Day 4 (Tues. Nov. 13, Umbria)

Umbria

Today we rented a car at Termini, the big train station in Roma. I always thought Termini was named because it was the end of all the train lines, but it’s apparently named after the ancient baths nearby. Berck, being a better than average American, had made a Thrifty car rental; they were indeed more thrifty than the discount he got with Avis or Hertz. It took about an hour for the clerk to go through all the paperwork. This was after our disastrous discovery that I hadn’t packed the maps of Italy that we’d bought at Borders in Colorado Springs and which Berck had carefully plotted the coordinates of all three Italian campgrounds that were open in winter. I had grabbed the pile of guidebooks and maps from Berck’s desk (I’d wanted to pack them the night before we left, but Berck was still working on them) not realizing there were two maps still on the floor. Berck asked me if I’d gotten all the maps, and I said I’d had, thinking he’d put them all in a pile for me to get. So we ran all over the train station looking for a map of Italy. Finally, we found one in the little bookstore RIGHT ACROSS FROM THE THRIFTY CAR RENTAL. Still, it’s a very good map book, even if it’s all in Italian.

We used it corkscrewing through Umbria today, enjoying the vistas of hilltop towns and hillsides of olive trees, apparently being harvested currently, since wherever we went, there were people spreading nets on the ground around trees and reaching up into the branches with long hooks, plastic crates on the ground nearby at the ready.

As the sun got low in the sky, I decided we would try to spend the night in Amelia, a wonderfully quaint walled town in southern Umbria. We stopped to get gas, and more importantly, use the toilet. This was amusing because it took Berck and the attendant a good minute to figure out where the latch for the gas tank was. I asked the attendant how to get to the piazza where the hostel was. He asked the driver of the truck he was filling, who laughed and shook his head. The attendant ran over to a car that had just arrived and asked the driver, who motioned me over. “Where,” he hesitated in halting English, “are you going?”

“Piazza Mazzini.”

“Who?” he said, and I realized he was wondering what I needed there.

“Hostel,” I said, “Ostello.”

“Ah!” he said.

“Ah!” the gas station attendant said.

“You,” the random guy buying gas said to me, “come with me. I drive you there. But first,” he waived his Euro note at me, indicating he needed to fill up first. We pulled out of the way and waited for him to finish.

“This is way too easy,” said Berck. “Why would he do this for us?” This is the magic of being a traveler. People are much more likely to help out a traveler in need than the guy down the street. And, of course, it helps being a girl.

He led back across the “highway.” Suddenly, we were going up and up steep narrow streets, through city walls, under archways connecting buildings on either side, steeper and narrower until we got to the apex, and the guy in his VW in front of us put on his blinker and continued straight, indicating that we were where he had been leading us. Then he stopped and backed up to make sure we knew we were where we wanted to be. Berck shook his hand as he grinned with his cigarette between his teeth, the joy of a person who has helped a traveler along his path. “This was was too easy,” Berck repeated as we pulled into a parking spot across the street from the piazza that held the hostel.

And it was. The hostel, an HI, was closed from October to April, like so many things in Italy. The weather, however, is perfect, cool and dry. November would be the perfect time to visit, if half the things weren’t closed.

Orvieto

So now we had to figure something else out. We reluctantly left Amelia with its impossibly narrow roads, going down, down, down and got back on the highway, continuing to Orvieto.

Orvieto is nowadays a tourist town, with every shop window a souvenir shop or restaurant. But we got here after dark, and the streets were relatively quiet and empty. Of course, most of the shops selling ceramics were still unnaturally open, spilling their light onto the scalloped cobblestones. We parked in pay parking lot by the Duomo (cathedral) and walked to the Hotel Posta, our guidebook’s recommendation for a good, cheap night’s sleep. Indeed, the hotel is very nice for it’s price being in the middle of a medieval town that seems to exist for tourists alone.

We checked in then retrieved our bags and paid for parking until 10am the next morning. We tried to find two places to eat recommended by our our guidebooks, but one was closed and the other wasn’t there. So we trusted our instincts and wandered up a side street till we found a restaurant with good prices and no English on the menu. Of course, all of the four couples inside were speaking English-plus-“grazie”, but that didn’t stop us from ordering aqua natural, a bottle of Sangiovesa, a plate of cured meats for antipasto misto, two plates of pasta (gnocchi for Berck, “angry” sauce on pasta for me), a secondi (angello cacciatore…I picked it out), another half litre of the house red, and some grappa to finish it off. Then of course, we had to get some gellato. You remember it’s good, but you can never remember just how good it is.

Berck says I should point out that I picked the lamb randomly without knowing what it was. It was still delicious.