Postscript: Italy, tourist style

Our last few days in Italy were spent with our friend Valerie in Orvieto, an Umbrian town set atop a massive piece of volcanic rock and famous for its beauty and, in particular, its spectacular cathedral. Valerie's house, while more modest than the Duomo, is spectacular in its own way, full of local ceramics and antiques and other pretty things and with gorgeous views from every window of the countryside below.

The view from one of Valerie's windows

And here's the view from a little way down the street

Orvieto evokes the Under the Tuscan Sun fantasy that Americans have about living in Italy, and it's almost oppressively beautiful. No wonder it has a sizable community of Americans, Brits, and other English speakers. In fact foreigners make up fully 10 percent of the city's population, which totals about 20,000.

In addition to enjoying the charms of Orvieto itself, we drove to some other local beauty spots. You can't go more than a few kilometers in that part of the world without bumping into yet another beautiful, ancient hilltop town. We visited several of them, each with its own claim to distinction.

The first was Pitigliano, nicknamed la piccola Gerusalemme (Little Jerusalem) because it had a relatively large Jewish population (as much as 20 percent of the total) starting as early as the 14th century. Although many Christian Pitigliani hid their Jewish neighbors during World War II, several families were sent off to the death camps and today the town has few, if any, Jewish residents. But the ghetto district is now a popular place for visitors, centered on the pretty 17th-century synagogue and its associated facilities--a ritual bath, a bakery for matzoh, a wine cellar--dug into the volcanic rock below.

My biggest regret about that day's visit was that we didn't go to the restaurant offering "The cuisine of the goyim."

It seemed like too obvious a gimmick for attracting tourists, but now I wish I'd gotten a chance to taste the spleen pate and ricotta soup, neither of which I've ever seen on an Italian menu before.

A couple of days later Valerie drove us to the Tuscan town of Pienza. It's named after Pope Pius II, whose aristo family owned the place and who rebuilt the town center as an "ideal city," Renaissance style. The main piazza is supposed to exemplify Pius's humanist ideals, and certainly the Duomo, with its sober, symmetrical facade and its light-filled, spare interior, lives up to that aspiration. The rest of the buildings around the little piazza, though, seem way too big for the space, dwarfing the piazza itself. That includes Pius's palace, although in itself it's a lovely building. Parts of Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet were filmed there.

 This is the back of the palace, facing the gardens, which look out over the valley. As you may notice, I didn't take any photos of the piazza or make any effort to capture the character of either Pienza or Pitigliano. That was in part because swarms of people with large cameras were already hard at work every place where a good shot was possible, and mostly because keeping track of yet another Italian hill town seemed--like so much else these days--sort of pointless. Mi dispiace. (I'm sorry.)

We briefly stopped into San Quirico d'Orcia, another very pretty town, this one named after a three-year-old (also known as St. Cyricus and, in French, St.-Cyr), who was killed in the third century C.E. for declaring himself a Christian. When I realized that the town cathedral offered neither a depiction nor relics of this infant religious prodigy, I lost interest. I should have taken some photos of the surrounding countryside, though. With its rows of cypress and solitary farmhouses it all looks just like a kitsch landscape painting.

However, our last stop, Bagno Vignoni, was genuinely exciting. Another ancient, lovely hill town, but this one has natural hot springs, and in the 16th century some enterprising lord or other turned the town's piazza into a gigantic hot-water bathing pool.

Sadly, bathing in the pool is no longer allowed, for reasons which aren't explained. The water bubbles up from a sulfurous spring that, back in the day, also powered several flour mills, whose excavated ruins are spread out along a cliff at the edge of town.

I'm frankly shocked at how few photos I have to offer of any of this. Maybe it's blog fatigue. Or perhaps all these gem-like little towns are so quaint, so storybook, so perfectly picturesque that actually taking pictures of them seems redundant.

Seeing all these lovely places, perversely, reminded me that one reason I like Fidenza so much is that it's not so excessively adorable. In fact, Italians in beautiful Orvieto who heard we have a place in Fidenza were baffled. "Fidenza? Why?" they inevitably asked. I guess it was like hearing someone from Italy say they're realizing a lifelong dream and buying a house in romantic Schenectady or a little place in the countryside outside Cleveland. Nothing against those towns, about which I know nothing, but no one has sold millions of copies of A House in Schenectady or Under the Cleveland Sun.

In truth Fidenza is merely an Italian town, set on a plain, with no dramatic views and a lot of post-war buildings (including the one our apartment is in). But that's one reason I like it. In Orvieto or these other breathtaking hill towns you're always aware that thousands of people over many centuries have oohed and ahhed over the same things you and all the other visitors are sighing over right now. Fidenza I feel like I have all to myself.