After returning to Florence from the day spent in Bologna, we hopped on a regional train to continue our trip. We were headed to Tuscany. The plan was to go to Orvieto, rent a car and drive around the Tuscan countryside. We did get through Tuscany, but it was on the train going from Florence, at the north end of Tuscany, to Orvieto, at the southern fringe of it. Orvieto is actually at the top edge of Umbria. Orvieto is where we spent the weekend.
Getting off the train in Orvieto Saturday just after 2 p.m., Judy went to find the Hertz Rent-a-car place. She came back to get me and said, “I have good news and bad news.” The good news was she found the place. The bad news was it had closed an hour earlier and was not going to re-open until Monday. What to do?
Orvieto is built on top of a hillside. It sits a few hundred feet up, on top of what could be called a mesa, is a couple thousand years old and has a wall around it. The train station sits at its bottom. In order to think about our predicament, we convinced the train ticket guy, a dead ringer for John Melilli, only with hair, to let us stow our bags while we took the tram up to the city.
We walked the wall at the top that overlooks the plain below with a view like at the top of the Duomos in Florence and Bologna and discussed our options: take the train onto Rome; take the train back to Florence; call Pamela and spend the weekend with her; or, take the train on to Naples. Judy was in favor of the last option. I was inclined to spend the weekend in Orvieto. We kicked around getting into Naples at night, trying to find a place to stay and figuring, since it was a big, port city, we’d end up paying a lot because we would be hot, tired, hungry, lost, and at the mercy of whoever we ran into.
While we were walking up an ancient street in Orvieto we passed a bed & breakfast and had a bite to eat in a wine bar farther up. While walking back to the tram we stopped in at the B&B, inquired, and decided to spend the weekend. It was a good choice.
We headed back to the train station, booked a trip to Montepulchiano for the next day for a day trip (to at least say we went to Tuscany) and lugged our luggage back up the tram to La Palma, the B&B where we were going to stay. Our room is very nice with a big, soft (sort of) bed, a giant chiffarobe and a full bath. It is clean, attractive and the woman who runs it also runs the restaurant downstairs. Her home cooked food was as good as the room we slept in.
We got settled, walked around the town to get a feel for it and found it was really a nice, very ancient town. It has a lot of history, the streets and buildings are all made out of very old, thick stone and, to me, it was the kind of city that symbolized the Old World.
Sunday morning we got up and took the train to Montepulchiano. While on the train Judy said “I don’t have a good feeling about this.” We got off at the train station, looked around and wondered where everyone was. The station was closed, there were a bunch of old guys at one end of the station and, across the street in a bar there was another, separate, group of old guys.
We came to learn that the town itself was 5.4 miles away, the buses didn’t run on Sundays and there was no response when we called the taxi company. Of course nothing was running it was Sunday. We had a cappuchino and a snack in the bar and then went back over to the platform to wait for the train. We would go to either Sienna or back to Orvieto, whichever train came first. We sat for four hours. It being Sunday, the trains ran on a reduced schedule. It got cloudy, it got cool. We got cool looks from the townies. The barmaid did not appreciate us using the bathroom, even though we had bought something. The old guys looked us over and eventually left. It was like a ghost town.
Finally the train came and we went back to Orvieto. Orvieto is actually a cool place. It has a cathedral that goes back to the Etruscan period. It has caves underneath the city that are 3,000 years old. We went through the Cathedral and then on an underground tour of the caves. We wandered in and out of shops filled with dolls, ceramics, clothing, artwork, silver, jewelry, and knick-knacks. It turned out that Orvieto is known for its ceramics and for its wine. We took a long taste of each and found it outstanding. Rick Steves did not list Orvieto in his travel book of Italy. I think that was a mistake.
We found Orvieto to be friendly, accommodating, of cultural and historic interest with good food, interesting shops with a real feel of the “old world.”
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