Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Italy 2015 - Assisi

Rocca Maggiore - the castle in Assisi

This is post number five about our Italian trip. The previous posts are:

  1. Milano
  2. Venezia
  3. Firenze
  4. Bagnoregio

We rented a car for the portion of our trip between Florence and Rome so that we could enjoy exploring the hill towns.

I love driving in Italy because the roads, the signs and the rules all make sense and drivers consistently follow them. The roads in the hill country of Tuscany and Umbria are curvy and fun, and the small cars (with manual transmissions!) handle well and are fun to drive.

Of course, curvy roads and dad having fun driving on them aren’t necessarily compatible with girls who get car sick. But we survived.

I had a loose plan to visit Perugia. None of us had ever been there and rumor has it that it is a lovely town. When we told our B&B host Marta in Bagnoregio that we would visit there her father suggested we visit Assisi. Assisi and Perugia are very close together so I thought we might visit both. We headed for Assisi first.

Assisi’s main claim to fame is its basilica with frescoes by several artists but most notably Giotto. But before we got to the basilica we explored the town.

The first thing I noticed is that the tufa that Assisi’s buildings are made of is a distinctly different color than the other hill towns I’ve visited. It’s lighter.

We had fun exploring the town. It’s very picturesque.

We could occasionally see a the castle on the top of the hill but it looked far away and I wasn’t sure if the girls would make it that far (it was a warm day). We kept wandering, going generally upward, and next thing you know we were approaching the castle.

It’s called Rocca Maggiore. It turned out to be the only castle we visited during our trip and it was a pretty good one for the girls’ first castle since it had a tower, tunnels, interior rooms and secret passages: all the components that make a castle cool for kids! (And for me!)

After the castle we made our way back down into the town and then to the basilica at the far end.

Those frescoes really are beautiful! Unfortunately no photography is permitted but in the photo album I included two photographs of postcards we bought.

The afternoon turned into a comedy of errors. It felt like a long hike the length of town between where the car was parked and the basilica, and the girls were hot and tired. We split up, and I went to get the car with a plan to meet Carol and the girls at a parking area near the basilica while they stayed put. My first trip to the car I managed to go without taking the keys, which were in Carol’s bag. Back I went. When I finally did retrieve the car and attempt to drive around the town to the other parking area, I was thwarted by police officers blocking the main road out of town. I found a tiny road through vineyards, only to discover that one cannot then drive to the destination parking area. So back around town I went, blocked again by police at a different intersection (so back up the tiny vineyard road), parked again and hiked back to the girls.

Side note: when we arrived in Italy we discovered that Carol’s phone was in fact not unlocked like I thought, so we only had one working phone and no way to contact each other.

The whole thing took more than an hour. I expected to return to a very grumpy family. I was grumpy! But when I found them at the designated parking area they were happy as clams. They had found a swing set, some feral cats and a cat lady. They were relaxed, rested and happy. Phew!

By now it was late in the afternoon and we were hungry and an hour away from our B&B. So we found a little bar with a view, had a snack, and then drove back to Bagnoregio. Perugia will have to wait for the next visit to Italy.

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