Exclude category/categories from blog roll

I feel like I have to be missing something, I thank you in advance for your guidance and for your patience as I’m sure this isn’t the first time this has been addressed. I’ve read what I can but after spending almost 3 hours on what I’m sure will be a few simple tweaks I’m throwing myself upon the mercy of the community.

I have my blog posts displayed on a page, using a static home page. I want to exclude specific categories from showing up with the rest of the posts.

I found this really helpful post but there are some things in play that I don’t think apply to my setup and/or the current version of WordPress. The loop doesn’t seem to be contained within index.php. Instead my theme has loop.php which is called from index, if I’m reading the code correctly. I’ve experimented with putting the WP_Query line before the loop in loop.php AND before loop is called in index.php and both have failed me miserably.

Please help me understand what I’m doing wrong here and how to resolve the issue. Any insight or guidance is appreciated.

My Site: https://2dorksontheroad.com
Using theme: Travel in Italy