Slowing down

It's not often that we slow down as a family.  There is always something to get done, something to see, somewhere to be.  It's a pattern that we bring with us on vacation, always wanting to see what is around the next corner, in the next town.

But on this trip, we have consciously decided to slow down on our last week.  We're staying at a kind of bed and breakfast up in the hills above Assisi.  The property itself is actually an olive farm, but it is not quite large enough to bill itself as an agriturismo.  The owners live on the first floor of the main building, a 17th century tower that they converted into a larger house, while the upper two floors are apartments.  Our place is a little one room cottage close to the main house that at one time was the pig house.  The view into the valley is really rather remarkable, especially in the early evening.

There is a certain character to the light in this part of the world.  It somehow seems warmer, more relaxing, than in many places I've been and it's particularly at its best in the late afternoon.

The property has a pool and the house has a little kitchen, so we've decided this seems a wonderful place to just stop and smell the Italy.  Right now, I am sitting at the little table in front of our cottage, taking in the view and blogging at a reasonable hour instead of at midnight as is often the case.  

We've checked out the local grocery store, trying to figure out how to order 100 grams of salame in uni-syllable Italian, we've swam in the pool, dodging some monster deer flies, and enjoyed the views from our front table watching the late afternoon light gently drift into evening light.  The timing is right both because it is our last week before we rejoin the real world, and because the kids are really starting to miss their friends and home.  Five weeks is a long time to be away, and even longer to be stuck with just your parents,  

We haven't been completely idle though.  Thursday, we headed into Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis, the patron saint of Italy.  The town is built in a hillside, like many In Italy, but this one is more obviously steeped and the route of any wander through the town is up towards the church of St. Francisca.  Not surprisingly given than the town is a Catholic pilgrimage site, there are a number of trinket shops selling religious memorabilia as you ascend the hill.  My absolute favourite were the little figurines of monks in brown cossaks playing soccer!

While many of the churches we've stepped into on our trip here are hushed and there is a degree of reverence among the visitors, the ones in Assisi felt more like working churches than museums.  One church had the foundations and pillars of a Roman temple that was converted into a Christian church in the 1100s.  It was by far the oldest things I'd ever set foot on - stone steps that were over 1000 years old.  It was really a little mind-blowing to think that anything could stand for that length of time.  The kids were less impressed, but did note that there was a lot of bird poop on 1000 year old buildings.

The streets of Assisi are narrow like many of the other hill and medieval towns we'd visited, but there was a different feel to it, perhaps because of the inclines.  I couldn't put my finger on why it felt a little different.  Perhaps it is the omnipresent flower boxes dripping from the windows.  

It turns out there is a flower box competition in Assisi every June and the boxes are the risidual.  It adds green and colour to otherwise stone grey streets and lanes.  

There are also fewer tourists here, which may actually be a character of Umbria generally.  The region doesn't have the same reputation as neighbouring Tuscany, especially outside of Italy.  Most of the tourists are Italians escaping the sweltering cities.  English speaking service people are rarer, and there is generally less of a sense of the buildings and cities being on display.

One really cool find was a small museum dedicated to the inventions of Leonardo Da Vinci.  Based on his diaries and drawings, craftsmen and engineers have actually recreated some of his machines out of materials that would have been available.  Many of the machines explored Da Vinci's fascination with reorientation force and included cogs, bearings and of course some if the flying machines that never left the page in Da Vinci's time. It gave me a renewed appreciation for the genius of the man - that he could conceive of the first ever know tank and paint the Mona Lisa.

Lunch was truffles and porcheta, both are regional specialties in Umbria.  More truffles are found in Umbrian solid than anywhere else in the world.  And they are good!  We've had tuffle cream sauce and truffles in oil, and for what looks like blobs of petrified wood, they are wonderfully delicately flavoured.  The pork here also seems to be more flavourful than what we're used to.  Not only was the porcheta sandwich melt in the mouth flavour, twice now, we have pan fried chops for dinner and they were bursting with flavour.  Dessert was meringues from a shop dedicated to then and housing a rainbow of massive meringues that could have doubled as beehives (whether the hairdo or the bee home, I'll let you decide).

After lunch, we wandered Assisi, stumbling into the church of Ste Clara, the first female follower if St. Francis.  Unlike most churches which are thickly ornate with every inch of space covered with artistic wonders or brilliant stained glass, Ste Clara was a medieval style church with a long nave and white wash on most of the walls.  There were a few frescos around the pulpit, but most of the church was bare walls, so that the eyes were inevitably drawn to the pulpit and cross.

Curiously, we also stumbled into a church that was in the midst of restoration.  It felt like we had stepped into a Dan Brown novel.  Large scaffolds lined the walls, surrounded by gause like white sheets through which we could just make out the craftsmen meticulously cleaning the frescos with small paint brushes.   

Friday, it was a short trip to the commune di Perugia where we got a much better sense of an Italian August.  He town is bigger and much more of a commercial town.  While we'd seen some shops closed for holidays, because we've mainly been in touristy areas, there hasn't been the same summer emptying out in most places.  After all, Lucca and Florence earn their bread and butter on the holiday trade.  Perugia, however, isn't such a tourist draw, though it does have an interesting old town.  As a result, there is definitely a feeling of something missing when we wandered the streets.  

It wasn't empty, but rather, felt more like it was at a Sunday pace.  There were also a lot of shops closed for the mid-day meal and when we meandered through the quieter back alleys, there was very little sounds of human habitation.  

Perugia as well is built on a hill, but unlike a lot of hill towns, it has kept the downward facing side of the  many of e streets open so that you there are clear views of the lower sections of the city and the green valley below.  

The streets are also wider and rather than churches being the center pieces of the main piazza, there are several piazzo, or palaces, that anchor the square in space and time.  There is a more modern feel to Perugia, although by modern, I would say that it is more like Renaissance than medieval.  There also seems to be more of a 21st century presence, though the architecture and streets are firmly linked to previous eras.  

Despite the modern touches, there are elements of the city that are incontrovertibly linked to its past - a subterranean city built in the Renaissance era to keep the city's inhabitants save from invaders.  The underground streets and lanes and almost ghostly giving the impression that the inhabitants have only recently vacated, though it is clear that the alleys and cavern like rooms haven't been used in centuries.

Dinner the last couple nights have been in front of our little cottage listening to the frogs, the dogs on neighbouring properties and generally watching night settle over the valley.

The parting shot for tonight is just goofing with the camera (note that no Miller children were harmed in the making of this photo).