Umbrian Ramble

Mosaic Ceiling at Chiesa San Vitale, Ravenna

To leisurely make our way back to the Sud from the Nord, my friend and I decided on a ramble through Umbria. We picked Ravenna as a daytime stop between departing Padova and ending up in Urbino for the evening. Ravenna is famous for it's mosaics. Sadly for us, the day was quite rainy, which put a damper on our willingness to tramp around town. Thankfully, the parking lot my friend had found and navigated us to ended up being at the edge of Chiesa San Vitale, which had some of the most amazing mosaics we'd seen outside of Venice's Basilica San Marco and Rome's Basilica San Pietro. Truly stunning. The church is small, but the mosaics and the colors are just incredible. Then, the rain just wouldn't let up and a man told us that most of the churches closed in the afternoon. So we found a pretty cafe for lunch and a refuge from the rain before heading back to the car and on to Urbino. There, we stayed in a charming hotel outside of town, but spent all our time in the old town.

Main piazza, Urbino

Urbino is a lovely, small, hill town. (I'd love to go back and re-read Anne Rivers Siddons novel Hill Towns, but I remember trying to re-read it before moving to Italy and the main character just making me so angry I put the book down.). Old Town Urbino is at the top of a giant rock, so we rode the elevator up and down several times in our one night/two day stay. The town itself is still quite hilly, which made me nervous with the stroller, but it has a fabulous atmosphere. At night, there were all kinds of happenings, late into the evening. It wasn't loud or crowded or annoying - just felt like we were part of a community actually living, not holed up inside homes. And Urbino is where the BEST GELATO in all my searching is found. See this post: This Time I Mean It.

From Urbino, we traveled on to Spoleto. My friend did not like Spoleto. I thought it was a nice enough town. The parking did throw me for a loop in the beginning. In Urbino, there is a fabulous, large parking lot at the base of town. In Spoleto, there is a tiny piazza with pay parking or, once our hotel in the pedestrian zone gave me directions, free parking that you have to drive around awhile to search for. And hope your car is safe. Our hotel clerk did look at me quizzically and with surprise when I asked if the parking was safe (after all, we had Nove ceramics and Elephant in the car!). Then I explained that we live in Naples, and she replied with an, "Ahhhhhhhh" of understanding.

One of the fanciest hotels in which La Bimba
will stay while she's on my payroll.

We were booked into a fancy hotel that we picked based on one photo of a room with frescoes all over the ceiling. I loved the hotel. We had frescoes on our bedroom ceiling. The breakfast rooms were a fresco bonanza. It was stunning, and I felt like royalty. Spoleto itself was pretty dead at night. We managed to find some restaurant recommendations on Trip Advisor (thank you again, Steve Jobs) and walked into Il Gusto, possibly the best meal I've eaten in Italy. We even got an amuse-bouche sampler that included caviar! My first ever caviar. And yet despite the fanciness, we wheeled in with no reservation and a baby in a stroller. No one bat an eye, and they set us up in a tiny room (the restaurant is a bunch of different sections) with only four other tables, where the stroller was so in the way that servers had to squeeze their bodies to get to other tables. Not a single person from the server to other patrons, ever sent a single, irritated glance our way. This attitude is in my Top 3 of the things I will miss about Italy. The devotion to children as a part of everyday life in all things is so freeing. Returning to a Land where we'll have to begin eating out at "family restaurants" is going to be a big adjustment.

We did a little walk around the town in the morning, visited the famous, Roman theatre which is home to a huge, arts festival in summertime, ate lunch at a popular and delicious Enoteca, then headed home with our Italian treasures and Umbrian memories.

Spoleto was even hillier than
Urbino, but had charming paths.

A Lion's View

One of my favorite photos from Assisi

In the Steps of St. Francis

 With a little girl all bandaged up and stroller purchased to cart the lame child around, we set off on our driving tour of Italy. First stop, the hill town of Assisi. Assisi was my first foray into the Tuscany/Umbria region right after we moved to Italy. I wrote about that trip here, with the inspired blog post title of Assisi. That post covers all the fun facts and such - stuff I'd completely forgotten about St. Francis. I won't repeat it all again.

View from hotel room window - well worth the half hour
it took for us to find the hotel.

We'd changed our itinerary a little bit to take into account the second stroller. Assisi is a very easy town to visit, with a mostly pedestrian city center, several eating options, lots of safe parking options, and smooth streets. The plan was to make the four hour drive in the morning, see Assisi in the afternoon, spend the following day visiting one or two other villages in Umbria, then on to Venice the following day - possibly another city stop on the way to Venice. Ha! I quickly found out what traveling with children is actually like. First of all, we didn't get out of the house until almost 10am. Nora was eating every three hours, so we had to stop for a feed the baby break. Arriving in Assisi, we wound our way through the town on the very few (one way) streets upon which driving is allowed and finally the GPS told us we'd reached our destination. We had not. We finally did reach our hotel and spent another two hours getting the car unloaded, me driving out of town to the parking lot and walking back in, unpacking, me feeding the baby, and so on. Traveling with children is a whole new ballgame for me.

Tea Room break

By the time we got out to walk around, most of Assisi's little shops were closed up. We made one loop near our hotel, then finished up back near the Basilica of St. Francis to see a gorgeous sunset over the Umbrian countryside, then into the nearby tearoom for some tea, pastries, and hot chocolate - a favorite stop of the day for every member of our group!

Basilica of Saint Francis

The following day, we covered the entire town. Every alley, every church, every shop. We even went up the steepest street I've seen outside of San Francisco. We pushed and pushed and pushed those strollers up, found an interesting church at the top, then back down. We stopped for tea, stopped for lunch, stopped to feed the baby, stopped to play with Princess dolls in a piazza, stopped for hot chocolate. The day was freezing cold, but our little live Princesses were bundled up, and the sky stayed a gorgeous blue all day, highlighting Assisi's beautiful, stone buildings and the flowers spilling out of pots all over the city. Day 2 of our trip was fairly successful, but next up was Venice - land of 1000 or so pedestrian bridges, so not really the place to have strollers (okay, actually only about 400 bridges), but we read that in winter, most of the bridges in the touristy areas have ramps. We'll see.

An Umbrian Visit

My aunt and uncle made it to Italy!

Leaving Naples, Paige, Julia and I headed up to the region of Umbria, with a stop-off at the Rome airport to pick up my very tired aunt and uncle, Katrina and Mike. Having had a couple of hours at the airport to wait on us, they were falling asleep atop their luggage. We were able to remedy that quite easily just by putting them in the car. It's impossible to sleep your first time on Italian roadways as you quickly realize that by staying awake, you may get that life flash that comes just before certain death.

Umbria is the sister to Tuscany, lesser known and visited, but with charming towns to explore. Orvieto was our destination, mainly due to it's closeness to Rome as we had only one night before returning to Rome. We booked into B&B Villa degli Ulivi, located just outside Orvieto's city walls, a beautiful, clean hotel with gorgeous views over the Umbrian countryside...and parking for my big, fat American car, which came in handy with five adults, four of whom had suitcases and carry-ons packed for their two week vacations. After settling into our hotel, we started up the hill to the escalator. Orvieto is so high up that you actually take an escalator to get into town! But up on the hilltop, we found a town just like the ones depicted in the movies, with stony, ocher-colored walls, flowers spilling from planters, cobblestone streets, and a main piazza complete with a fancy Duomo.

Orvieto is home to one of Italy's best known duomos, which was begun in the late 1200s, but took almost 300 years to complete...and it's huge, bronze doors weren't added until 1960. While the building is mostly stripes of black and white marble, the facade is an active riot of mosaics and sculptures. The interior is mostly bare, but features the intense, side chapel: Chapel of San Brizio, an absolute must-see. If anyone's read Frances Mayes's delightful Every Day in Tuscany, you'll recall her near obsession with the artist Luca Signorelli. I have not seen much of Signorelli's work, but I have to believe that the Chapel of San Brizio must have been one of his masterpieces. Signorelli is said to have influenced the younger Michelangelo, and gazing around this room, it's easy to see why. An entire room of frescoes, each showing a part of the Apocolypse - the whole story is there, covering the walls and ceiling. One wall shows signs of the end times and include an eclipse, tsunami, earthquakes, and violence in the streets - chilling given the images on the news each night. The frescoes are brilliant in color and captivating in their detail...and it was painted over 400 years ago.

Following our Duomo tour, we headed across the piazza for our tour of Orvieto's underground, with Paige electing to stay topside. We turned out to be the only ones signed up for the late afternoon, English tour, so we had our own personal tour guide - and avoided the bane of every guided tour group...that one person who just will not shut up. We found out that Orvieto's past residents, set atop a cliff with no water source, had done things like dig caves underneath their houses, and in some places, dug wells down to the bottom of the cliff for a water source during sieges. The result is that Orvieto is now on top of a honeycomb rather than solid cliff, and the outer cliff walls keep crumbling. Not something I really needed to know about until we were no longer underground. But our guide was fabulous in showing us a few of the caves, their staircases upward that once led into the homes of the owners, and the pigeon holes that provided a living for those folks lucky enough to have their very own cave. Pigeons were both a food source and something to sell, and they always returned to their own little hole in their own little cave. The caves we saw with the pigeon cubbies were located right on the outer wall, most with a little window cut into the cliff - the following day, on our drive out of town, we were on a road with a viewpoint to those very same caves:

Back in the piazza, we picked up Paige, and with the weather turned freezing, headed for a light dinner and bed. We ate at an internet cafe/restaurant that was a one-stop shop of pastries, light food options, local wine, and hot chocolate. A perfect end to the day.

EuroChocolate

"Evento PeriGoloso" is a fun play on the Italian language. Pericoloso (with a "c") means dangerous, while a Goloso or Golosa is a man or woman who really, really, really likes sweets - can't stop eating sweets.

(continued from Friday's post)...
We loaded back onto the tour bus Sunday morning for the short drive to Perugia, but then waited for over an hour while the tour guide tried to figure out the best way for us to get into the city. There must have been over 1000 people just in the parking lot where we were, all trying to buy tickets and then get on the shuttle buses and/or tram into Perugia's old city. After much plan changing, we got our bus tickets and were given freedom until 5pm that night. After missing two buses due to crowding, my group of six ladies shoved our way onto a bus Japanese style, and a few of us even secured seats - a wondrous feat.

Exiting into the Old Town, we were faced with a split, one stream of people going up some stairs, the others going into a tunnel that sloped up. Heading into the tunnel, we went up, up, up and came off of escalators into some sort of amazing forum or colisseum from antiquity. Lots of dark, arched tunnels and rooms branching off. These types of ruins are so interesting to those of us from Naples because the majority of "our" ruins were buried by Pompeii, thus, to see ruins in this region, you head underground. The hilltowns are, well, on hills, so it's a really different feel when visiting buildings and ruins that are hundreds, even thousands, of years old. In Perugia, there was a display set up from Mexico with samples of chocolate in one of the side branches. It was crowded, but not terrible...we should have known better.

After making our way out of this building, we were hit with the full blast of an Italian festival. Wall to wall people. The festival was set up running up and down the main street of Perugia's old city, along with a few off-shoots. Booths upon booths of chocolate from around Europe on both sides of the already narrow street. We pushed our way up to one of the booths and were able to get a couple of samples - Mama Mia! Delizioso! Unfortunately, that was one of the last samples of the day. The crowds were truly unbelievable and defy description. One of the things we were all looking forward to was the hot chocolate (I was walking around with the ladies from dinner the night before), so we got cups of that - and ate it with a spoon (see picture on right side of blog - yummmmm). We also pushed or way to the booths with liqueurs made from chocolate. All sorts of sauces and cremes were available - chocolate & orange, chocolate & almond, chocolate and pepperocini, and just keep on imagining. After pushing our way through the crowds (and in the rain, so add umbrellas to the madness), we decided to take a respite in a shoe store, an oasis for which were all so grateful that we all bought shoes. This also kept the shop keepers from saying a word about us dripping all over their tiny store and lounging around on their gigantic, leather seating.

I'm really not exaggerating about the crowds - here's a pic, and keep in mind, this street is one of the side streets of the festival!

Back into the madness, we quickly decided it was lunch time. We'd only each had a large breakfast, four sips of chocolate liqueurs, three pieces of chocolate, and cups of thick, creamy, hot chocolate. Clearly not enough food. We lucked out in finding a nearby restaurant with a great menu, good food, and only a ten minute table wait. When we left, the restaurant had a 45 minute table wait because by then, the light, misting rain had turned into an all out assault. But Perugia is yet another beautiful, Italian town with old stone buildings, fountains, detailed carvings hanging off the buildings, enticing alleys, and so on. I wonder if I'll ever tire of these charming, little places. My group decided to spend the afternoon getting off the beaten path and exploring Perugia's old city.

We walked around taking pictures in the rain, found a little chapel with a fresco painted in the 1500s (or thereabouts), and in general, just enjoyed the town without the crowds. The day was so nice, despite the rain, but we had a really rough, long trip home. I did learn a valuable lesson for the future. If we join in these tours on the future, we will drive our own car. The trip home took about 6 hours due to multiple bathroom stops (which each took a minimum of 30 minutes), while the driving time should only be about 3.5 hours.

Just a little sampling of what was available...