An Evening at the Theatre

When you get back from holiday and it's a nice day and people say you brought the weather back with you, it is potentially the most irritating thing in the world. Of course I didn't bring the weather back with me! It would not fit in Easyjet's hand luggage allowance, and the logistics of removing the sun from one part of the world to place it in another is full of pitfalls.

Anyway, I had spent approximately a day in Camerino when the British weather caught up with me and we were subjected to Biblical rain showers. they had been brewing during our jaunt around the piazza and they materialised not long after. I didn't even have an umbrella - I was in Italy. So that evening Gaby and I squelched through the building site - which, by now, was filling with water - got some shelter in a covered walkway, emerged on the main street and dashed into the theatre a few yards away.

In the foyer was a large statue of a naked woman. This was a little too close to home for me and my recent experience with naked Italian women and I did my best to ignore it.

Gaby and I went to join Bree and Lynette and wait for our tour to start. From what I remember, it was originally Roman. They took us down into the basement and showed us what was left of the original Roman columns. This was the first proper encounter I had with Roman Italy. As a teenager at college I'd been to Hadrian's Wall, I've been to places like York and Chester loads of times too, but there was something quite special about seeing it in Italy - as the Romans intended. Even though there are Roman walls all over the UK, they're ever-so-slightly anglicised. These weren't, however - they were 100% Roman, it was just a shame they were hidden away in the basement.

After that they took us up into the theatre itself: it was quite incredible. It wasn't massive - it had a very high ceiling and balconies all the way up. There were murals and gilt-edged this and gilt-edged that wherever you turned. It was like a little treasure trove, hidden away on top of this hill in a tiny town no-one has ever heard of.

Our guide left us back in the foyer and told us that if we wanted to see something at the threatre, a Sicilian band would be playing the following evening. We all thought it would be good fun to go and see and so we parted to meet again the following morning for our first day of classes, but not after threatening to get Lynette's zebra print dress to clothe the poor naked woman statue.