4.4
How embarassing – apparently the website
said “be sure to bring cash as B&Bs can’t take Visa” and I missed it. So
now I have to send them money when I get home. They were so nice to us that
this feels truly terrible. Tiziana even gave us a little striped dress for
Rose, and a winter coat – “My mother got them for our daughter and she only
wore them once. They’re really brand new.” Will have to get down to the post
instantly Monday to send a money order.
Train to Orvieto was uneventful. We could
have taken the funicular up the hill to the city and to the hotel, but I wasn’t
sure where the hotel was exactly and decided to cab it. It’s about 1 kilometer
from the station to the hotel via funicular. Almost 6 via cab. This is what you
get for building your city on the Italian version of a mesa. The drop is very
steep around 3 sides, but not as bad on the 4th, so the long and
windy road does eventually arrive.
Once settled in the hotel, we decided to go
out and explore a little. We turned left on the main road and wandered all the
way down to the funicular. When we passed a ceramics shop, of course we had to
stop (I’m on the hunt for matching pieces for my little coffee creamer that i
love so). The shop had a studio in it as well. An elderly man had just started
working on a little vase, drawing in the thin black lines of the traditional leaf
pattern. He had the vase on a wheel and just turned it very slowly to add more
and more layers of detail to the leaves. Rose was fascinated and stood for
almost 20 minutes absolutely silent watching. When he finished all the black,
he put everything aside and said he was tired, so we continued on down to the
funicular. Only one euro to ride it down and back up – after 12E for the cab,
ouch. Nice view, but as the cliff is very steep, not a very long one!
The funicular is right next to a public
park. It’s kinda cool to think that the place where Aurora and her new friend
(because Aurora ALWAYS has a new friend if there’s another little girl in the
place!) were running and playing is in the keep of a 13th century
castle. I walked around and read some of the signs about it. Orvieto was a
papal stronghold for a long time –Pope Boniface VIII got himself in trouble for
putting a statue of himself in place of the St Joseph that used to be over the
gate to the city. Someone accused him of idolatry and he ended up not only
having to remove the statue but not come back to Orvieto. Some amazing views of
the Umbrian countryside from up there. The little girl (whose name I did not
catch) wanted to come back and play again tomorrow, and I was all set to make
it a date, but her grandmother reminded her she had a ballet lesson. She and Ro
were both very disappointed.
As we walked back up, Ro looked in the
window of the Fusari studio and saw a woman sitting at the wheel now. She
immediately wanted to to watch again, which was fine with me. Signora Fusari
was considerably chattier than her husband. She told us all about the shop, the
kiln, how the earthquake last year had caused their old studio to be condemned
and now they only had this tiny space, instead of a big studio where the
“tornitori” (potters) worked and fired things in the HUGE kiln (this one was only
about 3x the size of a normal big kitchen oven). She and her husband and their
daughter do all the painting; she said most of the shops in the main ceramics
area of town buy from artists in the nearby countryside, but few do their own
work in-house. She had just finished the black on a different vase, and asked
Ro what color she should paint it. (Most of their work is black and white with
one color, pink, yellow, teal or cobalt blue, added.) I’m sure you’ll all be
astounded to hear she picked pink. So we got to watch the vase go from mostly
white to completely painted and ready to fire. They only run the oven once
every week or so, since it takes them that long to fill it up. Sgra Fusari fell
two months ago and broke her left wrist, so she still has a hard time balancing
long enough to do a lot of painting. She was sad that her daughter isn’t crazy
about doing the ceramics and her grandchildren aren’t at all interested. The
craft will die soon, she told us. Aurora said she would come back someday and
paint for her, which cheered her up a little.
As we were leaving, she led us over to one
of the tables in the store. It had coffee sets and little ceramic bells all
over it. She pointed to the bells. “You should pick one you like,” she told
Rose. We found one that was the same pattern as the vase she had been working
on, and pink as well! Perfect. I tried to pay for it – it was only 5E after all
– but she refused. “I enjoyed having her here. It is a gift.” I noticed some votive candle holders on a
rack in the studio that were lovely – will go back tomorrow and buy a few. As I
think about it, I kinda like the idea of votive holders better than candle
holders – the light is every bit as pretty and not in the way! You can see some
of their stuff here: https://plus.google.com/112784262776878746452/about?hl=en
For dinner we just went walking until we
found something. The restaurant we chose was off the main street and empty at 8
pm, but certainly not deservedly so – we both ordered rare steak with balsamic
crema sauce and garlic spinach, and I had a glass of the famous Orvieto white
wine, and they were all delightful.
The room is a thousand degrees, as usual.
What IS it with Italians, that they insist on keeping their hotel rooms at
temperatures Bedouins couldn’t tolerate? Fortunately, the windows opened, so we
left the windows open all the time. (Before you assault my lack of environmental
concern, we tried turning off the heat in the room, and we asked the guy at the
front desk to turn it off too. “Turning off” appears to mean, in hotel room
heat terms, “reduce from surface of sun temp to merely Saharan.”)
5.4
When we first started out this morning it
was raining, of course, but initially this was not too terrible, as we were
going to look at the Duomo and then take the Orvieto Underground tour.
When I first saw the Cathedral years ago with
its black-green and white stripes I thought it was ugly, but over time it’s
really grown on me, and now I can’t imagine its looking any other way. The mosaic work on the outside – lapis and
gold and something red – is almost invisible until you get right up to it, it’s
so fine. Even the pavement around the front, in pink and green marble, is
impressive.
The inside is almost solid 15th
century frescoes, just amazing. For my money, it beats Sistine Chapel hands
down: artwork just as impressive, cheaper to get in, no lines. The San Brizio
Madonna chapel was mostly done by Fra Angelico, but finished by Coreggio.
Around the bottom of the main religious frescoes there is a series of portraits
of… someone (philosophers? Pagan writers? Identifications are not clear) in
frames. But instead of being just static portraits, the subjects are looking at
each other or at the frescoes above, totally breaking the fourth wall. One is
even leaning out the “window” backwards to get a better look at the upper
frescoes.
The tunnel tour was a bit of a
disappointment because it was so short. Orvieto is built on a mesa of mostly
tufa, a relatively soft volcanic rock (you can totally scrape it off with a bit
of rock). The Etruscans who originally settled here built wells that go 200
meters down into the mesa to get water, and later built tunnels that included
storage, fortifications, and temples. The city was abandoned by the Etruscans,
but resettled by the Romans, and its defensibility made it a favorite haunt of
Popes throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance (some Popes went so far as to
live here rather than Rome, and there was more than once talk of moving Pope
Central out of Rome to Orvieto). Meanwhile, there were all these caves the
Etruscans had built, and the medieval residents continued to expand them. Today
there are over 1200 separate tunnels; most of them are under private houses and
are still used for storage, though rarely for wells, olive oil mills, and
pigeon-raising as they were by the Etruscans and medievals. The tunnels we saw
were an olive mill, a cement mine, a well, a pigeon columbarium, and the
waiting room of the underground hospital dug during WWII (the tunnel to the
hospital itself had partially collapsed, so we only got to look down in, not
actually go to the hospital).
After the tunnel we had lunch, then went on
a ceramics tour of Orvieto. The main ceramics district is just off the Piazza
Cahen, where the Duomo is. I found the shop where I had bought my creamer 10
years ago, but they didn’t have much to match it other than more coffee
service. So I was sad about that. However, I did see a peacock plate, a very
traditional Renaissance design and difficult to execute, on a wall that I
really wanted. I pulled it down and noticed that it had a chip on the back of
it. After looking and looking for one that didn’t have a chip (there were lots
of peacock design plates that size, but none in the same colors), I was about
to give up. The store owner saw that I was hunting for something and asked me
about it. When I told him I wasn’t going to buy a chipped plate, he offered it
to me for 50% off. Ok, at 50% I can tolerate a chip that’s not visible when the
plate is displayed!
Our last touristy stop of the day was the
Museo Faina, a private collection of local Etruscan goodies collected by the Faina
family in the late 1800s. The story of how it was collected is almost as
interesting as the objects themselves! A lot of what’s here is a hodgepodge
because its discovery predates both standard archeological collection practice
and laws governing what you can keep of antiquities when you find them. So
provenance and dating are both sketchy to completely unknown. A lot of what’s
here was found within 15 miles of Orvieto, however.
We went back down to Fusari to get the
votive holders, and they were all gone! When I asked, it turned out that the
ones I had seen were never for sale anyway – Sgr Fusari had made them all for
table decorations/prizes for their grandson Matteo’s first communion. However,
Sgra Fusari said I should just call next week and remind her of the pattern and
she’ll make me some more (but without Communione di Matteo 14-4-13 written on
the bottom!) So I bought a little plate that’s very representative of their
work, and will call later for the votives.
6.4
Naturally, since we were on the train all
day (after first waiting for it for over an hour when it was delayed in Rome),
this was the first uniformly gorgeous day all week. The station store had Magic
Pen coloring books (the kind where you have just one pen and coloring with it
changes the page to different colors), so I bought two for Rose to give her
something to do while we waited and during the trip. They were a great success
– will have to look for more for the next train ride. But otherwise an
uneventful day. Glad to be home.
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