Out and Back in Five Days

This trip was more blitzkrieg than any other time I’ve gone over. I left on a Tuesday at noon, arrived in Rome on Wednesday noon, left the hotel for the office at 7 AM on Thursday and returned to the hotel at Friday at 1 AM after a 14 hour long meeting and 4 hours of transport both ways. We had another meeting at 9:30 am that same morning which ended at 2 PM. I caught a plane home on Saturday morning early and arrived back in SF later that afternoon.

I was exhausted.

We had the "big meeting" out at Fucino, which is on the "spine" of the Italian peninsula about 2 hours east of Rome. We rode in several busses and saw some interesting and beautiful sights on the way. Fucino itself has an ancient history.

Fucino is a large bowl surrounded by mountains. It originally held a lake, but the Romans decided to drain it in order to allow for easier passage across the peninsula. They built two large tunnels in the mountainside to drain it. Apparently, when the tunnels were complete and the lake ready to be drained, Claudius himself came out to perform the gate opening ceremony. The engineers had miscalculated how much water would flow and when the gates were opened the spectators nearly drowned. It was quite a screw up! The tunnels are still visible today; we drove right past them to get to the meeting place.

The valley that was formed is still very wet; the water has nowhere to flow and so over the centuries a series of canals have been built to channel the water. The Fucino area is a very productive farmland, surrounded by snow-covered mountains and containing one of the largest antenna farms in the world.

The story is that in the early days of satellite communications, the satellites had small power amps and a correspondingly low signal to noise ratio. In order to make the best of this situation the Italians built this facility on the Fucino valley. It was far enough from Rome so that there was no RF interference from there. It was surrounded by the mountains which also shielded it, but it was close enough to get to relatively easily. Nowadays the location is not as vital, but they have so many installations out there that they keep using it.

The building we met in was of 1960's or early 1970's vintage; it had some funky-funny-cool architecture and custom furniture. We were in a meeting room, but upstairs was an executive conference room straight out of a James Bond film. The table was Danish Modern and the chairs were those wacky, big wing-backed things. There was a control console at one end with some great-looking knobs and switches, too.

The flight back was pretty spectacular, too. For the first time in all of the flights I've taken over and back in the last 11 years, there were no clouds over Greenland, or northern Canada. A colleague took some great shots of the ice pack and the glaciers.

Anyway, here are the pictures.

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