Back to Italia

Things have been super busy here and we're waaayyyyy behind on our posts. We haven't finished talking about Italia yet - and since we left that wonderful land, nearly a month has passed and we've been to four other countries!

To refresh your memory (and mine), when we last left our heroes (in Italy), they were examining the antiquated underground pigeon farms of Orvieto. Orvieto was roughly the halfway point of our trip, which looked essentially like this:

1. Pisa ☑ (A)
   
2. La Spezia and The Cinque Terre ☑ (B-C)
   
3. Florence (D)
   
4. San Gimignano ☑ (E)
   
5. Sienna ☑ (F)
   
6. Orvieto ☑ (G)
   
7. Rome (H)
   
8. Sorrento, Almalfi Coast, Capri (I)
   
9. Mt. Vesuvius (J)
   

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So it seems that the next city up is Florence!

Orvieto

The last of the Italian hill towns Laura and I visited during our vacation was Orvieto.





Like many other towns in Italy, Orvieto sports a fairly massive church, the Duomo di Orvieto. It was built in the 14th century specifically to house the Corporal of Bolsena, which without getting into all of the bizarre specifics, let's just call a miraculously bloody altar cloth. The memorable thing about the interior was a chapel containing some rather imaginative, intricate, and occasional disturbing depictions of the end times.



Orvieto's most unique feature is an extensive system of underground caves. In fact, pretty much everyone who lives in Orvieto owns their very own cave, or as they prefer to call it, wine cellar. The city is in possession of some of the outlying passages, which have been used for things like making olive oil, taking shelter from bombs, and - of course - raising pigeons for food. Below you see a wall from one of these underground caves filled with pigeon cubbies. It turns out that pigeons are particularly easy to farm because they fly away and feed themselves, only to return to their cubbies for nesting, and on one particular bad day to be a pigeon, harvesting. We were told they still raise pigeons for food in the area, just no longer in the caves.



Another interesting site in Orvieto is an Etruscan necropolis. The tombs were layed out in a grid as you can see below. Orvieto has been settled since Etruscan times and naturally its museums are packed with Etruscan stuff they've dug up.



There's nothing like peering inside of tombs to make a guy hungry. Luckily, spring in Italy means there's always something to eat hanging out of the trees. Below, you see me picking some cherries out of the necropolis cherry tree.

Welcome to Italy

Laura and I have been traveling in Italy for the last week for our "summer holiday," as it is known in Europe. We started in Pisa, then trekked to the Cinque Terre, gazed at magnificent art in Florence, then visited the hill-top triumvirate of San Gimignano, Sienna, and Orvieto. Most recently, we've been seeing the sites of Rome. Pictures and more details will be coming soon, but first I'll give you my personal orientation to Italy.

Everything in Italy - particularly middle to southern Italy where we have been - exists in one (or some combination) of the following three states:

1. Disrepair
   
2. Complete abandonment
   
3. Covered in a thin layer of grime
   

As negative as all of that may sound, it all contributes to the incredible atmosphere of the country, which is frenzied and unique and friendly and (this week) blazingly hot, and yes, also obscenely beautiful. After all, how can we expect a country dotted with the remnants of "the ancients" not to be in disrepair?

We have seen the pastel buildings of the Cinque Terre clinging to hills on the oceanside, smelled the fresh lemons in the terrace groves, seen the Italian laundry wafting in the breeze from city balconies, climbed thousands of steps, eaten more gelato than should be allowed in a lifetime, walked through underground caves, stood in awe of some of the world's finest masterpieces, retraced the steps of Roman Caesars, and - most importantly - we've managed not to get anything stolen.

"Holiday" isn't the right word at all. We're on an adventure. Welcome along for the ride.