Friday. Almost two weeks in and the bulk of the packaged part of the trip is over as we head back to Roma from Napoli for the last couple of days of it.

The first stop was the hilltop monastery / abbey of Monte Cassino which dates back to about 529. And which doesn't. That's because in 1944 this place was largely obliterated when the Allies, who had landed in Italy by that time, incorrectly believed that the monastery had been fortified. As a result they used air power to turn it into rubble. (Of a kind. If you look at some of the photos which post-date the bombing attack a lot of the outer walls are still standing, if badly damaged.)

The Germans did not in fact need to hold the monastery itself. Driving up to it I was struck by how severe the terrain was. You didn't need to be all the way up the top of the hill to dominate the valley below and the surrounding countryside. The "complete destruction" of the abbey is the conventional wisdom, part of the folklore of World War II, but the photos suggest that the "destruction" was more a case of "severe damage". Though I don't want to underplay how severe that damage was.

The point is, much of what you see here and most of the other things that we saw here (other than the aforementioned outer walls) is in reality not much older than 70 years old.

Still, it holds enough meaning for this group of nuns to be most interested and seemingly excited about their tour. I had to pump the brightness of those nuns a little via a masked levels adjustment layer because that was a little too much dynamic range for a single image. I love raw images that way...