Nestled in between the Apennine Mountains in Tuscany, there’s a quiet little town known as Poppi. One of the distinctive features of this hidden treasure is the medieval castle that towers over the town from the top of the hill. Poppi was a refreshing change of pace from the busy life of Florence and Rome where the streets were crowded with tourists and scammers shoving selfie sticks in your face. We were only in Poppi one night and we stayed in a convent during our stay. I’m not going to lie, past negative experiences left me kind of freaked out to stay in a convent but it was the cleanest place we’d stayed in all trip, the sisters were very kind to us, and they had breakfast laid out for us is the morning. But anyways, back to the castles. We got to tour two of them as a class, Castello Romena and Castello di Poppi. Both of the castles were originally owned by the Guidi family who apparently owned many castles in the area back in the day. The Poppi castle was in much better shape than the Castello Romena and it contained one of the coolest rooms I’d ever been in. The library of the castle has a collection of 25,000 books; some dating back as early as the 11th century. In addition to already being the coolest library in existence, they even have a first edition copy of Dante’s Inferno which only adds to the coolness factor. The castle has been kept in great condition so besides the library you can climb on up to the bell tower or descend into the tower where prisoners were kept. We peeked through a little hole and saw a skeleton that scared me at first glance because I wasn’t expecting it. I don’t know if it was a real skeleton or not, but if it was real can you imagine how cool that would have been?! Dante was actually inspired by the castles’ prisoner towers when he wrote his layers of hell for Inferno. Poppi might not have been one of the craziest places we’ve been to but it for sure was incredibly nice to visit.

  Yesterday evening we made it to Bologna; the rain and dark skies made the city seem the least lively of everywhere that we have been so far but luckily the sun came out with bright blue skies today.  Our first and only guided stop was to the University of Bologna and its operating theatre— not something I would normally be interested in seeing but it was pretty special to see because of the historical significance of it.  The operating theatre was very different from what I thought it was going to look like, besides the raised table in the middle of the room and the seats lining the edges.  The ceiling of the room and the walls were all carved wood decorated with animals, busts, and one or two anatomically correct figures.   More importantly though we were able to go inside this meeting/class room in the university.  This room was also grandly decorated but this time with painted and wooden crests on the upper halves of the walls while the lower halves were covered by locked bookshelves that were sorted by topic and contained books written in a multitude of languages.  There was also a locked, gated doorway that lead into an archives room with an innumerable amount of books from all ages.  I feel like the books were definitely what impressed upon me the historical importance of the university as a whole, especially because of the overwhelming feeling I got from the archives room.  Bologna was a very cool city to experience, mainly because of the change of pace and structural differences it provided contrasted against everywhere that we’ve been before.