1955 KAHS Senior Trip to Italy
Itinerary:
This was the itinerary handed out by Miss Cook (Edna Cook-Norvell) before the trip, in mimeographed form. (The original is nearly illegible more than 40 years later.)
25 May [1955] Wednesday
1500: leave Kaiserslautern by military bus from Vogelweh high school, proceed to Karlsruhe, box-dinner at
Karlsruhe
1812: leave Karlsruhe main railroad station; night on train.
26 May Thursday
0600: arrive Milano. Boxed breakfast or breakfast at station restaurant.
[illegible]: leave Milano
1156: arrive Florence, Hotel Balestro. Transfer to hotel and lunch. In the afternoon city sightseeing by motorcoach. Visit the Cathedral, Baptistery, Piazza Signoria, Ponte Vecchio and the Pitti Palace. Overnight at hotel.
27 May Friday
Breakfast at hotel
0800: leave Florence by bus.
0930: arrive Pisa. Visit the Leaning Tower, Cathedral, and Baptistery. Lunch at restaurant.
1300: leave Pisa and continue by motorcoach via Leghorn, Grosseto, Civitavecchia to Rome Lido, for dinner and
overnight at Hotel Sirenetta.
28 May Saturday
All meals, except lunch, and overnight at hotel, lunch at Rome. Full day city sightseeing by motorcoach visiting
the Pantheon, Treve Fountain, Vatican Museum and Gallery, Sistine Chapel, St. Peter's, Colosseum, Capitoline
Hill, Imperial Forum, and the Catacombs.
29 May Sunday
After breakfast at hotel, excursion by motorcoach to the following itinerary:
Old Appian Way, Domine Quo Vadis, Albano, Castel Gandolfo, Ariocia [?], Lake Albano, the Road of the
Lakes, Nema and its Lake, Rocca di Papa, Crottaferrata, and Frascata. Return to for lunch to hotel. [Apparently
we went swimming instead of doing this part of the itinerary, or did some people go on it?]
Leave Rome by motorcoach in the afternoon, dinner served en route in Aqua Pendente.
Arrive Siena about 2230. Overnight at hotel.
30 May Monday
After breakfast at hotel short sightseeing. Siena, set in the heart of Tuscany in the midst of an attractive hill
country, still preserves its medieval appearance and the purity of the speech of its inhabitants.
Leave Siena by motorcoach 09x0
Arrive Florence 1100
Leave Florence by train 1121. Boxed lunch and dinner on train.
31 May Tuesday
Arrive Karlsruhe 0249.
Arrive Mannheim 0343. Leave Mannheim.
Arrive Kaiserslautern 0549.
Bob Richmond remembers:
I sent out this story 43 years after May 25th, 1955 at 1525, when we all boarded buses that took us down to
Kaiserslautern's Hauptbahnhof - And we got on the train that took us to Italy.
It was a bright sunny late spring day, and it didn't get dark till late in the evening.
The train sped through Germany and into Switzerland before it got dark.
Roomy, dark, cushiony second class compartments -About eight of us in each one of them - I remember me and Jim
Brakebill and George Cowan and Melinda Wuelper and Kathleen Mather and probably a couple more, all in that
compartment.
Passports at the border - Switzerland a patchwork of little mountain fields -
What do you remember that day?
May 26th, 1955
The train plunged into Switzerland, night fell, we slept fitfully. Some time in the early morning we arrived in Milan, and
stumbled off into its cavernous train station and I think found something to eat there. I remember buying a little Italian
joke book and managing to figure out a few jokes in Italian. We didn't leave the train station in Milano, but hurtled on
to Florence.
Sometime in the mid afternoon I think the countryside began to take on that wonderful golden glow - reflection of the
Italian sun off of northern Italy's abundant limestone - as we approached Florence. I don't remember our arriving there,
but very soon we were in the courtyard in front of the Uffizi gallery. A reproduction of Michaelangelo's David flanked
one side of a small door, to the right of it under a portico the original (I think) of Perseus with the head of the Medusa.
I can only remember three paintings in the Uffizi. On a top floor were Botticelli's Spring (Primavera) and Birth of
Venus. I don't think I knew about the paintings before, but that haunting long-haired woman standing on the shell
became one of the icons of my life. (My wife still looks like her!) Enormous paintings, lighted in the fading sunlight on a
top floor.
On a lower floor, Da Vinci's Annunciation, a much smaller painting, a very conventional treatment of that Biblical scene,
when the angel has spoken his piece and Mary replies "genoito moi kata to rhema sou/may it happen to me in accordance
with Your covenant".
Seeing the tomb of Galileo and next to it a cenotaph for Dante (who died in exile at Ravenna and was buried there in
1322).
Wandering around in the fading golden sunlight, buying an ancient book from a pushcart peddler, getting lost and
having to ask an elderly woman "Where's the Arno?" in pidgin Italian.
I don't remember the hotel, or eating, or sleeping.
May 27th, 1955
The next morning in Florence we saw the cathedral, rather rapidly I think, before boarding buses again for Pisa.
Pisa of course is famous mostly for its strangely leaning tower, which we were allowed to climb to the top of. (I don't
think they permit that any more, because the tower is continuing to lean more and more.) I think Jim Brakebill and I
dropped at least an orange or two off it. I hope we didn't hit anybody!
Supposedly Galileo discovered that lighter and heavier objects fall at the same rate by dropping things off the tower.
When he was about the age we were then, he watched a chandelier (we saw it) swinging from the cathedral roof, and
observed (this was about 1580, I think) that a pendulum swings at the same rate whatever the amplitude of the swings. -
Anyway, it was a lovely cathedral.
And back on the buses. We had to detour to the US Naval Hospital at Livorno (Leghorn) for some repairs to Don
McGhay, but I want somebody else to tell that story.
Then back on the buses, once again. The lemon soda episode, which the perpetrator may relate if he dares to. Finally toward evening
we got so bored on the bus we had the bus driver let us run behind it for a while so we could relax a little.
We arrived in Rome about nightfall. We stayed on the seacoast of Rome (the Lido) at the Sirenetta Hotel. Somehow
George Cowan and I took off on a lengthy walk to a distant church - St. Paul's of something or other - the only Anglican
church in Rome, where a friend of his was an Anglican priest. We got to bed at some awful hour.
May 28th, 1955
OK, folks, here's the biggie! I have absolutely no idea how they managed to cram so much sightseeing into that one day
and a bit of the next.
Our tour of the Vatican probably started with the enormous museum. We must have been rushed it through it awfully fast. I remember pictures crammed so tightly onto walls that you'd have had trouble getting a thumbtack between them.
The only work of art I can actually remember is the Laocoon group (the Greco-Roman statue of the three guys being strangled by large snakes). Mary, if you put that trip together, I want two days for that museum (after two days for Florence).
We must have gone from there to St. Peter's, possibly after a delicious lunch at a large trattoria (Mary says she knows where it is - there was a picture of an octopus in mosaic work on the wall). The immense cathedral with the little plaques in the floor showing the relative lengths of other great churches in Christendom, petering out (sorry about that) as we approached the high altar with its great sculptured canopy (baldacchino) designed by Bernini. Four immense pillars supported the dome above the altar in the center of the cross-shaped (Romanesque) church (whose architect was Michaelangelo), with a dome (a copy of the ancient Roman Pantheon, which we saw earlier in the trip) said to be floating upon the pillars. The Blessed Sacrament exposed in a monstrance at a side altar to the right (epistle) side of the altar - I
remember Mary Brobson and Dean Porta and Mary Bradley kneeling before it. On toward the rear in another small side chapel, Michaelangelo's Pietà, his statue of the Blessed Virgin holding the dead body of her crucified Son.
On out into the dazzling midafternoon sunlight, in time for the Pope's blessing of crowd in St. Peter's square. The tiny white figure of Pope Pius XII (Pope from about 1938, to 1958) appeared at a distant window, and appears in my
Kodachrome slide as a tiny white dot. The crowd dropped to their knees holding newly bought rosaries and jewelry up for the papal blessing.
From there our buses took us to the little church of St. Peter in Chains (San Pietro in Vincoli), dominated by Michaelangelo's immense white marble statue of Moses, with his tiny little goat horns (I can't remember why Moses has
horns in medieval iconography, it rests on a misreading of the Hebrew.), along with - in a glass case - what legend claims were the original chains that held St. Peter in a Roman prison.
From there past Victor Emmanuel's garish white monument ("the sugar cake") to the Colosseum and the Roman Forum,
ringed by the famed pines of Rome. Both the Colosseum and the Forum are of course fabulous ruins, with considerable
archeologic investigation done there since 1955.
Somewhere in here the fountain of Trevi, the three-coins-in-a-fountain fountain, all of us pitching in the small change of
half a dozen nations in the hope that some day we'd return there.
Evening found us in a dank catacomb amid first century skeletons, and, Jim, you have a story to tell.
May 29th, 1955
We must have eaten dinner, and breakfast the following morning, but I only remember eating twice on the whole trip. A
sixteen year old boy's heart is very full indeed when he does not remember dinner.
We went swimming on the Lido (seashore) in front of the hotel, and I think that took up a good part of the morning.
Swimming was challenging - Warren Hopkins records having been nearly swept out to sea by a riptide. What I remember is a tremendous southward cross-tow, so strong that every few minutes I had to get out of the water and run a quarter mile up the beach. - The beach sand was nearly black, and later on under the microscope proved to contain crystals of many colors - I wish I knew what
had happened to my sample of it.
In the late morning we took buses northward on the modern road that overlies the deep roadbed of the 2,000 year old
Appian Way. We stopped a number of times to look at old Roman family tombs and other monuments along the way.
After that the bus ride took most of the day. I remember sun-drenched fields of wheat, with bright red poppies blooming
among the wheat stalks.
We stopped for lunch at the old town of Acquapendente, where the proprietor trotted out for us a carefully laminated
page of his guest book in which Adolf Hitler (his signature long since snipped out by an autograph hunter) had drawn a big swastika and noted that "it's so comfortable here you feel
right at home."
Not very long before sundown we arrived in the medieval city of Siena. A lot of us bought silly blue felt student hats with
long duckbills projecting from a narrow upturned brim. I had one of those things hung on the wall at home for years,
until it literally crumbled into dust.
May 30th, 1955
Morning in Siena - bright and clear, like all of our days in Italy. We toured the cathedral, white marble with black
marble floors, but I don't remember it very well.
And we saw the town square of Siena, absolutely empty around incredibly crowded tile-roofed buildings. Here every
year, once in July and once in August, they hold the Palio (say POLLy-oh), the world's craziest horse race. The seventeen
contrade (boroughs) of the city each enter a horse, ridden by a cowboy crazy enough to do it. Mayhem is frequent. Siena has a fairly minimal Web site, all in Italian, with a nice aerial photograph of the square. "Il Palio del 16 Agosto 1999 è stato vinto dalla Contrada della Chiocciola" - In 1999 the Contrada of the Snail won it.
Then onto the train, a Swiss train back through Switzerland. I guess the Swiss statute of limitations has run out, so I'll
incriminate most of the guys by saying that we stripped that train of everything that could be removed with screwdrivers
and other small tools. I think my favorite souvenir of the whole trip is a little aluminum plaque with Humoresque in
German, French, and Italian - you know, While the Train is in the Station we Encourage Constipation.
Swiss farmers' fields, like green patchwork quilts laid over mountains. Ice cream from trainside vendors. Exhausted
fitful sleep in another train compartment.
May 31st, 1955
Waking up on the train.
Early in the morning we had a brief stopover in Karlsruhe. George Cowan and I walked down the main street, which was
draped with German flags, one of which adhered to us - I remember seeing it in George's dorm room at Columbia that
fall. What I'm not sure we knew at the time was that those flags celebrated the end of the occupation and the founding of
the German Federal Republic.
We arrived back in Kaiserslautern in mid-morning, about 1020. Miss Cook had sternly instructed us that every one of us
must be in school that day, where we'd be recorded as tardy but present. And so we did, though I doubt a one of us paid a
moment's attention. I distinctly remember going home after school (I lived in Vogelweh, within walking distance of the
school), falling into bed, and not getting up till the next morning.
Mary Bradley-McCauley remembers:
I remember the excitement of getting on the bus and saying auf Wiedersehn to underclassmen. I couldn't believe I was
going to Italy, maybe a chance to see the Pope. It was a magical time for me. I remember buying a candy bar from a vendor
at one of the train stops in Switzerland and not being able to sleep in anticipation. I also remember being pickpocketed
at the train station in Milan when we were changing trains or going to busses, I can't remember.
Warren Hopkins remembers:
Bob: I can't remember how many times I have told people about our senior trip. All the things we saw, all the things we
did. I remember bits. I do remember swimming and a riptide getting hold of me so I couldn't get back to the beach right
away. Don't remember sharing that with anyone at the time. Do remember it scared the hell out of me.It was only a three
or four minute adventure but something I have thought about from time to time.
Bob Long remembers:
My recollections of our senior class trip:
I believe we discovered after the train pulled out that our suppers or part of the supper, had been left on the train platform.
KAHS was one of the last remaining dependents' schools to take a senior class trip to another country. Our senior class
sponsor (Miss Cook) took a lot of flak from sponsors at other DOD schools because they didn't want to take the
responsibility of taking such a trip.
We had earned enough money to make the trip affordable to every member of the senior class. As I recall out of pocket
expenses we had to pay were something like $10 A PERSON!
I recall our amazement to find out they had housed some of the senior boys in the same apartment as one of the pension
maids (different bedrooms!)
We went into one Italian restaurant following the leaders to what we thought would be a private room only to find
ourselves all standing outside the ladies restroom.
Then there were the "happenings" which were handled by us student leaders without the sponsors being made aware (as
far as I know!). In one Italian hotel our guide came to get me, very distraught because two of our senior boys had dumped a
wastebasket of water out the window - accidentally or on purpose onto the head of an Italian policeman. I had the two boys
apologize to the policeman. He accepted the apology hence averting an international incident (with the sponsors no less).
[C'mon, Bob, who were they? - Bob]
Great trip. Great memories, probably changed and mellowed over the years.
Roberta Hicks-Wilson remembers:
Hard to believe that it was 43 years ago that we took our senior class trip.
I dug out my trusty old diary and here is what I found.
Miss Cook only allowed us to take one suitcase on the trip, plus a bag to carry home our shopping in. Each person was to
take a clock.
We loaded our buses in front of the high school and left for the train station at Karlsruhe at 3:00. The bus that I rode on
had a sign on the side of it which read "Rome or Bust."
I remember sitting on my suitcase on the train platform waiting for the train to come in. All of us were so excited,
running around taking pictures. The people who shared my train compartment were Suzanne Opsahl, Al Rutledge,
Barbara Peters, Tom Golenia, me and Jerry King.
I remember the Swiss Guards at the border, with their fancy uniforms and carrying their rifles on their shoulders. I
remember people selling food and drink from the platform. We would stick our arms out the windows with American
money, and they would hand the food up to us.
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Begun as an e-mailing May 25th, 1998. Updated January 11th, 2001.