Il
18 maggio ed il 20 maggio
Assisi
I'm
already in my last week here and have been so wonderfully busy that
posting blog entries has been put aside. It's a beautiful, sunny
Sunday morning and in between laundry and packing, I am finding some
moments to get caught up and share my comings and goings. I have
talked about the beauty of the Umbrian Valley which only gets
magnified the more I see of it. There are many charming hilltop
cities nestled in the mountains, but a car is necessary to get to
most of them and, last Friday, Janet suggested that we go to
Bevagna, a spot she had visited before and always enjoyed going back
to. Bevagna has the stillness of centuries past with the flavor of an
ordinary life in an intimate, walled medieval city. We began our day
there with coffee in the piazza and a conversation with a “local”,
a gentleman who had lived outside of Italy for many years, but came
back to Bevagna to retire and enjoy the simple lifestyle in the
soothing ambiance of his home town.
There
weren't too many visitors so we (Janet, Ingrid, and I) had the luxury
of a leisurely stroll and stopping wherever and whenever we wanted.
Of course, that meant buying a couple of vibrantly colored cotton
dishtowels to add to my collection and a visit to the local
pasticcieria from where I left with a bag full of assorted pastries,
all of which were consumed in two days! Besides food and souvenirs,
however, we did take in a history lesson. At the beginning of the
20th century, ruins of
a 2nd century Roman bathhouse were discovered in Bevagna
and after years of a painstaking recovery process, which was not completed until 1982 as everything was
covered with piles of dirt and rubble, the delightful mosaics of
animal marine life were revealed. One could almost feel the activily
in this public bathhouse as the Romans came to bathe, get massages
with perfumed oil, talk politics, and, undoubtably, do a bit of
gossipping....for what else is a bathhouse for! Also at one end of
town are the remains of a Roman ampitheater which now has stone
houses built into the ruins of the walls and is, in itself, a quaint
peaceful neighborhood to live in.
We
walked into the local theater, still on its original site from 1886,
but fully restored and accommodating 250 places, only to find a number
of teens feverishly working on the set-up for the weekend performance
of “Grease.” Learning that this group had done everything
completely on their own-from flyers to props to costumes to
choreography and directing, Ingrid and I purchased tickets to return
for Sunday night's performance...which we did on a rainy night. The
enthusism of the cast was well-worth the trip and, of course, there
was dinner at an “Agritourismo” in Montefalco, a charming inn
where the homemade pasta with vegetables, panna cotta con frutti di
bosco (berries), and Prosecco all made for another grand evening in
the Umbrian Valley.
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