Due giorni, due avventure continua

Translation: Two days, two adventures continued

Last Saturday after Spaccanpoli, the four of us were at a barbeque with some friends. Our barbeque was right next to "Central Park" here on base to watch Gary Sinise and the LT Dan Band. We met up with some other friends who ended up inviting us to tag along with them on their Sunday adventure...
Sunday morning we got up and met our friends for the 30km scenic drive from home to Casertavecchia. We did zero research, we had no info, so we had no idea what we would find at the end of our drive, but we trusted our friends to take us to someplace pretty cool.

We drove up, up, up the hillside of the Tifitani mountains, around all these hairpin turns with seemingly nothing else around and ended up at a dirt parking lot with a few restaurants at the bottom of another hill. We walked up this long hill to find ourselves at the start of the little medieval village of Casertavecchia. Again, a place that you picture when you know you are coming to Italy. A one lane, cobblestone road about as wide as a car, we were often moving over to let a small car or motorscooter pass us. The ruins were closed off but I was able to hold my camera up, point and shoot, getting some pretty amazing pictures.





There were church bells chiming for several minutes before we reached the bell tower. I'm not sure if she liked watching the bells or hearing the sound they made but Riann kept saying they were beautiful. To live life through the eyes of your own child is a pretty fun experience, it makes you look at things again in a completely different way and really look at something instead of just walking by.
We stumbled upon the church that must have just let out, and then through an archway we spotted several people watching something... being curious, we deicided to look too. What we found were two men in full suits of armor on horseback. What we ended up finding out from an Italian spectator was these men were practicing for an upcoming jousting tournament. It was pretty cool to see, and something I never thought I would...



We ended up having lunch with our friends at a wonderful little restaurant where, of course, the food was delicious. Pasta and pizza for all of us, and then a stop at the bottom of the hill we had to walk back down for gelato before heading home.