Getting There is Half the Fun …

We checked out of our Assisi apartment and headed down Mt. Subasio one final time. I should explain that we’ve had an, um, challenging time with the navsat all week.  Our #1 GPS was lost along with my I-phone, of course.  The car has a navsat, but it doesn’t seem to have all addresses possible  … or maybe we don’t know how to use it.  That leaves us with phoning, translating, et cetera, and the reality is that direction giving is a lost art – lost in the era of GPS.  Also, we don’t have a decent map of Italy, so we’re kinda sorta stuck with what we got.

Anyway, we set the navsat for Ovieto, and we got there, but it was over hill, over dale.  And many a dusty trail.  Well, I wanted to wander country roads on this vacation; I guess it’s a matter of being careful what I ask for.  Finally we found the autostrada and made some time, and there was Orvieto on a hill on the horizon! Hurrah.

Sort of.

We didn’t have the street address for the train station which, according to the guidebook, is where we were to get the funicular to get up the hill to Orvieto.  How hard can it be to find a train station?  Not hard, as it turns out, but impossible to find a place to park! Finally we found the Hertz car rental, and since our car is a Hertz, we asked the nice man where to park and he allowed us to park in the Hertz lot.  And so we took the funicular, and by good planning the bus was waiting when we got to the top of the hill, and at the end of the bus ride was the Duomo, gleaming in the sun.

According to the guidebook, Orvieto’s cathedral is “one of Italy’s finest Romanesque/Gothic cathedrals.”  I guess that about sums it up! What was fun was that as we were visiting, a choir of nuns were practicing, and the music was really heavenly.  And the inside hasn’t been larded with later-day ornamentation, so the Duomo is quite a remarkable sight.  We enjoyed it very much.

Orvieto is built on an Etruscan city, and there’s lots to see, but not this time.  We took the bus back to the venicular, and went through the same silliness in finding our way to Tarquinia.  I was here 45 years ago, and really, really wanted to return.  And of course, Frank is up for most anything …

After many twists and turns we found ourselves on the main drag coming through the old city gate into town, when we realized that our hotel – or at least the address of the hotel – was the old city gate.  Frank got out, was told parking was in the public lot across the street (!??? when in Rome, I guess!) and after we checked in, we were walked a block away to the Tarquinia Duomo square, and to our room, which is in the second floor of an old apartment building on the square.  Breakfast is in another square, several more blocks away.

This is going to be fun.

But we got here just in time  — the sun is setting over the Mediterranean, and we didn’t get naps today.  And I promised Frank pizza for supper.  That, at least, shouldn’t be hard to find!

 

A Week in Umbria

 

It’s clear that a week in Umbria is barely scratching the surface.  A month would be more like it! But our week is over – tomorrow we leave. The good news, I guess, is that by leaving the mountains we will be returning to warmer weather … although news from home suggests that we shouldn’t complain about the near-freezing temperatures of the past two days.

This morning I climbed up to the Rocca Maggiore, the “Big Rock” and fortress towering over Assisi.  And this afternoon Frank and I went to the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a huge (huge!) church in the plain below the city.  Santa Maria has quite a history – it turns out that there was a little chapel there, in the woods, that St. Francis rather liked, and as a result, the monks more-or-less gave it to him.  There he lived/spent most of his time, and there — or more precisely, just nearby in the infirmary – he died.  Several hundred years later Pope Pius IV built a HUGE basilica over the little chapel – the little chapel sits in the cross of the big basilica.  The old infirmary is one of the chapels on the side wall of the basilica.  The idea, of course, was to create a place of pilgrimage – papal style.

So today, one walks into the church — which according to the guidebook is the seventh (or fifth, depending on the guidebook) largest church in the world, in order to visit the little chapel and the infirmary.

And what do you think St. Francis would have to say about all that?