somas see italy: orvieto

{me appreciating the view}


You’ve probably never heard of it.  I hadn’t either, but you’ll want to.  Orvieto is a little “hill” town in Umbria, halfway between Florence and Rome by train.  You’ll be astonished while traveling around Italy at the number of these towns, that in the rolling green hills there will be towns at their very peaks, just hanging out and literally dangling off the sides of the most steep inclines.  Seriously, I understand from a medieval standpoint that you’re safest high up… you know, so invaders and pirates and the like don’t get to you too easily.  So you build high, surround yourself with a wall and create a lot of lookout towers.  Boom.  But, where do you get your water?  How do you not expose yourself too much through opening and closing your gates to get food?


views from the edge






around town

copious amount of food pictures
note i wasn't brave enough to eat any of it!

Maybe I should re-focus here.  Orvieto is very beautiful and people still live there!  Just way up there, you know, totally normal.  And what’s very neat is that Orvieto was built upon an Etruscan settlement.  The Etruscans were in Italy before the Romans and lived in caves underneath present day Orvieto.  I didn’t go in them because I was scureeed.  You walk around the streets of Orvieto and you feel like you should have a coat of armor and be packing some intense weaponry.  It doesn’t help that there are wild boar heads hung outside every restaurant… and no, I didn’t partake… I don’t think I can ever say yes to another Margherita pizza again!  And the views from every angle are incredible, naturally.  Like everywhere else in Italy, there’s 3 churches to every one person, with the Duomo being, in my opinion, the most beautiful of all Italy.


duomo

We walked around, bought food from a market and went into the city’s well… yes.  See, there was some pope who fled Rome and made Orvieto his home.  For protection, the town can’t be beat… except for its difficult position for attaining water.  So the pope had this huge well made, an engineering feat to this day, comprised of a double helix structure, so that people and horses alike can travel down for water and come back up on a different path then they came.  Very trippy and pretty radical that the Romans could make such a thing.  See pictures below.

st. patrick's well

Arguably the best part of Orvieto for us, though, was our stay at an adorable old farmhouse-turned-B&B.  We were a little down the hill from the city, situated on a olive vineyard.  Nice.  And we had our own terrace to watch the sun.  Boom.  And the place was decorated to the nines.  And we had a big, homemade breakfast with the B&B’s owners and two other couples who stayed, one from Germany, another from Italy.  It was essentially a mini UN in which we compared and contrasted our countries and cultures, and came to an understanding and great appreciation.  Awww.

 

onto rome!