Second post! Aren’t we doing well!
Tomorrow I fly to Naples to be met (hopefully) by an Italian man holding up a sign bearing my surname. Wonderful. It’s that time again, you see; the yearly pilgrimage to some gorgeous corner of the earth otherwise known as the ‘family holiday’. A glorious week in the sun where all the manacles of independence, adulthood and peaceful co-existence (i.e. university life) are shrugged off in favour of sibling rivalry, family squabbles and a grating refusal to ever, ever stop for a rest if there is anywhere listed in the Times travel supplement within five miles walk. This year the family unit is alighting upon Sorrento.
Charming!
Lucky, really, because my two semester special subject in the coming year (and most likely my dissertation) is Medieval (i.e. Norman) Southern Italy and Sicily, primarily through the extensive primary sources available at the Leeds Medieval History Texts in Translation website. Upon congratulating my parents on picking a rather useful destination I was helpfully informed that there was ‘a lot of history’. That meaning the Roman stuff helpfully buried by all that magma. I’ve managed to wrangle a day in Amalfi (where I will make sure to pay my respects to St Andrew – we might be there on one of the feast days all being well) and we’ll see what other medieval delights arise when we’re over there.
I’ve forged through G A Loud’s ‘The Age of Robert Guiscard‘ (the hero of which has provided me with an alias for the last few years) and made a start on the two main chronicles (William of Apulia and Geoffrey of Malaterra). Incidentally, I was struck by a wonderful little gobbet in Malaterra which I feel sorely tempted to include in the introduction to my dissertation (directed towards the marker):
“But I commence my task timidly, for my style lacks learning and my powers of expression are poor. It is as though I was in the middle of a very deep lake and knew not how to swim. I am also exceedingly afraid of you and your anger towards me, all the more so since it is you, who are steeped in the clearest fountain of the literary art, and not me – starved of the bread of such knowledge, who should be preparing for such a task.”
Suitably grovelling…
