Heading for our final hotel stay, in Rome, we go for an overnight stay nearby to visit Hadrian's Villa. These one or two nights stays are getting old, like any "road trip" inevitably seems to, and we look back fondly at our calm, quiet weeks in the our apartment in Lucca.
I have seen these ruins once before, as a child, but it's another first for Nancy. It's impressive in scale, of course, but we are again reminded of the poor state of Italian museum-craft. There is usually now an English translation of signs and labels at major sites, for which we are grateful... but there is also a dogged refusal, apparently, to allow any native English speaker proof-read any text. We assume is an result of some policy to employ only government-certified people for such tasks, who are likely local graduates of English programs who have passed exams scored by other Italians.
The text at Hadrian's Villa is particularly vexing, as it consists mostly of laundry-lists of architectural features, badly composed and overly-detailed, and almost nothing about how human beings might have utilized the buildings. Perhaps this is intended to create revenue at the bookstore.
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