The rambling recipes & travels of a home baker

Day 10: Orvieto

Today, I headed out to Orvieto. – and one quick thing – everyone here keeps saying how similar Ernie and I are – that we look like each other – which I find odd, but of course makes sense because we are siblings, but I never really thought we did.  However, here in Viterbo, I have heard it a LOT – you can take a look by looking at the last photo on the previous post….OK, back to traveling.

It’s about an 1h20m train ride to Orvieto with a transfer and changing platforms.  I had forgotten all about train travel and how nice and relaxing it can be, but then recalled all of the validating, and changing platforms and trying to listen for any changes in a foreign language.  It’s a wonder I didn’t end up in Naples or something.

Orvieto is another central Italian hilltown – beautiful vistas, massive wall fortifications, charmingly crooked streets and alleys.  It’s most famous structure though is it’s cathedral.  You study so many cathedrals in Art History that I had forgotten that this one was the cathedral with the crazy striped banding and the lively facade.

So when you arrive by train, you take a funicular up to the top and then you’re at the base of the corso – the main commercial street and a ten minute walk from the cathedral.

There’s a small fortress right behind the funicular with some nice views and it was nice to let the bigger pack of tourists go ahead and catch some quiet time.

I knew there was an outdoor market today in Piazza del Popolo so I took a right towards that area and found a bunch of stalls with fruits, veggies, meats, kitchenware, clothing, etc.

The non-food stuff wasn’t that interesting, so I just picked up an apple and some strawberries in addition to a pizza bianca with zucchini that I’d previously purchased on the walk in to town.  There was a set of steps that led up to a vantage point over the piazza.

Knowing that the duomo closes at 1pm for services and that almost everything closes down between 1 and 4:30, I headed over to the central area to catch both the Museo Emilio Greco and also the cathedral.

The Museo Emilio Greco highlights the work of this Italian sculptor who did the design for the bronze doors of the cathedral.  Not unlike the competition for the doors in Florence, there was a competition in the 1960s to design the bronze central doors at Orvieto.  The doors are divided into panels and tell stories from the bible, but the style is uniquely modern and quite unlike any of the other work in and around the cathedral.  The museum was small, but had quite a few pieces – I liked the elongated figures and abstracted faces.

So inside the cathedral, the horizontal banding continues, but also the architect angled the walls in slightly so from the back, the cathedral looks much longer than it is – the reverse happens when you’re at the front.

Inside the cathedral are mini chapels and there is one to the right called the Chapel of the Madonna of San Brizio.  It is significant because of the work by the painter Luca Signorelli.  You can’t take photos, but you can read about the chapel here.  It tells the story of the the damned and the redeemed in colorful glory full of natural disasters, including angels that appear to be shooting lasers from their eyes – just kidding – sort of…..

So at one we were promptly ushered out of the cathedral and dumped on to the steps of the cathedral.  I found a spot on the left side of the front facade and ate my strawberries while watching the large tour groups.  I am grateful not to be travelling in such a group, but I noticed all of a sudden that today was the first day of my travels where I was completely alone.  It felt very different – both liberating – I could stop and do what I wanted whenever I wanted, but also a bit lonely – a very different feeling than before.

So knowing that all of the shops were closed, but not hungry because of the strawberries, I wandered to the far west end of town for a walk along the walls and views out.  My favorite part was at the quiet west end where there were few if any people around and I could just grab a spot and sit and read or write or think.

So after a few hours of walking, I returned closer to the center of town and grabbed a very late lunch of some salumi and cheese.

I also tried to peruse through the Italian paper and was only able to guess by looking at the photos – lots of talk about the upcoming royal wedding, but I particularly loved this photo of Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi – the expression on Sarkozy’s face…

Since things were still closed (the Italian lunch siesta and I are so not in sync…I find myself wandering amongst closed shops all the time in Italy!), I took a walk along the north side of the town back to the funicular entrance where on the recommendation of my brother, I went down in St. Patrick’s Well which was built in the 1500s when a pope who was hiding out here ordered the well to be dug so that Orvieto could always have water.  It’s some 246 steps down in a double helix formation, so that people going down are not crossing people going up – it’s quite ingenious for when they actually used it – i.e. donkeys could go up one way and people another, etc.  This experience also confirms that I have a slight fear of heights – going down – but not climbing up.  It’s like I have no issues climbing up scaffolding up a building, but walking down scaffolding to go into an excavated site, I do.  The same slight panic happened here.

The funicular ride down was particularly fun because I got caught amongst a group of Italian middle schoolers – mainly boys jamming themselves into the funicular like a clown car…

OK, tomorrow – Villa Lante and off to see Roberto in Senigallia!

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