During half term a group of students from Lower V to Upper VI took a trip to the Bay of Naples. Our trip was amazing! It had a collection of different activities varying from food and nutrition activities and Latin visits and talks. Even though we couldn’t climb Mount Vesuvius because of the bad weather conditions we still had an amazing time and everyone enjoyed their time in Sorrento.
For the Food and Nutrition aspect of the trip we visited an olive oil grove and factory to see how olive oil is harvested and made. We tasted their oils in so many flavours. We went to a mozzarella farm where we saw mozzarella being made and enjoyed lunch. We watched ice cream making and tasted fresh lemon sorbet and collected their recipe and certificate. On the last day we went to a lemon grove and saw the lemons and oranges ripening. We tasted their jams and sorbet. During these visits we learned about how olive oil is made and collected without machines or chemicals, how mozzarella is made from the cows at the farm and how they plait it, and at the lemon grove we learned about how they deal with the weather conditions and at which time of the year they collect the lemons.
We also tried lots of gelato throughout our trip, comparing how some of the flavours differed from others. An example of a difference we noticed was at the lemon grove the lemons gelato was very sweet compared to others. Finally, we had an amazing visit to a pizza restaurant where we were all taught how to make traditional pizza dough and enjoyed our own pizza whilst watching some traditional dancing.
For the Latin and Classics side of the trip we enjoyed a visit to an important villa called The Villa Oplontis and then Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Naples Archaeological Museum. We had a visit and tour of Pompeii from a guide which helped us learn lots of interesting facts about the daily life of the people of Pompeii and how they worshipped their gods.
The visit to Herculaneum was my favourite part of the trip. It consisted of free time to explore the ruins and take photos. This was very interesting and I loved looking at the buildings and trying to figure out what it would have been used for. Ms Lopresti read the first hand account from Pliny the Younger in Latin, in the form of a letter written about his uncle who experienced the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Finally at the Naples Archaeological Museum we had free time to roam around and look at all the statues found in Pompeii and the Herculaneum we had just visited. This just made the experience very special, seeing items that were there almost 2000 years ago.
Jess, Lower V
