ONE MONTH LATER
It’s now just over a month after coming back from our trip. After being away for a week I’ve had a lot of work to catch up on, so I haven’t had the chance to do as much research as I would have liked. I was supposed to write a post about my last day of the trip but had a massive falling out with my dad, as if we had been saving all of our suppressed disagreements during the trip. I was in such a bad mood I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down and write. But I think now is a good time to give a little recap of what has happened since.
First off, I had all intentions of returning to the village to go down into the tunnels under the church, for another shot at finding the inscription, and also planning the much anticipated trip to Ponza. But as faith would have it, shortly after returning home, I had to go into the emergency room with a punctured lung. The doctors still don’t really know what happened, but I’ve been in and out of the hospital ever since. I’m not allowed to fly because of the air pressure at high altitudes, which is annoying, so I’ve had to put my plans on hold.
Something that has come up though, which in one way makes a lot of my research useless but I still find more interesting than troubling, is that our timeline might have been incredibly off all along. We have discovered that in the south of Czechia, in the nearby areas, several Roman tombs and military settlements have been found. During the same time period, as I understand it, soldiers were recruited by the Romans from islands and countries in surrounding areas – such as Ponza. In one way it makes more sense that this Ponza soldier we are looking for came to the area for this reason since it has, in all honesty, been very hard to find out why someone would have travelled there around the 1500-1600’s. But like I said, this would put our timeline incredibly off – a couple of thousand years.
We haven’t heard back from any of the Ponzer family members in the local town who we tried to email. Maybe because they can’t speak English, or maybe they are just not interested. It would be interesting to know if they have more information than we do. In any case, we got the adress to the Czech national archive where they supposedly have all records of people in the area dating back hundreds of years. My dad said he will contact them and see what information he can find, based on his great grandparents birth records. He’s been in France for a few weeks, but said that he will look into it as soon as he is back.
But this new potential finding makes me once again think of Christine, who wrote that historical novel about someone who lived on Ponza two thousand years ago (a book I’m currently reading, by the way). Like I said in a previous post, in our email conversation she told me that she didn’t know much about Ponza in the 1500’s, since the research she did for the book was focused on a period much further back. But this puts her era of expertise right along side the new time period I’m interested in. I’m going to email her again and see if she has any thoughts on what I should look into next.