Orvieto and Civitia di Bagnoregio

Posted on July 1, 2016 by borysSNORC

Today we took off out of town for a drive into the Umbrian countryside. I was immediately reminded of how scary Italian drivers are… road rules seem more like ‘guidelines’, speed limits are for to be routinely ignored, indicators are apparently purely decorative and following road line markings appears to be optional! You know, it’s all fun and games until we die in a fiery inferno – but whatever. I opted to sit in the back to avoid the front row seat of the chaos.

First stop we went to Civitia di Bagnoregio to see the ‘old town’. It was close to 11am and 34C by the time we arrived and I had discovered that the only access to the town was via a long, steep pedestrian bridge. So as gorgeous as the lovely ancient town looked, a nearby wine bar won out while the others trekked over to “the city that dies”. This place has a long and very interesting history spanning from the ancient Etruscans and Romans… seriously Google that shit up… there’s simply too much to put in here.

After leaving Bagnoregio, we head towards another ancient town called Orvieto, which again has a history that goes back to the Etruscan and Roman periods, but is reliably documented as being inhabited in the Bronze and Iron ages, which is just phenomenal. Particularly in light of the fact that Australia’s ‘history’ (well, it’s written history), goes all the way back to like, 1788… which for these places probably feels like last month or something. Our first stop in Orvieto was the Pozzo di San Patrizio – or the Well of St Patrick! When we decided to day trip out into the countryside and I looked up Orvieto, this is one of the most fascinating things that leapt out of the Google image search. Amazing walled city on the top of a huge plateau with impressive cliffs all around, and this bizarre 54m deep well dug into the ground. It was built in 1527-37 at the urging of Pope Clement VII, and the well was designed to protect them from a potential siege or disaster (this being the mentality directly after the sack of Rome – look that up too). The well has a double helix stairwell to the bottom and they used to use mules to carry water back up to the top. With 248 steps down and 248 steps back up… it was lucky there was another wine bar nearby! 😀

After the intrepid adventurers came up and rubbed it in that this place was one of the most amazing things they’d ever seen… nice find… we went not far around the corner in Orvieto to go see the cathedral. Now, I love a good church as much as the next person, but at some point when you travel a lot, you find yourself thinking ‘Not another bloody church!’ So I was ready to do the three minute whip through ‘yet another bloody church’ and make haste outside to potter around the town. NO SO! We drove up to the church and I was immediately taken by it’s incredibly elaborate gothic Italian architecture. The Cathedral of Orvieto, also known as the Orvieto Duomo is an absolute masterpiece, both inside and out.

Mostly built in the 12th, 16th and then 19th century, the cathedral is mind-blowingly beautiful. The outer facade was covered with a huge number of elaborate bas-reliefs, sculptures and mosaics that I understand were made by the Sienese artist – Lorenzo Maitani, and the interior is covered in 14-16thC frescoes. Just amazing…

Loads more photos but my internet connection is not playing nice with me. After the Cathedral, we drove around the countryside to a small town called Montecchio where we had lunch at a local restaurant, with a local chef and lots of local produce – massive charcuterie platter, a beef ragout dish, a five cheese pasta tortellini type thing (he had me at gorgonzola!) and Aunty Mary tried the panna cotta for dessert, but made a bad call on the orange marmalade topping bit… not a crowd pleaser. Over all lunch was fantastic and the wines that we washed it all down weren’t too bad either.

After lunch the long dozy drive back to Roma… past the fields of sunflowers and hay bales, past more medieval walled towns high up on plateaus and then one final stop on our tour – to see the mysterious ‘keyhole’. No idea what that was, but we found out when we got there…

It seem the Malta embassy has a garden beside their main buildings, and that garden has a large impressive gate, with a conspicuous keyhole, then when you look through it… you can see three countries – Malta in the garden, Italy in the middle ground, and of course, Vatican City in the background! Nicely lined up Mr Unknown Landscape Gardiner.

After this we did some fly by speed landscape photography of some other famous Rome landmarks – all of which we will be checking out tomorrow, so will get some better photos then – before being dropped off back home… home for the time being, the amazing Trevi Fountain which I am falling more and more in love with every day. Who knew a fountain could have ‘moods’? It’s just gorgeous and I’m seeing more in it, the more we look at it.

Anyway, after this a little shopping for some Murano glass beads – they didn’t have single beads available so I was forced to buy a couple of necklaces with the intention of re-stringing them later into something a bit less ‘this necklace was made with little or no thought’. And of course, obligatory limone gelato. 🙂 It’s been a really long day, and I’m pretty sure that, (for a change), this is the somewhat truncated version of what we got up to! So tired, but so much fun.

Thanks to LaMiaSorellina for all the organizing! Mwah!

Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini Crypt

Posted on June 29, 2016 by borysSNORC

Went upstairs to the rooftop terrace this morning for a lovely buffet breakfast consisting of breads, pastries, charcuterie, cheeses, eggs and all good thing while wondering what to do today. Both of us have been to Rome before and see a lot of the highlights and while we are scheduled to check out places like the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Pantheon and the like, later in the week – we had no set plans today based on the ‘wait-and-see-how-we-pull-up-after-shitty-long-flight’ factor.

So we decided we’d go for a wander about 10 mins from here (being the Fontana di Trevi… did I mention the Trevi Fountain is right outside our window, and is the stunning backdrop to our breakfast on the rooftop patio?) to the Santa Maria della Concepzio de Cappuccini. Which is a gorgeous church (below), complete with museum, and crypt full of the bones of 3700 Capuchin order friars semi-interred in an artistic interior design display.

Apparently, when friars arrived at this church in the 1630s, they brought 300 odd cartloads of deceased friars’ remains with them. There was a strange-ish friar Fr. Michael of Bergame who was responsible for the arrangement of the bones in the crypts. They also had soil bought in from Jerusalem thanks to the generosity of Pope Urban VIII in order to bury any monks that would subsequently die… So when another monk died, they were buried in the crypt without a coffin, and allowed to decompose in the soil from Jerusalem, and when they ran out of room, they would exhume him and add his bones to the decorative motifs surrounding the interesting soils of the crypts. Bodies spent roughly 30 years in the soil before being exhumed and added to the artwork.

The Church (and the guides here) insist that the display is not meant to be a sort of danse macabre, but rather a contemplative reminder of how short our lives on Earth are and a sharp refresher on the nature of human mortality, in case any of us forget.

Photography is forbidden in the crypts, so I have plucked some images off their website and various… I have a feeling there is going to be a lot of ‘stock’ photos plucked off wikipedia for posts on this trip, if they keep up this ‘no photos allowed’ shite.

The central motif of this ‘piece’ is the crossed arms that is the symbol of the Franciscan order – the skeletal arm of Jesus, crossed with the clothed arm of St Francis, surrounded by columns made of skulls, in between a wall lined in skulls and femurs, under an archway made of shoulder blades and tailbones.

All of these displays are made with the bones of exhumed friars/monks. The last friar who was buried in the crypts was exhumed in 1870, so good to know it’s not a ‘work in progress’ still. O.o The bones are artistically display to depict many religious symbols and reminders of Earthly life. There are tailbones used to create hour glass shapes, skull used to create walls with the entire skeletons of some friars used to show the walk of man through life. There is bones used to make lanterns, bones lining the walls, the roof the archways. It is really fascinating in a absolutely creepy kind of way – I don’t care what the Church says the intent is.

Many famous persons have come to visit here over the centuries – Mark Twain, the Marquis de Sade, and Nigel Hawthorne to name a few,

“The reflection that he must someday be taken apart like an engine or a clock…and worked up into arches and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did not distress this monk in the least. I thought he even looked as if he were thinking, with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well on top of the heap and his own ribs add a charm to the frescoes which possibly they lacked at present.” ~ Mark Twain

Might look for something a little more cheerful to check out after lunch!

Long flight is long.

Posted on June 29, 2016 by borysSNORC

I feel like I shouldn’t really gripe about long haul flights – they usually mean we are off to somewhere exotic and interesting, but oh my god, do they knock me around.

Given I have recently been fighting off pneumonia and bronchitis and sinusitis and shit like that, and was so close to cancelling this trip and leaving Aunty Mary to go without me, I have pulled up this morning much better than expected (good reason for not writing about it last night – my view on the matter was decidedly less circumspect with pain levels through the roof and just absolutely exhausted).

We left Brisbane at 0500, so had to be at the airport at 0300. I, of course, was still doped up to the eyeballs on Valium as we left the house having had somewhere in the region of 3-4 hours sleep to get up at my alarm at 0200. :/ Not an ideal start to the day, but what do you do. Race across town to the airport, vaguely thinking about the fact that my travel insurance doesn’t kick in until you are 50kms from home, so there would be no death benefits payable if we crashed and burned on take off because the airport is only 15kms from home, (#ThingsThatGoThroughMyHeadWhenStoned)… Do the hurry up and wait thing at the airport. Line up get boarding passes, go wait in the lounge in a a drug addle haze for two hours before boarding and yay, we get away on time.

Get on the plane and our TA has booked us a window and an aisle seat and a spare in between… usually I book my own flights, but these open jaw flights can’t be easily booked online yourself, so the chickie had allocated us seats with one in between. Give a slightly concerned/piss-off/please-no look to everyone coming down the aisle to claim their seat after we settled and luck went out way – no one in between. So we had a spare seat and a bit of space to stretch out from Brisbane to Dubai. T

hat flight went mostly well, except for the cock up with the food… I’m not one to list down a strong dislike as an allergy, so I never request special meals and it’s never been a problem, you can usually chose something that suits your preferences, but I haven’t flown Emirates since going to Turkey with Dr Nick in 2007 (whoa… I vaguely remember that flight, there was a LOT of alcohol and a very enabling flight attendant named Brad who kept bringing us G&Ts), anyway, capsicum is my kryptonite (that and coriander, but that’s genetic so nothing to be done about that one). Breakfast, consisted of something that was supposed to be scrambled eggs, but was just some sort of salty reconstituted mush, with a little chicken sausage and some soggy potato gems masquerading as ‘hash browns’, was served at 0600. Still groggy, I wasn’t really hungry, so I had a bit of ‘egg’, and ate the fruit and a bad cup of tea and called that, breakfast done. Then around four hours after that, they came around with some little pies – half of them meat, half of them vegetable mornay… took a bit out of the little pie they gave me and it was almost wholly capsicum and went ‘nup’. Asked the flight attendant if I could have one of the other ones, and he said ‘Sure, I’ll be right back.’ I waited about 35mins and all the trash was being whisked away and the guy happened to walk past and see me and said, ‘Sorry, but there were none left.’ Ok whatevs.

Until after many more hours of painfully sitting still – fucking captain must be seriously risk adverse, there was some turbulence but nothing over the top and he had the seatbelt sign on for about 12hrs of the 14hr flight discouraging people from moving around the cabin – and they came to serve ‘dinner’. It was about 1600 our time at this point, so we’d had nothing but a party pie thing since 0600, except juices, water and lemonade, and I didn’t even have one of those. ‘Dinner’ was chicken and mushrooms with ‘grilled Mediterranean vegetables’ (you got it – capsicum), and some weird capsicum brushetta and banana cake… or alternative meal was a lamb biriyani. Rather than risk the capsicum, I asked for the lamb. Different hostie this time said, ‘I am out of lamb atm, but I’ll bring you one right back.’ Oh, here we go. Seriously, 20 mins passes, and I am sitting there thinking, surely they haven’t forgotten me again. By the time they start cleaning up after everyone, I’m hitting the attendant call button and it was being turned off and ignored because they were all busy! Four times, I tried to get someone’s attention. Eventually someone walked past and made eye contact, and I was like ‘Could I please have a meal?’. She looked appalled, and asked what happened, I said the chick was coming back with a lamb dish, she said ‘We are out of lamb.’ FFS. I saw someone going past from the central galley with a huge tray of them, so I asked her to go look. She came back with a meal – of lamb – and then asked if I need anything else… and of course being in a pained and now unusually hangry state, I said ‘No thank you, but could you please send me the cabin manager after I’ve had my dinner.’

Well you can imagine how that conversation went – she was very apologetic, by this time I was over it so I was saying ‘I understand these things happen, but you can’t tell someone you’ll be right back and then forget about them for half an hour – and it really shouldn’t be happening to the same person twice in one flight!’ Blah blah blah, she was appreciative of the feedback and the rest of the staff were very solicitous after that – she ill advisedly gave me a customer feedback card with an email address on it ‘in case I wanted to write to their head office about the matter’, but screw that – I get paid to write consumer complaints these days, so stuffed I can be bothered writing one in my time, and definitely not over airline over food!

Anyway, we get to Dubai, do the transit thing, go through security, throw away a perfectly good unopened bottle of water, and wait about three hours for our connection to Rome. Get on the plane, same seats allocated, and damn but there is someone in the middle seat. We schooch over and they get the aisle and the next six hours are torturous. So much back pain. And how annoying to be climbing over sleeping Chinese woman who won’t get up to let us out. :/

Get to Rome, and think, finally! We are here. There’s supposed to be a driver waiting to take us to the hotel but first, what have we got for you borys?! LOST LUGGAGE! Shit. Stand around the carousel see three bags like mine go past, keep standing around, watching all the people pushing and shoving (those pamphlets the Chinese govt are issuing to tell their burgeoning middle class on, how to be good tourists, are NOT working), as they collect their luggage until eventually no bags left, and the carousel stops. Bugger. Go hunting, find a bunch of other people from Brisbane with missing bags, hope like hell they aren’t stuck in Dubai or worse… and eventually discover that they came off the flight but were left on the tarmac. Wait some more. Nearly an hour from exit plane to collect bag, and I’m thinking, our driver will have fucked off… but no, thankfully he was still there when we got out, and he drove us – in that particularly Italian style that I like to think of as ‘bored Mario Andretti going out for milk’ – to the hotel. We made it around 10pm… and looked out the hotel window and saw:

Which almost, almost, made the nightmare transit worth it. Woke up this morning and it looked even more beautiful… and on a bit of sleep and not being stuck in a seat, the transit is forgotten. Mind you, I have just determined that that is my absolute last long haul flight in cattle class… I’ve never seen the value in not stretching my travel dollars as far as humanly possible, but I am just too broken for this shit.