Turin and Roman Through Italy: Just returned to Rome again after exploring the South of Italy

We just spent the last five days traveling throughout southern Italy and taking our last guided tour of Italy with the school. It flew by once again but was another great experience. Each place had something unique and fun and it was almost sad to come back to Rome at the end to rain and no more trips. Then again, we were exhausted after spending several hours each day on the bus going from location to location.

We started our trip last Wednesday and our first stop was an olive farm. Personally, Im not a huge fan of olives, but I figured it would be interesting. I definitely learned a lot about olives. Like you cant eat them right off the tree and black and green olives are made from the same olives, just different processes. And then theres olives for oil and then theres table olives. The place we went made table olives and they were known for their huge olives. They definitely were huge. I tried both colors, just to say I tried them. They were good as far as I could tell? but it was definitely interesting to see the process and spend the day exploring the farm, something different from our usual historic tours.

Huge vats of smelly olives

Huge containers of fresh olives

A lot of olive boxes

Gigantic wine bottles in the basement of the olive building

Their olive, wine and foccaccia spread for tasting

olivesssss

After the olive farm, we headed to this octagonal castle on a hill. The castle itself had 8 sides and each tower on all of the corners was an octagon too. It was pretty interesting. It was also made more interesting by the fog that rolled in as soon as we got to the top. It was perfectly clear and then all of the sudden we couldnt see down the mountain at all. Plus the sun was setting so it made for a cool experience.