Thursday, June 8, 2017

A few days in Orvieto

We have been staying in Orvieto for the past few days, in a lovely little house near the edge of town that our friend Valerie has been living in for the past few months. 

 We were supposed to stay here with her, as her guests, but a sudden illness during a trip back to the States forced her to abandon the rest of her Italian vacation. In an act of terrific generosity, she insisted we come and stay here anyway. I'm so glad we did!

The town rubbed me the wrong way a bit at first. It is definitely a tourist town, and the center, with its famous Duomo, is crowded with stores selling fancy handbags and tourist souvenirs, with restaurants whose menus include English translations, and with people snapping pictures of everything and speaking English and German and Japanese. All my not very latent snobbism rises up...because like most tourists, I hate being reminded that I am just another tourist myself.

But I quickly succumbed to the charm of the house we're staying in and the town itself. Here's the view from our bedroom. Need I say more?
But of course I will. Orvieto is on top of a little plateau and it looks across fields and farms and old tile roofs. Here's another view...can't you hear Kiri Te Kenawa warbling Puccini?
(That's a "Room with a View" reference, youngsters.)
This above was taken at sunset as we strolled up our street. The two photos below were taken during a walk along the road below the town. Those walls do indeed look like a good defense.

Of course the most awesome sight in Orvieto is the Duomo. It was built beginning in the 14th century to house a piece of linen stained with blood that was said to have seeped, miraculously, from a communion wafer a century earlier in a nearby town. The "corporal," as it's called, is locked away inside an elaborate case, but the photos of it on display don't look like much. The building the Orvietans created to house it is spectacular, however. My cheesy little snapshots don't come within a mile of doing it justice. With its all-over pattern of black-and-white, basalt-and-travertine stripes, its brilliantly colorful mosaics, its profusion of sculptures, arches, and towers, it is an astonishing work of art.


The town is full of cobblestoned streets, many of them at a pretty steep incline, and the house we're in--like, I imagine, most of the houses in town--is full of stairs. No wonder the nudes pictured in the Duomo's fresco of the resurrection of the dead shows a crowd of people with very large, very firm buttocks. The people who live here must have thighs and backsides of steel.

Valerie is in the process of buying a house nearby, with equally spectacular views. Her friend Roy walked us over to see it today.

We are looking forward to coming back and visiting Orvieto again in the not too distant future, this time with Valerie on hand to show us around.

1 comment:

barbara said...

Gorgeous. What are you all doing with your days? Are you cooking? Are you speaking Italian?

Arriverderci!

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