Familiar Places

[LadyKestrel]

Last night I excavated the Nov./Dec. 2019 copy of Archaeology magazine from a pile of my old periodicals and came across a story about an excavation of an ancient Roman imperial estate in the southern Italian region of Puglia. The dig info was interesting, but I was really surprised when they mentioned the medieval cities of Ostuni and Alberobello, which are in that region. The summer after my first year of teaching, I went on my first trip across the Atlantic to stay three weeks with married friends in the beautiful hill town of Ostuni, and we visited Alberobello which has these wonderful houses with cone-shaped roofs called trulli houses. It was a memorable trip, and it tickled me to read about it.

It makes things more personal when a book, article or game mentions or even takes place in a part of the world I know. I have more to share, but I'd love to hear about other people's experiences like this, too.

[draclvr]

I first started reading the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series by Laurel K. Hamilton in 1995. I was working at Missouri Department of Natural Resources as a field inspector for the Clean Water Act. That meant I inspected sewage treatment facilities including all the little lagoons our behind rural trailer courts. The author lives in the St. Louis area and the series is set here in St. Louis and the surrounding area. As I was reading about Anita traveling down a dark rural country road in neighboring Jefferson County, I laughed because I had driven down that very road that day!