Word: sperlonga
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After then travelling through India, Nepal, and the veldts of East Africa (where Land Rover safaris past Kilimanjaro and across the Serengeti plain were the major method of instruction), the year concluded at Jaeger's villa overlooking the Mediterranean at Sperlonga, Italy. Only a few of the students--one a woman who remained in a Sherpa village near Mt. Everest--failed to join the rest for the final week of the school. The week was given over to thesis writing (or dancing, or narrating) for those concerned about academic credit when they returned to their respective colleges...
...discovery was made by a young Italian engineer named Erno Bellante, who was building a road past the town of Sperlonga (pop. 3,000) by the Tyrrhenian Sea. Taking time off from his prosaic work, Amateur Archaeologist Bellante set workmen to digging inside the grotto of Tiberius (who reigned from 14 A.D. to 37 A.D.), 90-ft.-deep cavern hard by the site of Tiberius' famed Villa Spelunca (Cave Villa).* Beneath six inches of limy earth, one of Bellante's men struck a marble fragment shaped like the calf of a human leg, about twice lifesize. The diggers...
Only a third of the cave had been excavated by last week, and the torso of Laocoön himself was still among the missing pieces. To complicate matters, the citizens of Sperlonga were trying to keep the fragments in home ground. Thinking of tourist-trade possibilities, they rolled a five-ton rock before the cave entrance, dug a moat to frustrate approaching trucks. Still, having logic, culture and Cops all on his side, Jacopi was determined to get the entire cave excavated and the fragments transported to Rome, where they can be expertly examined and reassembled to determine whether...
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