Two more Ubrian towns

Today we found a place I could live, at least for some time. The hill top town (yes another one) of Perugia. We came to Perugia from Gubbio (see previous post).
An interesting little tale about Perugia. Perugia was for many years (way back in the 1000, 1100,1200, 1300) a fiercely independent town. Then the pope came along and decided they should pay their salt tax, well naturally the Perugian were a bit annoyed about this and suggested that they wouldn’t. As you can imagine the Pope said ‘no worries’… yeah right. No, the Pope sends in one of his underlings to take control. Up until then the town was basically run by the aristocracy, having built a series of lovely villas, surrounding pretty Piazza’s with the odd church intermingled amongst them in the better part of town. So, this upstart comes in and decides to build a honking great fortress right where all these villas, piazzas and churches are. You can imagine the locals are well pleased with this plan, so rather than be congenial the religious guy (I can’t remember what he was exactly… a cardinal maybe) realises that the fortress he has planned needs to protect the city from both the outside world and from the city itself. The final fortress was a monstrous building on the edge of the city that consumed all these rich dudes villa’s with a moat all the way around, with the bulk of the protection facing the townsfolk. The story then fast forwards to the 1860’s and, I imagine with the unification of Italy, all this nonsense was well behind them so they decide to bulldoze the fortress and build a new town hall etc.


We came across the fortress having wandered aimlessly around the streets of Perugia with our Museo card promising free entry into a dozen what almost turned out to be fictitious museums. In the end we discover some them, and after winding down the streets for some time came across these escalators heading into the mountains. Great idea these Italians have, build escalators to get you up the steep hills in town, very civilized idea. The escalators ended deep within the underground bowels of the town and the foundations of the fortress (that was how we found it).
Perugia has a fantastic main via which ends in the Cathedral (not one of the best we have seen) and a fountain in the Piazza. In an odd way the whole place worked wonderfully together without any of the individual parts being magnificent in isolation. The side streets are very cute with overhead bridges, planters and twisty little alleys and staircases.
We had spent two days in Perugia, but one day was spent in the campsite just doing nothing… watching movies and working.


After Perugia we headed for Rome, with a stop in the… you guessed it… hill top town of Orvieto. This had once been a very important town on the trading routes out of Rome. We chose Oriveto on the recommendation of the 1000 Place’s book (see previous post) and true to form what a great place. Orvieto grows out of a rock outcrop that springs out the green rolling hills. The rock is formed in sheer red cliffs and, as such, the Italians (maybe learning something from the Swiss) have built a little reticulated train that takes you up the cliff with a few escalators to help you on your way. Other than the location, Orvieto’s other draw card is the Duomo. It has a façade covered in beautiful frescoes, mosaics and base reliefs. Even the spiralling columns have mosaics embedded inside the spirals and in the blue sky and sunshine the whole place glows. We settles down in a wine bar outside the duomo and tried some of the local wines, can’t complain.
And so was Umbria, a place to come back to with time to spare… and on to Rome.