STUDENTS VISIT MEDIEVAL UMBRIAN TOWN
ONE STUDENT RELATES TERRIFYING ORDEAL DANGLING FROM WIRE
THE STUDENTS AND FACULTY OF THE CAGLI PROJECT recently spent a day in the charming medieval city of Gubbio, perched amid the Appennini mountains."It was beautiful," student Kristen Cesiro said with enthusiasm.
"Really nice," agreed Alyssa Porambo. "And Antonio was a very good tour guide."
The students decided to take a hanging gondola, or funivia, to the top of the hill just outside town in order to view the pickled and mummified remains of Saint Ubaldus. Ubaldus, the patron saint of migraine headaches and demonic possession, passed away in 1160, but the citizens of Gubbio keep his decrepit body on display in a hilltop basilica.
"I went up the funivia by myself," Cesiro told me with pride. "But the situation was amorphous."
Asked about Saint Ubaldus, she was less than impressed. "That dude looked really dead," she said.
Most students enjoyed a leisurely ride up the mountain on the goldolas, swaying gently and allowing the fresh hillside air to toss their Matteo-styled hair to and fro in the soft breeze. But for one student, the day turned into a horrifying ordeal of unspeakable terror.
"It was the gondolas," Porambo explained with a shudder. "And Greg Cavaluzzo. He was about to pee his pants. He was freakin' out."
We caught up with Cavaluzzo in a spacious hall just off the computer lab, where he was busy editing some of his essays.
He laughed the experience off at first, but it quickly became evident that Cavaluzzo had sustained a trauma that few could expect to walk away from unscathed.
"Oh God," Cavaluzzo told me. "Antonio told me about these gondolas. I pictured an enclosed booth, with maybe a seat or two."
Cavaluzzo's face turned ashen as he recounted his discovery of the terrifying truth.
"This was no booth. This was a rickety metal object," he said, thinking back that sickening afternoon when the very sky over his head seemed to go dark. "It was like a birdcage... so creepy. And then it began swinging in the wind-- not good."
Cavaluzzo described in vivid detail the shock his body went into as the gondola soared nearly twenty feet above the hillside.
"My hands were sweating. Alyssa lit a cigarette and began swinging back and forth, telling me to look at the beautiful view. But I couldn't-- I thought we'd crash to our doom. Oh, it was horrible. Even my feet were sweating. I took off my flip-flops and left wet footprints-- kinda gross."
In the end, though, Cavaluzzo came through the ordeal, defying death itself and surviving to stare at the wrinkled husk of Saint Ubaldus at the top.
"I feel like I conquered my fear," Cavaluzzo said, wiping his brow. "In the end, I'm happy I did it."
