(Blog still under construction) Matera      We discovered the city of Matera while watching the movie, The Passion of Christ by Mel Gibson, a few years ago.  We knew we wanted to know more about this intriguing community and were especially interested when we learned that it is a city of caves where people have lived since Palaeolithic times.        It was truly amazing to visit a city with such history.

When my husband and I travel to Italy, we are looking for experiences accompanied by beautiful scenery to photograph for future paintings.  We try to get off the beaten path and one way of doing this is by staying in a monastery.  We were a little apprehensive about it at first. My favorite monastery experience was when we found a monastery from the book, "Lodging in Italy's Monasteries," and at the time the only contact to the monastery in Italy was a telephone number.  We decided to