Full as ‘googs’, we settled into our lovely Ed and trickled only 30 minutes to Spello, another exquisite Umbrian stone town poured down a mountain side. We sat out the end of the rain in our overnight rest stop at the lower gate and when the blue sky opened up, we walked up to be charmed once again by a gorgeous flowered town made of limestone & the local pink rock.
Loads of picturesque stone arches give away its Roman origins. From high look outs we could see out across undulating curvy green fields & olives groves back to Assisi. With no plan, we got lost just wandering about quietly and peering into homey windows. It seems not many tourists stop here. We enjoyed watching old chaps filling the squares and noisily chatting on benches whilst the women scuttled from shops with produce and some with their yoga mats on their backs.
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| Spello old town gates |
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| old Roman arch |
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| cars drive on this |
As it got cooler, we made for our cosy home and in PJs, read about St Francis before pleasurably cuddling up with our individual books.
13/10 SPELLO to SPOLETO
Through the night the two beautifully lit up octagonal towers at the lower walls could be seen form our loo window - ahh la dolce vita!
So, up in the fog, we exercised at one end of the parking lot so as to not wake anyone with our heaving, hawking & huffing.
The kid’s second last maths exams were scheduled for after breakfast and rewarded with a bacci . Whilst we readied for take-off the kids threw their paper planes about achieving some aeronautical thrills. The fleet is parked up above the crockery cupboard. We pulled out past more wee towns tipped down hillsides like little butterscotch blocks of lego pinned at the top with a spire or tower. Finding it hard to bypass a Decathlon, we concocted excuses including replacing mangey, pongey shoes, and some cheap new summer shirts for RSA and Oz cos the ones we’re wearing now will be folded into the bin! The co-located supermarket was perfect for a quick top up of pane & lunch items.
Naively, we imagined the bigger Spoleto to be a quicker & less lovely stop than our previous Umbrian towns and so when the rain poured down, we lingered over our juicy sandwiches having found a terrific €5/night very pleasant open carpark and read a bit. Despite choosing a park way over on our own, within a few hours 2 other Italian motorhomes squeezed into the bays IMMEDIATELY each side of us. Why is that? It seems the folk here love to snuggle in despite vast options of other parks!?
With the skies clearing late afternoon, we found we were brilliantly located just at the foot of another enormous undercover escalator taking us all the way up to the commanding hilltop Rocca and behind it, the spectacular Roman aqueduct leading into the centro storico.
Vertiginous views revealed waves of green cropped Umbrian hills & a gorgeous town below…….just when we thought it could get no prettier. Wil chimed in a number of times how he is “definitely coming back to Europe and specifically, here.” We passed a cosy but elegant & stylish hillside inn giving a sneak peak of it’s wonderful lounge over-looking the aqueduct through the ajar front door - simultaneously Wil & Jen enthusiatically announced we’d return here on our bikes, hot, sweaty, probably rain drenched....with the credit card!
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| Roman Aqueduct |
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| across the aqueduct to the Rocca |
We wandered enchanted around the majestic stone structures as sunset colours turned them to them gold and then we weaved down the hill into the Duomo Piazza to be rewarded with another spectacular cathedral and a scene buzzing with dressed up culture vultures clinking champagne flutes outside several teatros.
Inside the Duomo are really nice, highly coloured Lippi frescos and our cherished, much more beautiful stone & terracotta delicately patterned floors polished smooth and unevenly worn over hundreds of years. An art, music & film center apparently it is on Isabella Rosillini and Fellini’s favourite list. Almost instinctively now, we found a gelateria for dinner and hit home with Jeff’s ‘sniffer dog’ tracker guiding us through the tight, very steep incredibly beautiful maze of old cobble streets. The little billy goats, Wil & Kel pronk about seemingly unaware of the gradients!
14/10 SPOLETO to TODI
We tossed about from about 0530 waiting for enough light to hop on the bikes and explore more magical scenes and countryside. Not disappointed, we just kept turning right ascending above the cloud dusted city with its beautiful curved walls and serpiginous dry but green grassed river beds. As the roads got smaller, steeper & rougher so did the cars. We observed a string of them in tilted rushed parks, hanging off the tarmac. Older truffle hunting folk with baskets, gloves, long walking sticks and small dogs were setting out to gather their booty in the early morning.
As we rounded the corner with Ed in sight, we were greeted with the beautiful scene of a frenzy of whirling white paper planes chased by smiling, long sticky-legged pilots breathing steam in the cold morning air.
Having finished in the classroom, the sibs chucked their jets about more refining their aeronauticals with staples on the nose, making models with wider wing spans etc. Our pack up was augmented by Kel’s opera singing as they tested out & chased after the paper fleet. Jeff received news of our registration renewal from Rowdy and phoned a Rome campsite to warn them of our and its postal arrival…... all going well.
The drive to Todi, our next Umbrian town, took us on a wonderful up and down roller coaster path through the Apennines coloured with the first golds & reds of Autumn.
Kel listening to sped up pop songs (imagining her fame?), Wil wrote a letter to a publishing house as the author, Frederick Forsyth, asking for interest in his book The Odessa File whilst we discussed troubled Italian political history and training for triathlons.
On the steep ascent to our park at the lower gates of Todi, we planned our early morning bike ride tomorrow. With the early afternoon sun shining, we cooked up a huge vegie & bean soup for lunch after which the kids named the crafts in their hanger - Fabka, All Your Presents Belong to Me, and TaaDaa! Motions in the Oceans, Bernards Stupid Dumb Airways and more…
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| view from Todi campsite |
Another wonderful free funicular just next to our rest stop took us up the rest of the hill to the crowning citta, Todi, where we happened upon the preparations for the festival of their patron saint, San Fortuna.
It looked almost like Christmas with beautiful lights strung up across the piazza, trees & pot plants garnished with large velvety red sashes and bows, kids racing around playing tiggy and folk out in their finest. We tasted and bought some truffle tapenade, saw some beautiful old churches, wandered the streets with their layers of history - Roman, Medieval, Renaissance and then the Risorgimento statues, plaques and men on steed placed by political propaganda machines in the early 19th century. It is interesting to learn how much gentrification of these small towns was organised in Mussolini’s time - a man obsessed with re-creating a powerful, masculine Roman Empire-like Italy. A small sign led to fascinating below ground Roman Cistern. These were enormous cavernous storage tanks collecting a town water supply from a string of fresh water springs as well as feeding baths & fountains. They also collected storm water and kept the damp clay-like collapse prone earth dry. There was no aqueduct to this town. Instead 5kms of tunnels, 30 tanks and 500 wells - like an invisible below ground city. What they didn’t get right, was how to keep the drinking water safe. Aqueducts now supply town water.
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| in a Roman cistern |
With half an hour to kill before the festival, we found an amazing artisanal gelateria where we had first course of dinner.
Then sitting on medieval steps in the joyfully decorated Piazza del Popolo, we people watched, enjoyed endless bonging of enormous deafening bells and followed the procession from the Duomo to the Chiesa della San Fortuna where monks, priests, school kids and musicians wove up the candle lit stairs to mass in the clear crisp early evening.
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| Piazza Popoli |
No matter how many small towns we see, they all have unique vibrancy as well as things comfortingly familiar, like old men gathering on benches for a chat in the early evening and square-shaped women with grocery bags trickling into the chiesa.
Second course at home was truffle tapenade, pickled octopus, dried figs, bocincini, sun-dried tomatoes & dry biscuits nibbled as we watched & then vigourously discussed a DVD about Rome & the Romans. We waded through the preceding ancient Phoenicia, Greece and Carthage. Can’t wait to see the ancient Forum.
15/10 ROME-WARD
Waiting for the rain to stop, we set off at only 0715, flew down the marked hill mindful of our brakes and crawled straight up the strada stretto taking only 11 minutes to the city gates.
The gradient was such that Jeff felt his front wheel lifting off the ground with every down stroke of the pedal requiring that he lean right forward so as to not cartwheel backwards! We would’ve done another round or two had we not been amongst morning work & school going traffic on a road with absolutely no shoulders. So instead, we circled the town walls and pulled into the Piazza Popolo for a delicious coffee, watching a very different scene of cars, buses, trucks, morning commuters, busy cafes pushing out on-the-run coffee & croissants all squeezing through the tight corners & curves of the tiny cobbled streets.
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| Mr Garibadli (again) |
The old centres are so beautiful - where time seems to have stood still in yesteryear, so clean and so proudly lived in. They breathe living history where vital campanil-centric communities get about their business & everyone knows each other, contrasting with the many almost sterile touristy UNESCO toy towns we’ve seen in other parts of Europe.
Smug with being on holidays, our snail’s pace contrasted with morning commuters as we slowly sipped our coffee and then set back to the kids for an even slower breakfast.
The schoolroom was cosy and overlooked the gorgeous soft farmed valley below still full of lifting white cloud.
Our next adventure is totally different - Caput Mundi - the ancient capital of the world - Rome.
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