In spite of all the modern communications devices, there are still some young ones who enjoy sitting down and penning their letters home while on foreign holidays or learning courses. Thus, two young girls in Padua to study Italian, who write much of the beauties of the architecture they have seen, and a young man who tells of gritty days on an archaeological dig. The girls have only one problem: the heat. "Today it was 36 degrees. There is no swimming pool .. . but we found our solution. We were sitting in the shade in one of the parks with our friends when, on the next patch of grass, the sprinklers came on. In we rushed and got beautifully cool and refreshed. An experience to be repeated, I think." In their class at the language institute are the following nationalities: Croatian, German, English, Japanese, Spanish and Turkish. And the two Irish.
They are highly impressed by the architecture. "Yesterday we went to Vicenza. So beautiful. All very symmetrical and perfect, just as Palladio would have wanted us to see it. We were very excited by the Teatro Olympico - the oldest surviving indoor theatre. It was started by Palladio, but he died after a year. The first performance was Oedipus Rex in 1587. They have recreated the scenery from that first performance."
Then a long, lively epistle from a young journalist who has been spending a month in the valley in Southern France where the famous Museum of Man at Tautavel is located near the foot of the Pyrenees. He is not an archaeologist, just one of the holiday workers, and spent much of his time sieving through the soil of the cave from which the objects in the museum have come and are coming. "Inevitably, many of the passers-by ask if we are looking for gold." The cave, he writes, was often merely a stopping-off place for the hunters as they followed the animals. "But it was first inhabited 690,000 years ago and the most recent period was 35,000 years ago. Puts our own post-Ice Age history into new perspective. Basically I spend my days going through the remains of someone's dinner. They were very messy eaters: bits of broken bones where they smashed them to get at the marrow, and even some roughly-shaped stone tools used for cutting up the meat. There is a large skull belonging to a horse, and a recently found rabbit's jaw. Dinner ended 450,000 years ago before fire had been domesticated."
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