The Weekend of the Witch ...

... well, she's not quite a witch but she certainly looks like one to me!



In Italy they have only recently embraced Father Christmas (Babbo Natale). Traditionally children receive their stockings on the 6th of January, filled with sweets if they have been good all year and carbon if they have been bad. The deliverer of these is not a jolly chubby man with a white beard but an ugly, old, but kindly, witch-like woman called La Befana. Piazza Navona is full of them and I swear I nearly pooped my pants when I saw these gals for the first time. The picture you see is an example of the Befana and not me first thing on a sunday morning! The other Christmas tradition in Italy is the displaying of the Nativity Scene (or Presepe). Every church worth it's salt has a presepe on display and of course one of the grandest is at the Vatican in St Peters Square.

So, this past weekend was the last of the season's festivities in Roma, which of course meant that it was yet another holiday! We spent saturday afternoon wondering around the streets of central Rome, haggling with the street vendors and trying to avoid tripping over the children running around the piazza's. On sunday, after a lazy morning we headed for Rome's planetarium, housed within the Mussolini built area of EUR in South Rome. It wasn't quite on par with the space museum in Washington, but I'll bet in Washington they can't deliver a story about space the way our italian lecturer did. Not a word did I understand but who needs to when there's an accent like that talking to you below a star-filled sky!