Pompeii Today: Bill Jennings

New Miniseries

Caroline Lawrence's amazing Roman Mysteries series of young adult historical mystery novels will be produced as a five-hour television miniseries for the BBC, with a planned release on British television in 2007 or 2008. Filming will take place in Greece, Malta and Bulgaria.

Many BBC productions have very high production values; the best (mostly due to the high-powered cast of Shakespearean actors) was the landmark 1976 miniseries I, Claudius.

Much more information, including photos, can be found at Caroline Lawrence's production diaries, part of her official Roman Mysteries website.

Ms. Lawrence visited my school in March 2005 and spoke to my sixth-grade students. I have a small photo gallery from her trip. If you scroll down to the bottom third of Ms. Lawrence's July 2005 fanmail page, you can read letters and see scrolls made by my students. There's also a great photo of Ms. Lawrence surrounded by all of the students who came to hear her speak.

How To Talk To A Mortal, If You Must

How To Talk To A Mortal, If You Must, originally uploaded by MrJennings.

How To Talk To A Mortal, If You Must, the first panel in a new case of Supernatural Law, featuring Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre by Batton Lash.

(On the Supernatural Law website, just click the large image to see the next page. There are over twenty pages in the story so far -- new pages are added every Monday and Thursday.)

Mt Vesuvius: A View From Space

Mt Vesuvius: A View From Space, originally uploaded by MrJennings.

Here's a photo of Mt. Vesuvius taken from space, available from the NASA website.

There is also a Mt. Vesuvius webcam!

Daytrips from Rome

I've been Tivoing and burning-to-DVD episodes of Rudy Maxa's Smart Travels.

One of the upcoming episodes focuses on daytrips from Rome. The website has a great collection of all of its tips for Roman Daytrips. The tips cover: Rome, Ostia, Tivoli, Castel Gandolfo (the Pope's summer home, don't you know), Nemi, Viterbo, and a whole lot more.

Rudy Maxa, by the way, has an offical website and, of course, a blog

Fly To Italy Cheap(er)

Over at the wonderful Dream of Italy weblog, there's a nice long article on How to Fly to Italy Cheap(er) This Year. Lots of good tips!

Shot of the Day

Today's Gridskipper, which is fast becoming one of my favorite websites, has a nice little blog entry about the National Geographic photo of the day feature.

Amazing stuff. So many of the gorgeous, gorgeous photos have the caption "Photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, National Geographic" God, if only my rejected photos looked this good.

Interesting reads

Gadling has pointed out a couple of interesting articles:

So Happy Traveling Together? is a brief how-to on avoiding arguments when you're travelling with someone.  Be sure to read the CNN article that is linked in the Gadling entry. 

Family Spat Solved Through Travel concerns two squabbling brothers who found healing on a trip through Italy.  The article mentioned is on the LA Times site;  you may need to use BugMeNot.com for free registration.

Sciopero

What's On In Rome is a frequently-updated English language guide to current cultural activities in Rome.

The site includes write-ups of cultural events that are interesting.

Even more useful is the page of strike information. As any seasoned traveller will tell you, the most important Italian words that you must learn are grazie, per favore and sciopero. Five major transportation strikes that were planned for this week have been postponed because of the pope's funeral. Amazing.

Gridskipper and Gadling

Gridskipper.com, which bills itself as "The Urban Travel Guide", archives all of its articles by city. Here are all the Rome articles (going back to January 2005).

Gadling.com, which bills itself as "Engaged Travel for Adventurers", archives by different topics.  Here are the Italy articles (going back to October 2004).

Gadling only has one article from the past month, which is a shame.  Gridskipper has a few more Rome articles from the past week, but not so many before that.

One big complaint:  they never cite the author of these little blog entries.  Both Gadling and Gridskipper a produced by up-and-coming weblog media companies, so I don't understand why them seem to be afraid of giving their reporters and editors a byline every now and then.

Dream of Italy

Travel writer Kathy McCabe is updating her Dream of Italy weblog daily, with tons of information about visiting Rome for the Pope's funeral. She's only been writing for a couple of weeks, but I can already tell this site is a keeper.