My name is Simone, a student of Icesi, a university of Cali, Colombia, where I study industrial engineering. I come from Italy in a town near Venice and my father is Italian but my mother is Colombian. So I like eat Colombian food like “bandeja paisa”, “carne sudada”, “raspado” and more. But also I love Italian food, like pasta, pizza. Obviously I speak Italian and Spanish very well, little English and very poor French (this is because I attended three years of this ten years ago).

I sometimes read books, listen music or do something different when I am very tired to relax myself. When I was in Italy I used to travel a lot with my parents or with school in other Italian cities like Rome, Florence, Naples or visit my mother’s family in Cali. In each travel we eat a lot of food that we never tried. So if it isn’t strange, I usually don’t have any problem to taste some food. 

Now, I want to present experiences of my life in a little town, where I was going to visit my grandmother when she was still alive. So due that few people know the place that I will narrate, it is good to present it because in Italy everyone think that there is only Rome, Pisa or Venice, but there are others wonderful places full of attraction and mystery. This place that I will present is Bomarzo.

Bomarzo is a town situated one hours from Rome, so I had to do five or six hours to come here. It was five hundred km of cars. There the landscape is very different of my homeland, it is full of hills and little mountains, called Apennine, and so everyone could found curved streets.

The town is divided by two places, old and new part. Old part is the most interesting, as you can see in the photo, because it is a sort of castle, founded by prince Orsini around in 1520, where there are houses, a church and the municipal hall. 

My grandmother lived here, and it was very quiet. I usual walk through the town and in some places I could see the landscape and the river Tevere, which passes in Rome. I remember that the atmosphere was magical and somewhat mysterious, because the structures are very old and I imagined how life was centuries ago.

But what is very fantastic is the Parco dei mostri, also created by prince Orsini that located this place near to the castle. To enter here you have to pay ten euros, but it is a good investment. It is very wonderful, you can found dragons, mythological figures, elephants, giants fighting and all sorts of monster. 

Also there are some structure, in particular an inclined building what create sickness because walls don’t create a 90 degree angle with the floor. 

But what is very symbolic of the park and of the town, and famous in a lot of films is the ogre. It is a sculpture that represent the heat of a monster with is open mouth. It is so big that people could enter here and due the shape of the environment, the voices of who enter are amplified and distorted, creating a scary effect. In his mouth there is written the following sentence: “Ogni pensiero vola”, meaning: every thought flies, in the sense that by entering there you have to stay free of thoughts.

So, as you see, this place hides a lot of wonders, and Bomarzo is only one of a lot of Italian towns that is good to visit and live a unique experience.