Umbria

In which I spend a month in the city atop a cliff in the green heart of Italy, experience All Saints' and All Souls' Day, and get snubbed by local cats.

Dear readers, I’m sending one out from deep in the archives today, about the beautiful city of Orvieto, in Umbria. Wishing you a happy weekend, xo.

{Orvieto, Italy}

The rain has been relentless in Italy, and as a consequence, many trains at Santa Maria Novella station in Florence are running late. My train, however, has a different problem. An announcement scrolls across the arrivals board in Italian, and I try to read it with my very limited Italian skills. I know that it says something about a “grande animale”, but I can’t figure out if the large animal is on the tracks or actually on board the train. It doesn’t really matter, because either way my train is canceled, and I have to catch a much later one to Orvieto than I had anticipated.

Orvieto is a hill town in Umbria, the green heart of Italy. Instead of sitting on the side of a gently sloping hill like its Tuscan hill town counterparts, Orvieto sits high atop an isolated rocky cliff - a cliff so high that it is necessary to take a funicular from the train station at the bottom to the old town at the top. It is dark and pouring rain by the time I finally arrive in Orvieto, and I can barely see anything as the shuttle bus carries me the five minutes from the funicular at one end of town towards my apartment at the other end.