them from being destroyed. Legend was "the angels" brought the house to Loreto. Documents show the Angelli
family brought the home up. In this slide show, only the brick is from Mary's home. The floor, barrel vaulted ceiling and the marble encasement for the house are added features (as is the lighting, but I bet you knew that).
The other feature that makes the church unique from a structural perspective is that the central church is part church and part fortress. The church is near the Adriatic and the precious contents needed to be protected from pirates (they didn't want anyone taking what they had rescued).
In Loreto we had a coffee break, visited the Basilica (including, of course, the gift shop), and had some time to just "hang out," both in the piazza in front of the Basilica and behind it, where we could look out at the Adriatic.
We got back on the bus and headed just a short way north on the coast to the small town of Sirolo. In February it's a pretty sleepy town but come summer it will be a real hopping joint. There is a very nice photo gallery of Sirolo online. We had a little more than an hour to explore, sit in the sun and relax or whatever. The students all made the steep walk down to the waterfront (Clark, a BSU student, actually slipped and fell in). The major promontory is Mount Conero, which can actually be seen from parts of Macerata on a clear day. It also gives its name to a well-known red wine from this region, Rosso Conero.

I really like this picture of Kim and Filiberto that I took in Sirolo, with Monte Conero (or at least a portion of it) in the background.


When we left Sirolo, we drove inland to the town of Genja, the entrance to the Frassasi Caves. But first, we stopped for lunch. A word about the meals on excursions. Filiberto arranges for optional lunches. Usually for 10 Euros he gets them a meal that is worth much more. Most students opt to join us for lunch. Because Genga is such a small town, and it's off season, options were limited so they all joined us. Good decision. If you're ever in Genga, Italy, I highly recommend Francesco Ristorante. Our pasta course was a pappardelle pasta with a wild boar sauce. We didn't tel the students it was boar until after they finished it, but they all loved it. Boar (cinghiale, in Italian) is a Marche specialty. The quality AND quantity were great. There was also bread, water, wine (both white and red), roast pork and chicken with french fries, salad, dessert and coffee, but the pasta course alone made the price worth it.
Believe it or not, even the Frasassi Caves don't allow pictures inside, so once again I took pictures of the exterior of the cave, and you'll have to look online to see the interior. The cave's own website doesn't have a comprehensive photo collection (they sell CDs and DVDs). I recommend you go to images.google.com and just enter "Frasassi" and you'll see individual pictures from all over the web. We walked to the cave entrance from the restaurant, all of us feeling rather stuffed, for our guided tour. Frasassi was discovered recently (1971), so the limestone formations haven't all been darkened by smoke from torches and candles, as is the case with so many caves discovered a century ago.

Once again we boarded the bus to head to our final stop of the day, which was the Belisario winery. Due to Filiberto's connections we were able to have our own private tour of the winery, followed by our very own tasting. Belisaro has many wines, but it is located in the town of Metalica, and is best known for a special white wine known as Verdicchio. Verdicchio comes from two areas in the Marche: the hills around Jesi and the hills around Matelica. Most enophiles know the valley around Matelica to be the better of the two. The valley runs North/South, which makes the temperatures more extreme, because they are not moderated by the sea breeze. The hotter warm weather and the colder cold weather evidently results in a better grape (at least that's what we were told). Belisario is a cooperative, and the growers own the winery and the product, so it handles more than just Verdicchio. These storage tanks are quite high tech: they control the fermentation process. During fermentation, temperatures rise, which accelerates the process even more. The thermometers monitor the temperature, and if it starts getting too warm, they circulate cold water through the thicker bands on the outer shell of the stainless steel vats. Ideally they want the fermentation process to take just about 25 days. Verdiccho is a white wine, so barriques are not a normal part of the fermentation process, but they do get used for the "reserve" wine. The wine is kept in oak barrels (from France) for a year to give it a distinctive flavor. Wine aficionados know that while red wine is often aged, white wine is not and should be consumed shortly after bottling. We did our best to assist. Lest anyone think we were encouraging debauchery by the students, each got a small glass, specifically to learn how one tastes wine.
There are dozens of websites that teach wine tasting techniques so I won't bother explaining here. Let it suffice to say that for some of the students, it was the first time they held a glass of wine for 10-15 minutes before they even took a sip. Our host (Luca, which will be my grandson's name) was very helpful and pleasant.

OK, more quick statistics from the newspaper:

• In 2007, 39 percent of the deaths in Macerata were due to probems of the circulatory system and 32 percent tumors.
  
• Married adults are 50 percent of the adult population, 39 percent single, 9 percent widowed, 2 percent divorced.
  
• University of Macerata has 13,659 students, up 850 from the previous year. Eighty-one percent of the sudent population lives outside the city center (where the university is located).