Italy 2007 – Assisi
By request of my wife, today’s adventure was to be a road trip to Assisi. Assisi is someplace I had never been in Italy – so it sounded like an interesting trip. It’s about a two-hour drive from Siena, so we’d have plenty of time to look around before heading home.
Before we left, we made another relatively fruitless search for breakfast. We ended up at a small coffee shop where we had to make do with sandwiches. Shortly before we finished up, William uttered “GUCK!” again. That’s when we realized it was a total blowout and he was tracking it around the coffee shop. We won’t tell if you won’t.
On our way to the car, we made a couple of quick stops – my mother tried to go to McDonalds and we went to the post office. We’ve tried to get my grandfather some commemorative stamp sets on each trip – and that’s always an adventure. After trying to explain to several Italian postal workers what we wanted, we finally got to the correct person. She didn’t understand a word of English – and I think we had to wait for her to take her coffee break before she started showing us our options.
By late morning, we were finally en route to Assisi. Though it wasn’t the nicest day – it was great to be able to see the Tuscan countryside. After two hours of jockeying around crazy Italian traffic, we arrived and proceeded to park at the very top. It’s a good thing that Rick directs you to park there – Assisi is on the top of a steep hill.
The Umbrian Countryside as seen from Assisi
Our plan was to follow the Rick Steves walking tour of Assisi. The tour would take us past all the important sites and end up at the famous Basilica. As with many of Rick’s walking tours, it can sometimes be a challenge to navigate by his pencil maps that leave out a lot of details. This was about par for the course and we wandered for 15 minutes before finding the start of the tour.
The tour started us at the Roman amphitheater before giving us some views of the Umbrian countryside. Before continuing the tour, we stopped for lunch at a trattoria that apparently serves lots of tourists – I think a tour bus of retired Americans was filling the place when we got there. We got some pretty decent pizzas before resuming our tour.
One of the residences in Assisi with a great view
The tour then led us past the Cathedral of San Rufino on our way to the Basilica of Santa Chiara (St. Claire). While inside, we shuffled our way behind a good sized group of nuns to catch a timed glimpse of the body of St. Claire. No kidding, the curtain opens every fifteen minutes on the dot for about 5 minutes.
Side note: Wow, lots of saints in Assisi. Let’s count ‘em: Francis, Claire, Rufino, Maria degli Angeli, and I’m sure I’m missing some. That’s like one in a thousand per capita. My hometown of 8,000 certainly didn’t have eight saints. We did have some characters that apparently took the vow of poverty – but I think that was a different deal.
About the time we left the Basilica of St. Clair, it started to pour. It’s really tough to manage following a tour guide in heavy rain – and my Rick Steves book will never quite close again due to rain-wrinkled pages. I also kept the camera under wraps – so I didn’t get a ton of photos in Assisi.
Walking to the lower part of Assisi
By now, it was becoming late afternoon and we had to skip a few tour stops to make sure we made it to the Basilica of St. Francis while it was still open. One non-negotiable stop along the way was the gelateria, and I filled up on my daily fix of lemon sorbet.
It turned out to be a pretty good hike in the rain to get down to the Basilica. It was all the way across town and down a good sized hill. Our tour started in the lower level where St. Francis’ tomb is located. Apparently, his tomb was hidden for 500 years and was due to be revealed in the 1900s. The problem was that they forgot the exact location and it took a bit of digging to re-find him. Oops! William took the opportunity to befriend one of the many priests roaming around and he made off with a little piece of candy as a gift.
The Basilica of St. Francis
The upstairs of the Basilica is famous for the gigantic frescoes depicting the life of St. Francis. These were heavily damaged during an earthquake in the late-1990′s but have been mostly restored. Sadly, a couple of priests were killed by falling frescoes a couple of days after the earthquake while surveying the damage. The peace of the experience was somewhat marred by the guards running around yelling “quiet!” and “no pictures!”. Isn’t yelling “Quiet!” counterproductive?
The trek back to the car was a long uphill grind across the entire town with a couple of gift shop stops along the way. We made it back to the car and headed down the hill to Siena just as the torrential downpour hit again.
Once back in Siena, we walked to a small restaurant near our hotel. Again, we heard that they could fit us in without reservations – but we’d have to eat FAST! It was a great little spot and extremely cheap. My antipasto was great – my pasta was great – my main dish was.. really blah. I don’t know why I thought boiled beef with green sauce (turned out to be parsley in olive oil) was somehow going to be more exiting. My mother’s dish (some sort of spicy stew) was fantastic and I filled myself up on the rest of her dinner.
Before bed, I needed to make one quick stop at the Internet Cafe’ to sync up with our lodging arrangements in Rome and to verify our arrival time. The only problem was that both internet spots in town were closed. This was cause for panic – because I didn’t have a meet up time or place arranged – and we were staying in an apartment, not a hotel. I also didn’t have the phone number for our contact – it was on my e-mail!
In desperation, I fired up WiFiFoFum on my mobile phone and started warwalking to find an unsecured access point. It used to be that people would unbox their new wireless router and plug it in without bothering to set a password or encryption. Those days are gone – I had to walk around for an hour before finding one just off Il Campo that I could connect to. Before I lost the connection, I frantically tapped out a response e-mail, copied the phone number and directions, and breathed a deep sigh of relief. To celebrate, I bought a BIG Peroni and went for a leisurely stroll around Il Campo to enjoy my beer and savor nightlife in Siena.
I spent a little too much time strolling and realized at 10:55 that I only had five minutes to get back to Alma Domus before the allegedly rigid curfew at 11 PM. After a hard march across town, I rolled in door a little sweaty but just under the curfew and headed straight to bed.
See the rest of my images from the trip to Italy right here: (link)