The Island of Capri

Maybe the best part of our whole Italy trip was the boat ride we took from Sorrento to Capri, a resort island that stretches all the way back to Roman times.


Our hosts, the guys from Capitanoago, provided an awesome experience. Our first stop was to do some sightseeing in the town of Capri. The town itself had the usual Italian hillside charm, with the colorful buildings, wild vines, and walking paths winding into the hills.


We didn't doddle in town, instead riding straight up the mountainside for some awesome views and a pleasant walk back down.


But the town and the views were far from the highlight of the trip: no, that title goes to the plethora of rocky outcroppings, caves, and grottos that we got to see while boating around the island perimeter. A photo can't possibly do justice to how fantastic Capri is when seen from the water, with its natural arches and towering cliffs jutting menacingly from the blue-green sea.


Here's the view from an enormous cave we stopped to explore.


Tucked at the very bottom of a typically rocky spot on the island perimeter is a nondescript hole just big enough for a row boat. Get inside the Grotta Azzurra (Blue Grotto), though, and the light shines beneath the surface of the water, making it the most vividly blue color you can imagine. It was an absolutely stunning natural sight.



More pictures are on Flickr.

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.