Day One in Assisi

PART 2:  Day One in Assisi

The ride from the train station up the hill is on a tree-lined divided road that gives beautiful views of the Spoleto Valley.  It goes below the Basilica of San Francesco making several stops at hotels outside the city walls.  Our ride ended at Plaza Matteotti, inside the walls, and close to our hotel, La Pallotta.  

The bus driver knew our hotel and pointed us to Via Torrione.  According to our Rick Steves map we should follow V Torrione until we get to Piazza Rufino then follow Via San Rufino to #6.  We started walking, and,  hey, it’s all downhill.  

We found Via San Rufino, but not #6.  We asked a man who is closing his shop where our hotel is and he points straight up.  We are 20 feet from the steps that lead up to La Pellotta which is on the second floor, right over our heads.  

  

We climb the stairs, ring the bell, and Serena answers.  We introduce ourselves, and she is expecting us. Nessun problema – no problemo.  The reservations we made in May and confirmed a month ago are still there.  We have a place to stay: a clean room with tile floors with a fine view of the street below.  And if we  go up a floor, there is a marvelous view of the Spoleto Valley and the tiled roofs of Assisi. La Pellotta is really a B and B, with seven rooms, a breakfast room with four tables, and coffee and pastries that are available all day.  The pastries are home baked tarts and pies.

We were supposed to meet Bonnie’s brother Joe for dinner at 7:00.  He was on the last 2 days of a month’s stay in Assisi teaching theology and leading pilgrimages.  He comes to Assisi twice a year and knows it inside and out.  Joe took us to one of his favorites, Ristorante Metastasio, about a 20 minute walk from the hotel.  We sat outside with a beautiful view of the Spoleto Valley at sunset.  It was too dark to get a good picture so I have inserted one from their website.   

The food was as good as the view.  I had wild boar (cinghiale) with strangozzi.  Bonnie had pasta with salmon and zucchini.  Strangozzi, according to Joe, is a handmade pasta that is popular in Umbria (Assisi’s province).  It looks like fat coarse spaghetti.  I found out later that the coarseness is a result of using more than one type of flour, which causes the sauce to stick to the pasta rather that sliding off it, and that intensifies the flavor.  It was definitely a different class of pasta.  When we went to Siena a few days later, I had pici, which is the signature pasta of Tuscany. In appearance, taste and texture pici seems the same as strangozzi.  I ended up eating pici – strangozzi with wild boar three nights out of five.  It’s good!    

If you are keeping score, Tripadvisor ranks Metastacio as #8 of 111 restaurants in Assisi.  It’s a fine dining experience:  great view, fine food, and attentive service.  What’s more to want?

Getting There

PART 1:  Getting There 

Going to other places is fascinating.  When those places are far away and you have heard and read about them for most of your life, then your fascination level is way way up there.  In September Bonnie and I took our first trip to Europe, spending almost three weeks in Italy, part of it on a Rick Steves tour and part of it on our own.  We saw five cities (Assisi, Siena, Venice, Florence, and Rome), took more than 1400 pictures, ate some pretty good food, and saw lots of Renaissance art and architecture.

In this blog we’ll share with you some of what we saw and did.  We hope you enjoy it, and if you’ve been to Italy before, we hope your memories will be refreshed.  

Monday September 23: 

We have reservations on American Airlines Flight 110 from Chicago to Rome; leaving at 5:15 PM and arriving in Rome at 9:25 AM Tuesday. From the start things do not go smoothly: 

•  American has misspelled my name (left out the “f” in Halfpenny) so I don’t match what’s on my passport, and they can’t issue a boarding pass.  Forty five minutes to get that straightened out. And Bonnie and I do not sit together. 
• After we board, the pilot announces the plane has a broken A/C clamp.  We take off an hour late.
• We are served two meals: dinner and breakfast.  The dinner is “chicken or pasta.”  The lady next to me asks the stewardess what kind of sauce is on the pasta. “It’s…a sauce,” is the answer, and she serves it with all the grace of how we used to serve kids in detention.
• The plane lands in Rome 1½ hours late and we have to wait 15 minutes for the plane ahead of us to leave the gate.   
• When we pull up to the gate the landing crew can’t attach the gate to the plane.  Another 30 minutes to get that fixed.

 

If we had slept, the gate-that-wouldn’t-attach might have been comical, but we hadn’t slept and we just wanted to get off the plane.  But our scheduled eight hour fifteen minute flight that took eleven hours is over, and we are in Rome – on Italian soil.  We made it.

Tuesday September 24:   

Next step – getting out of the airport and catching the train to Assisi.

Fiumicino  Airport is the biggest in Italy, and like rats in a maze, we follow the signs though it to the “Leonardo Express” train which will take us to the Termini train station in central Rome.  The train is sleek and hi-tech looking, and comfortable (except for the a/c not working).  The ride lasts 30 minutes and costs 16 euros a piece.  

We get to Termini about 12:30, just at the peak of the lunch hour, and squeeze into a crowded Caffe Express for our first Italian meal:  a panino for me and a salad for Bon.  This is a cafeteria and we pick our food by pointing, nodding, handing a cashier a 20 euro bill, and stuffing the change in a pocket.  But the food is good:  ciabatta roll, fresh veggies and tasty Italian salumi (cold cuts) .

The next train to Assisi will leave at 2:30 and we decide to get our tickets right now.  We tell the ticket agent we want two first class tickets to Assisi.  It’s a 2½ hour ride and costs only 20 euros.  We don’t notice that she had sold us two second class tickets and not given directions to where we should board the train.  Our first verbal exchange has some big holes.

We find a schedule board that shows our train leaving from Binari 1 est (Platform 1 East).  We go down the stairs to the trains and the first platform we see is Binari 26.  We are going to have to walk under 25 tracks to get to our platform.  We can barely make out the end of the walkway - Track One.  We are tired. We get to Track One; the sign says Binari 1 est (different than Binari 1) is up the stairs and to the right.  We still have more walking.  Up the stairs, to the right, follow the signs.  We are outside the station proper and walking alongside the tracks.   

There are lots of train-related offices, but no sign of a platform, just signs and arrows pointing to “Binari 1 est.”  After 10 minutes (and we are still tired) we see two additional tracks and one of them seems to be Binari 1 est.  We ask a woman if this is where we catch the train to Assisi.  She says she thinks so, because that is where she is going.  She is from Australia and seems as confused as us.

And so we begin the first of many waiting-for-the-train (or bus) anxious moments.  Are we in the right place?  What if we miss our train?  Can we get our money back?  When will the next train come?   How long are we going to be stuck here?

About 15 minutes before the train is scheduled to leave, people start drifting down the walkway and getting on the train that we believe is going to Assisi.  We ask one of them if this is the train and he says yes.  The sign on the train says Perugia, which is after Assisi and where the line ends (according to the ticket agent and schedule board).  We relax a little.  We plop ourselves in an almost empty car.  Looking around we see the Australian lady is there too.  And there is a group of three people who tell me they are going to Perugia.  We relax a little more.  After 10 minutes (about 1430) the train starts moving, and we are going – somewhere.

We stop in Trastevere (an area on the other side of the Tiber) and pick up some more passengers.  Ten minutes later the conductor comes to check tickets.  He looks at ours and in really hard to understand English asks if we are Americans.  He says (we think) that we have second class tickets but we are in a first class car.  We owe him 19 euros.  He says the car in front of us is a second class car.  We look through the doors and really can’t see much difference between the two cars.  Are we getting conned?  We give him the 19 euros. Later we learn that the additional fare was not a con and that we were on a first class car.  It said so on the outside right by the door.

The train car is old but clean, and the train speeds through a lot of tunnels and sunken tracks making several stops:  Orte, Narni, Termi, Foligno, Spoleto.  It isn’t until Spoleto that we come into open country and could see what Italy looks like:  agricultural land close to the tracks, hills and tree-covered small mountains in the distance, and most picturesque of all, thousand year old towns built atop hills as protection from other towns.  From the train the hill towns look very similar: a cluster of smaller buildings with the tower of a church or two dominating the hill.  At the base of each hill there are more modern buildings where the town has expanded.

I am frustrated because the train is moving too fast for me to get any clear pictures.  I would love to have a map to identify some of the towns.

Here is a view of the Spoleto Valley taken from in front of the basilica in Assisi.  The wall across the middle is part of the town wall.

 

About 5:00 PM, close to the scheduled time, we arrive in Assisi, actually Santa Maria degli Angeli.  Assisi is up the hill 6 miles away.  Almost everyone gets off the train.  Inside the station, we buy two bus tickets that will take us up the hill.  The Umbria Mobilita comes ten minutes later and we climb aboard – standing room only.  No matter - in 15 minutes we’ll have wound our way up the hill and arrived at our first destination. 

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