Before I talk about what we did today I will give you a quick tour of Coldigioco, my new home for the next three months. Coldigioco is a small village consisting of ten or twelve buildings most of which have now been assimilated into OGC itself. It is located in Le Marche, a region on the eastern elbow of Italy. Although its mailing address is in the town of Apiro it is actually closer to the village of Frontale.
Click here for the full map which will be updated with where I go each day. The location of OGC is indicated by this first blue marker.
This building is called the schoolhouse, where the library and geology lab are. Sandro and Paula, our art teacher, and their son Max live in the upstairs.
This is Contrada Coldigioco, the little street that goes through Coldigioco. A miniature piazza is on the right. Consuelo, our Italian teacher lives in the center building, and a recording studio and most of the female students live in the building on the very far left.
The view from the piazza. The white building is called Margolis and it houses our main classroom, kitchen, and il terrazza.
This is where I live! It's hard to see but the doors are beautifully painted in vibrant red, green, and gold.
Il terrazza, where we eat our meals.
The view from il terrazza is so gorgeous.
The classroom in Margolis with about half our program during a break in our art class.
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Today we went to Gubbio, a gorgeous hour long drive along the winding country roads southwest of Coldigioco.
This is the gorge at Gubbio, the major destination of our day's field work.
This is a Roman aqueduct sitting on top of the Scaglia Rossa formation, which contains the K-T Boundary, marking the border between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary Periods. This point in the stratigraphic column is seen every where in the world because it records the impact of a 10 km wide meteor that crashed into Mexico about 66 million years ago and caused a drastic decrease in world temperature when the debris from the impact blocked the sun. A few months later, the huge increase in particulate matter, water, and carbon dioxide released from vaporized sedimentary rocks led to an increase in temperature from an exaggerated greenhouse effect. These drastic global climate changes led to the extinction of 75% of species on earth. The K-T Boundary is going to be one of the focuses of our work this semester.
A Roman amphitheater in Gubbio.
On our way home I snapped this photograph of Apiro, the nearest larger town. Most of the old towns and cities in this region of Italy are up on hills and many still have their old city walls.
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