The Hike!

Yesterday was unbelievable, which I’m sure you can observe by the pictures I posted!) We went hiking in the mountains to reach our destination: a monastery in Fonte Avellana.

With our backpacks filled with food and water, we boarded the bus for departure. After a long two-hour bus ride of winding roads and restless sleep, we arrived in the BEAUTIFUL Mountains of Isola Fossara. None of us knew what to expect on this hike, all we could tell by our schedules was that it was going to last three hours. 10:30 am came around and we were off! For the first thirty minutes it was intense uphill climbs (it’s a good thing I have to walk up three hills a day to class otherwise I would probably still be in those mountains at this moment). The weather couldn’t have been anymore perfect, and the people on the path with me made the day even brighter. Our leaders were Gina and Mark, whom are our visiting professors. Mark teaches Music history and Gina teaches Dante and The Divine Comedy (by far my favorite class.) Gina explained to us that the path we were walking on was one of the paths Dante himself took to reach the same monastery we were going to! The hike was absolutely amazing and when we reached our highest point it could literally (and figuratively) take your breath away… Literally from all the climbing and figuratively because of how picturesque and amazing the view was! On our adventure, we encountered a beautiful family of horses, we could hear cowbells in the distance, and we saw one of the cows!

After about two hours of hiking we could finally see our destination of Fonte Avellana in the distance. The last part of the hike was harder than the first in my opinion. Going down hill, with only about two feet of space to move left to right, concentrating on your every step was harder than actually going up the mountains. I stayed towards the front with Gina, because she was filled with fun and exciting facts about the hike! When we reached our last hill that led us to the monastery, the bells rang at exactly 1:30. It was such a cool ways to finish the hike and let me just say finishing that hike was SO rewarding. We spent the remainder of the day visiting the inside of the monastery, which sadly, I could not take pictures. At the end, one of the scholars actually let us see the ORIGINAL songbook of chants that the monks use on a daily basis. There were giant holes in some of the pages and he explained to us that those holes were there from the beginning, and that they had to print around them. It was incredible! When we left, Gina told us that that will be the most important document we will ever see on this whole entire trip and that they don’t just go around showing people that book. It was such a great day filled with accomplishment, astonishment, and excitement.