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.
{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.
