Umbria Untour, Summer of 2004
by Ronald & Barbara Moline, Oak Park, IL
Last year in September, we did the Untours North Tuscany trip, and fell in love with Italy. This September, we were in Umbria, and our love affair only deepened.
Our vacation, began, however, on a very unhappy note: I had not arrived in the DaVinci International Airport from Munich more than fifteen minutes previously, when I discovered my wallet was missing. I will not waste your time with the anxieties, speculations, and concerns this engendered, but give you a few bottom lines. It is reasonably certain, I think, that the wallet was taken by someone with official authorization to be in security areas. It either fell out of my coat pocket in the overhead rack of the aircraft, or it was pickpocketed in baggage claim (where in fact I was jostled, as one almost always is in that setting). No one came close to me as I wheeled my bags into the terminal from baggage claim, and where I discovered it was missing just minutes later.
Let me take the occasion to remind you of the usefulness and importance of carrying a photocopy or list of all your credit cards and any other vital information with you, separate from your wallet or purse. Of course I didn’t. The story, though, has a happy ending: a generous German individual named Derk Ohlson found my wallet on a train in Rome, called my credit card companies and tried to cancel the cards (successfully done with one, not the others), and mailed the wallet to my home. I learned of all this, of course, after I returned. The wallet was intact; only the $200 in cash was missing. But back to Umbria.
This is as good a place as any to sing the praises of Untours Umbrian repre-sentative, JoAnne Rowe. She was extremely supportive and helpful when she met us, at the height of our dismay over the wallet, at the airport; and throughout the trip was an informative, available, lovely resource person. I thought she was a treasure; the sort of person you felt, under other circumstances, you could become friends with for life.
We would not have imagined loving Umbria more than Tuscany, but we did––for several reasons. One, driving was less difficult, with fewer sprawling towns to crawl through, minimal traffic congestion, and fewer parking problems. Second, there were far fewer tourists...in our various forays, it seemed to me we encountered far more Italian tourists than foreign!
Third, the people of Umbria seemed exceptionally friendly and helpful, even though we had said the same of the Tuscans. On the outskirts of Todi, for example, I asked three old men sitting on a bench if it was okay to park on the street, near where they were sitting. They nodded, but one man indicated that it was probably safer to park across the street--and proceeded to go to the middle of the road and stop traffic, allowing me to U-turn! He then helped guide my parking, and simply shrugged off my effusive "grazies".
Fourth, our destination points always seemed manageable, and were invariably picturesque. Even the large towns aren't that large, and most of the towns are little more than villages. We were especially taken with Spoleto, which, you may agree, doesn't get huge reviews in the tourist guides, aside from its music festival. It was good-sized, but, again, manageable, with the sorts of perks one wants in a city like good shopping, restaurants, Internet cafes, etc., but with the fascination of a medieval town as well, with its rabbit-warren of streets, and beautiful churches. I have never, in any other Italian city, gotten lost trying to find the Duomo--nor felt so rewarded when we discovered it!
Our lodging, Casa Rossa, could not have been more charming, better located, or well managed. Our young “landlady,” Sara, was just a delight: warm, forth-coming, helpful...did I mention beautiful? She was more than willing to let us use her computer one day to get on the internet; she made telephone reser-vations for us for an opera in Spoleto; and she presented us with an extra bottle of wine one day, just out of niceness!
Our ”hometown,” La Bruna –just down the hill from Casa Rossa – is not particularly picturesque, but we liked it all the more for that reason: a true, non-tourist, Italian town, with a good grocery store, bakery, butcher, and pastaria. We wouldn't encounter a single other tourist in our frequent trips to pick up supplies.
Going up the hill from Casa Rossa, there is a restaurant called La Panorama, which we used as our evening pizza place, although it has a full menu and got good reviews from previous Casa Rossa guests. At the top of the hill – a fifteen-minute hike from Casa Rossa – is the charming and prosperous-appearing medieval town of Castel di Ritaldi. It is quite small, and thus probably not worth a long drive from somewhere else to see; but it has grand views of Trevi, Montefalco, and the valleys in-between, and features many lovely, modern villas on its outskirts, any number of which I would be happy to call home.
I am able to read enough Italian to have figured out one day, from a poster, that there was to be a festival on the weekend in Castel di Ritaldo, featuring among other things lunch provided by the restaurant association. We made the hike on Saturday, and were rewarded with the second-best lasagna we'd ever eaten––free! (More about the first in a minute.) There was also free wine, mineral water, and a couple more courses which we were too full to eat!
No one taking the Umbria Untour should miss a dinner at Vanna's, the proprietress of the I Mandorli property. Dinner is by reservation only, and only prepared, I believe, if she has a quorum, however she defines that. The night we went there were fifteen people, filling one long outdoor table; but when five more appeared, seemingly unexpected––non problema! Set up another table! Mama Vanna, as she called herself, gave us superb antipasti, followed by THE best lasagna we've ever eaten. Followed of course by il secondo, and then il dolce. Fabulous.
The mid-tour planned event could not have been more interesting: a visit to the estate of Antonio Bachetoni. We were in awe of a whole hillside of 400-year-old olive trees, appreciative of the family's antique-filled villa, and impressed by his herd of prize cattle. Antonio, a man of noble birth, is a handsome, somewhat reserved but friendly man, appearing in his early 50’s, with whom I had an interesting brief chat about American politics. He asked me if I liked Bush, and approved the answer it took me about one second to give. He went on to say that he felt, as a European whose life can be directly affected by what Bush does, that he ought to have a right to vote for the American president. I told him I couldn't agree more!
One of our trips, after visiting Deruta and buying some magnificent ceramics, was to Lake Tasameno. It is a pleasant enough lake, but I frankly would have regretted taking the time to see it, since there were so many other places to visit in the time we had left, except for one reason: we discovered an incredibly good seafood restaurant, in the little town of Pasignano, called Trattoria del Piscatore. A seafood ravioli in a creamy red sauce was one of the most outstanding dishes I have ever eaten anywhere–– no wonder the place was full of French tourists, even in the off-season of this little summer resort town!
Having gone on and on about food, it will probably come as a surprise when I tell you that I don't think the food of Umbria is the match of Tuscany. Believe me, I’m not complaining––I think it is evident that we ate very well! But the menus of most restaurants are pretty much the same throughout the region, and the sauces tended to lack the flavor of those we routinely found in Tuscany. Walnuts, balsamic vinegar, good parmesan...not here. It also seemed odd to us that the Umbrians serve a basket of salt-free bread at the beginning of every meal just like the Tuscans––but without putting olive oil on the table. They are happy to bring it; they just don't seem to use it themselves on their bread. As for truffles: they are harvested, if that’s the word, in November––meaning that, this late in their year, we were only getting the dried variety in foods, which, I am told, is not nearly the same as fresh.
I very much encourage any Umbrian Untourist to take the long drive off Via Fleminia to Nórcia, and beyond. Nórcia is an interesting destination in its own right––the pork capital of Italy, with incredible butcher shops, but also an exceptionally attractive main piazza. However the real treat lies in the mountains beyond it, much of which is a national park. One climbs, and climbs, until the road suddenly opens onto a truly amazing sight: the “Piano Grande:” a broad, flat plain, stretching for miles, without human habitation. There were horses, and cattle, grazing here and there on the vast expanse, with no fences to rein them in. The plain is surrounded by the bare, whaleback mountains, and, perched on a hill at the far end of the plain, sits the completely isolated, ancient hill-town named Castellucio. It is magical––a true shining city upon a hill. It surely has to be the area where the so-called “spaghetti westerns” were filmed; it looks for all the world like areas of our own West.
I don’t need to tell the reader about Assisi; it more than lived up to our expectations. We were particularly awed by the beauty of the Basilica, which, like the Duomo in Pisa, sits at the end of a broad expanse of grass, which is an extremely rare sort of setting in Italy. Not surprisingly, we en-countered more tourists here than anywhere else in Umbria, but again, not so many that we felt discomfited. It is a solemn and moving sight to see, among the many visitors to St. Francis’ tomb below the lower church of the basilica, pilgrims of faith, praying, with tears in their eyes, before the saint.
To get a real sense of the life and ministry of St. Francis, one must leave Assisi, where he has been co-opted by the Vatican, and visit Eremo delle Carceri, Francis’ mountain hermitage. When he was not out preaching his message, this is where the saint retreated, with his followers, to live in complete simplicity and quasi-poverty, to re-group and to meditate upon the wonders of God that surrounded him in this beautiful spot. It was raining when we arrived from Assisi, but the weather only added to the mystical feel of this holy place. There is a long, broad path along the side of the forested mountain, with a high stone wall on the mountain side, up to the stone grotto in which the monks lived, which reminded Barbara and I in-tensely of the approaches to Buddhist retreats in the mountains of Korea. I feel sure the spirituality of these two disparate traditions comes together in such places.
We ended our trip with two days in Rome, taking the train from Spoleto. What a country bumpkin I’d become in just two weeks! A large, aggressive lady at the train station, straight out of a Fellini movie, grabbed our bags and threw them in a taxi, then loudly demanded recompense for her “quatro bambini.” If I’d had my wits about me I would have asked their age: in their twenties? When I finally called a halt to shelling out coins, she turned away disgustedly with a “Mama Mia!”, and on to her next victim. Not to be out done, the taxi driver, who chatted us up the whole way to the hotel, pointed to the meter indicating kilometers traveled, rather than fee – which I totally failed to catch – and charged me 39 euros instead of the 10 or 12 it should have cost.
The Hotel Lancelot is a gem. After our discombobulation in getting there, the warm and friendly proprietress, an Italian woman raised in Canada, was just what who we needed; and she proved very helpful for the duration of our brief visit. The hotel itself is very comfortable, and marvelously located just blocks from the Coliseum.
Our last day in Rome was very special: we had a private tour of the Vatican Museum, Sistine Chapel, and St. Peters, with a woman guide who had been strongly recommended to us by some friends who used her services last year. Patrizia Sfligiotti is a wisp of a woman, pert, attractive, charming, and incredibly knowledgeable. She has a Ph.D. in Archaeology, and has been giving private tours for the past several years, her second career. She seemed to know the entire history of the formidable collection in the museum, including the names and histories of the various popes who commissioned the various sculptures and painting. I will be happy to provide her email address upon request.
There are so many places to see in this world, and Untours provides so many splendid destinations; but I must say, we may never stray from Italy, having become so smitten. I would happily become a poster child for Untours Umbrian and Tuscany packages, except for the incongruity that I am a senior citizen!
Arrivederci,
Ron