Final Days

My palm has calluses from where the two ends of the trowel handle hit it when I’m baulk walling. So legit it hurts (literally).

Yesterday was the last day of real work at Scavi - Backfill day. First all the trenches had to get plastic laid in the bottom of them to show that they had been excavated in and just in case they need to be uncovered at any future point. Then the backfilling began.

First we filled in Taylor and Kelsey’s barren trench so we filled the whole thing up with the rocks and terracotta from the other trenches. As if backfill wasn’t depressing enough because we are undoing all the work we did in digging in the first place, but throwing the unwanted terracotta pieces that we were so ecstatic to pull out of the ground back into a hole to be covered in dirt was emotionally scarring.

After finishing Kelsey and Taylor’s trench we set up a bucket brigade to fill in Andi’s. we had a line of people handing buckets off from the dirt dump, down the line to where they were being thrown.

Freddy’s trench needed more people so I volunteered to go help them in their bucket line. I ended up at the end of the line throwing buckets into the trench. This was logistically difficult because we didn’t have enough people to have someone running empty buckets back to the people shovelling so we had to pass the empty buckets up the line while passing full (and extremely heavy) buckets back down. Once the trench was mostly full we started just taking buckets to the people shovelling and then taking them down by ourselves to even out the surface.

After Freddy’s trench was done there was only one left to be filled in the CB area so our group moved to CA to prepare to fill the last two trenches. We put bags of pottery to be repatriated into the first one which had a huge crevice to be filled then we added dirt on top before laying the plastic.

Filling trenches was more difficult here because the dirt dump was further away from the trenches so with less people our bucket brigade was rather thin. Some of us ended up having to run with the buckets to move them along. After the rest of the group finished in CB and we had more people working things went a lot more smoothly and we finished filling by 12:00 after an exhausting 5 hours.

Then we took everything down off the hill. All the trowels, picks, axes, shovels, stadia rods, tape measures, clippers, buckets string, nails, plastic, line levels, plumb bobs had to come down and be stored in the Mag for the winter. After all that was done we were given the afternoon off to relax and rest up for the student dinner. I took a nice hour long nap and then finished my final paper.

Once my paper was done I got ready for dinner and met everyone else out in front of the hotel for a social function that the commune set up for the members of the dig. It was a publicity event attended by a bunch of politicians we all awkwardly stood around and chatted but couldn’t really meet anyone because very few of us speak any Italian. We were all just impatiently waiting for dinner to begin.

After all the politicians left the group all got together by the pool to take a nice photo. Once that was all organized it was finally time to eat. We sat down and promptly started in on the wine. The evening was so fun we spent time joking with everyone and then Freddy sang his national anthem which was promptly followed by the anthems of anyone from anywhere else but America. Then after all the foreigners were finished there was a resounding chorus of the star spangled banner.

After dinner the real fun began, it was a sloppy night of champagne and grappa to the face.

Then this morning absolutely everyone at scavi woke up not feeling so hot. We at least got to sleep in until 7:30 this morning. We had a lovely breakfast of scrambelled eggs and fruit and then we began to dismantle and scrub every inch of the kitchen. We put on some dancing tunes and moved all the food off the shelves, giving the perishables to Sinora and packing up stuff that could be used for next year. We wiped all the shelves down and scrubbed the floor. All the leftover food and alcohol from the summer is laid on one table basically as a free for all for the weekend.

After that was finished we moved into cleaning the house and packing all our stuff up. I threw out a lot of socks – they were revolting mud stained and stiff. I also threw out my chucks, they had a good run, walked a lot of places.

We all spent the day hanging out being morose as people started leaving. It is so depressing watching our numbers dwindling, talking about someone and then getting sad as you realize that they aren’t here anymore. Most people who are still here are leaving tomorrow morning at the same time as me so it won’t be so hard to leave.

Florence tomorrow with Katia, then off home Sunday morning. (let’s hope I make it to heathrow in time for my flight!!)