This time it was just me and Lydia on our own the whole weekend. We decided to strike out without the rest of the group to Assisi and Orvieto, both cities in the Umbria region of Italia.
We met early Friday morning at Santa Maria Novella (the train station) for an 8 a.m. train direct to Assisi. After a mostly uneventful trip, the train dropped us at the Assisi station at the base of a hill leading up to Assisi proper.
Lydia and I got our bearings and decided against taking a taxi up the hill to the main town. We set off across the street, beginning an hour long hike through beautiful Umbrian farmland and up a steep cobblestone path into a parking lot just below the Basilica di San Francesco d'Assisi. We decided our first stop in Assisi would be at the Basilica since we arrived at the top of the hill around noon - an hour before we could check in to our hostel.
Luckily for us, the hostel was literally two minutes down the street from the Basilica, so we had plenty of time to tour the church while we waited.
Like all Italian churches, the Basilica is super huge and super beautiful. After touring the artwork and chapels of the upper and lower basilica, Lydia and I headed to the basement to pay our respects to St. Francis at this actual tomb.
Of all the churches we've visited in Italy, this one was by far my favorite. Maybe it's because of the deep personal connection I have developed to St. Frankie in all the years he has been living as a bird-feeder in my backyard. Or maybe it's just because there was an inviting air to the church that I haven't found in any of the other cathedrals in Italy. I really felt like St. Francis wanted us to be there as we walked through his namesake basilica.
Once one o'clock rolled around, Lydia and I headed up the street to our hostel, Hotel Properzio. We rang the doorbell and a young woman ushered us into a living room with a receptionist desk set up by the entry.
She confirmed our reservation, checked our passports and led us to our room on the second floor. As nice as everything was, we immediately felt a chill upon entering the room. It had been cold downstairs as well, but our room had to be about 20 degrees colder than the early spring weather outside. Our host didn't speak much English, but we thought we understood that the heat would come on at 4 p.m.
As Lydia and I were planning to spend the rest of the day sightseeing, we weren't bothered by the lack of heat. We thanked our hostess, unpacked a little bit and took our map out into the street to find our first planned stop: Eremo delle Carceri.
Our hostess (I didn't catch her name, unfortunately) had circled the hermitage on our map before we left and warned us it would be a long walk.
"Maybe buy a taxi?" she suggested when we told her our plan.
Of course, we didn't want to waste money on a taxi and we thought we were prepared for a hike. We followed the map to a high school at the edge of Assisi (we ended up in the courtyard during lunch and all of the students stood around smoking and staring at us) and found a sign labeled "Eremo" with an arrow pointing up into the hills.
We were a kilometer from our hostel by that point and figured we couldn't be more than another kilometer from Eremo.
False.
We walked for half an hour without seeing another sign. We stopped at a tavern to ask if we were going the right way, but the tavern was closed. We walked another ten or fifteen minutes, beginning to worry if we were off track, until another bend brought us distraction from this concern in the form of a pack of adorable donkeys.
Naturally, we used this opportunity to rest and take about a hundred photos while the old farmer who owned the donkeys watched us from his back porch at the bottom of the slope. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. I've never realized how much I like donkeys.
That didn't happen.
We walked for another hour without seeing another sign of life, other than a handful of passing cars. There were no more signs, no more establishments, no more donkeys or farms. Finally we saw a jogger approaching up the hill (he had to be crazy). When he got close enough, Lydia yelled out for help in Italian. He shrugged and kept running.
"Wait! Do you speak English?" Lydia yelled, but he was past us at this point with his earbuds back in. "We speak English!"
The jogger was the last person we saw for another half hour or so and the first person we saw when we finally reached level ground. I waved to the guy and he asked if Lydia and I were American.
It turns out, he's an Australian soccer player living in Assisi. We stopped to catch our breath and talk to him in the parking lot where apparently you're supposed to park if you're smart enough to drive to Eremo.
We learned our new friend has been living in Assisi for the past four months and is here for a year-long soccer training camp, which explains why he was able to run up that killer hill. What it doesn't explain is why this guy - who claimed to run this hill four times a week - had never heard of Eremo.
Because as we discovered after leaving Aussie and walking another TWO minutes, we were in the parking lot of Eremo.
Oh well. The good news is, we finally made it. Two and a half hours after we left our hostel, we managed to walk to Eremo delle Carceri, hermitage of St. Francis himself.
It was worth the hike. The hermitage had the most gorgeous view of Umbria and was one of the most peaceful, lovely places I've ever been. I felt the same sense of calm and belonging walking around Eremo as I did in Francis' basilica.
He ended up in the Basilica so that people would not steal his body, but the Eremo would have made a much better resting place.
We spent over an hour in Eremo, then pulled ourselves together for the trip back down.
This time, we made it in only two hours, but by that point it was nearly dark and Lydia and I were both starving. We tried to find a restaurant that was open this early (it was about 6:30), but in Italy, most people don't eat dinner before 7. As we were scanning the menu at a promising looking restaurant, the chef came by to open the place for the evening and asked if we would like to make a reservation. We settled on 7:30 and, that figured out, headed back to the hostel to shower and change for dinner.
Dinner was excellent. I don't know why we needed a reservation though since the only other people in the restaurant the whole time was a group of middle-aged English guys who told us to go down St. Patrick's Well in Orvieto after we told them our weekend plans. I sat with my back to the kitchen, but Lydia said the chefs watched us and the guys eat all through dinner, a practice which seems to be pretty common in Italian restaurants when business is slow.
After dinner (spinach ravioli for me; truffle spaghetti for Lydia; cake for both of us for dessert), we went back to the hostel to find the heat had still not come on.
It was awful. By that point, the hostess had gone home and Lydia and I were the ONLY guests in the hotel. We searched the whole place top to bottom for extra blankets, but couldn't find any. Instead, we each layered with the few clothes we brought for the weekend.
I lay awake shivering most of the night, and Lydia said she didn't get much sleep either. I'm almost certain I've never been that cold for that long in my whole life. When it was finally morning, we packed quickly and headed downstairs for the 8:30 breakfast.
The first thing our hostess did when we got downstairs was ask nervously if we had slept okay. We told her about the lack of heat and she began profusely apologizing. The heat had literally never kicked on like it was supposed to do at 4 p.m. the day before and the hostess supposedly didn't know why. She tried to make up for this by making both of us cappuccino after cappuccino so that our mugs never ran out and refilling our breakfast plates with bread and yogurt until we couldn't eat anymore. Then she asked what our plans were for the day and volunteered to drive us to Rocca Maggiore castle, about a fifteen minute car ride from the hostel.
On the way, she stopped to introduce us to Massimo, a Franciscan monk, who was walking barefoot up the cold street wearing nothing but his burlap sack. So that was interesting at least, getting to see an authentic modern-day Franciscan.
The castle was pretty sweet. I mean, it's a castle. The inside was decorated with photos from years of mediaeval-themed festivals in Assisi and reenactments of the castle in it's glory days. We climbed all three turrets for more fantastic views of Umbria before heading back to the train station around noon.
We got to Orvieto a little after 3 p.m. and took the funiculare (think Pittsburgh Incline) from the train station to the top of the cliff that is Orvieto.
Immediately at the top of the cliff, there is a series of walkways and overlooks built along the cliff ledge, so we walked those and took photos as we made our way over to St. Patrick's Well.
The Well is worth the trip and the 5 Euro ticket price, as the old men in Assisi told us. It's about 204 feet straight down on broad spiral stairs and it was nerve-wracking for me and my semi-fear of heights, especially when Lydia leaned way out over the water to take photos (there aren't any guard rails; we could have died). The bottom is cool because your voice echoes so much and you can see all the coins (and lost glasses, wallets, hats, etc.) in the water. On the way back to the top, Lydia and I both stopped to make a wish and throw a coin down into the dank water.
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| Me leaning out a window in the well. |
By this point it was time for dinner, so we headed to a restaurant that claimed to have the best carbonara in Italy, but it was reservation-only. Instead, we found a family-style restaurant called Trattoria Numero Uno and tried our luck there.
It was a great choice. None of the waitstaff spoke English, but our waitress Google translated all our questions and the menu so that we knew what we were ordering. There were about twenty homemade menu items to choose from, and not one was something Lydia or I had ever heard of. But I ended up with a delicious chicken and dumpling soup and Lydia got a spinach, egg and cheese souffle. Both were delicious, and afterwards we shared the official dessert of Orvieto - white cake soaked in cherry liqueur and mixed into chocolate pudding, topped with extra-thick whipped cream and chocolate chips. Amazing.
Also, did I mention this restaurant is adorable? There were three families in the dining room with us and one couple our age, and everyone talked to each other, despite being strangers. I felt like Lydia and I were at the kids table as everyone talked around us in Italian, smiling at the dumb Americans who couldn't understand what was going on.
A little girl from one of the families carried around a basket of plush fruit and vegetables, which she dutifully distributed to around everyone in the room. An even younger little boy and girl whispered secrets to our waitress and ran in and out of the dining room laughing. Despite this, they were really cute and well-behaved kids, so it was adorable instead of annoying.
We left the restaurant happy and made our way home after 11. We woke up around 8 a.m. Sunday and got room service (a plate of bread and butter and a thermos of American coffee) and checked out of Valentina.
From Valentina, we went to the Orvieto Duomo to sign up for a tour of Underground Orvieto, a network of caves spanning the entire area of the city above. Lydia and I were the only people on the English tour, so we had a guide all to ourselves.
The tour was really good. Our guide showed us some of the earliest caves (built around 3,000 B.C.) which were used by the Etruscans as grottoes to make and store olive oil. Many of the caves were also used for mining and - for about a century - for raising pigeons for eggs and meat.
Now most of the caves are used as private basements or store rooms. Our guide explained that when you buy property in Orvieto, you get everything under it as well as above, so we could only see the caves under the property owned by Underground Orvieto.
During World War II, Orvieto was designated a safe city, excluded from bombing. As a precaution though, the caves were transformed into bomb shelters and a tunnel was built from one of the largest caves directly into the basement of the nearest hospital, just in case.
This was the last addition to the caves because the underground labyrinth has made the aboveground city so weak that they fear more digging will cause the entire city to cave in large chunks of it to fall into the surrounding countryside.
Lydia and I spent the last few hours following the tour wondering around Orvieto, but it was cold and rainy Sunday, so we were relieved when it was finally time to catch our train home to Florence. We spent as much of the afternoon as possible in another restaurant where I finally got some Orvieto carbonara (can't complain).
... So that was my weekend. Unfortunately, now I'm sick. I woke up today with a bad cold and made the mistake of going to class anyhow. It is cold and raining today, so now I'm even sicker... Oh well. It will be TheraFlu then an early bedtime tonight.
Buona notte, tutti!
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