The 6th Day in italy, we decided to explore umbria. we were right on the border between tuscany and umbria, and the host of the house we were renting told us of some good spots to visit. so, we quite aggressively decided to see 3 of those on this day, but ended up only being able to see 2 of them. those two cities were Spello and Assisi.
Umbria is quite different from tuscany. where tuscany is mostly wide open plains, with hills around them, umbria is mostly hills, with smaller plains. it might not seem like a big difference, but in our drive to the first city, i think we went through 6 tunnels, whereas there had been none in tuscany.
So we arrived in Spello, with a beautiful sunny day again. which was nice after all the rain we had been having.
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it was a very quaint little town, with lots of stairs initially, well, at least from one of the parking lots. this is proof for eran later that i carried him up loads of stairs.
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i dont think he was impressed with my help.
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so the village had a circular road all around, and we started around that to see all the sights.
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Assisi, our next destination
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this was a depiction of the city, painted on the roof of an archway
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the circle road was very thin, and even though it said it was a car restricted zone, a lot of cars still passed us.
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so by this point, it was going on noon or 1 i think, and it was time for lunch. we had picked a place in our next city, Assisi to have lunch, so we piled back in the cars, and drove the 15 min to the next village. i took us on a scenic route, which was very nice, but we ended up in a spot we were not allowed, and had to back out a long windy road. super fun! we eventually found the designated city parking lot, and made our way to the restaurant.
and what a find it was. the restaurant had been built over and inside a renovated ancient roman house. it was a fantastic and peaceful place to have lunch.
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needless to say, the food was amazing.
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as it happened, that day was our 5 year wedding anniversary, and when i ordered my tea (i always order tea), what arrived, but the canadian tea we use as wedding favours.
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i think we all enjoyed ourselves at lunch
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So Assisi.
it was a much busier tourist destination than spello had been. as soon as we left the restaurant, and went to the mail square, we saw it was packed with tourists.
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at this point the day started to become overcast a bit, which was nice, cooled us off a bit
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then we saw the craziest thing. there happened to be a scooter convention for one type of scooter, and they all met right were we were.
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then it was a few family pictures as we were heading out
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and just as we were trying to make it to the car, the heavens opened up on us again
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and that wrapped up day 6 of our adventure. i quite enjoyed both town that we visited. assisi was a little packed for my liking, and i think at this point i was starting to get “really really old stuff” overload. there is so much to see, but by this point in our trip, i just couldn’t handle it anymore. this becomes even more apparent to me the next day, when i really stopped caring about seeing anything. i was just trying to photograph interesting things instead. its a real shame, because there is so much cool history and things to look at, but i think it has to be broken into more bite sized chunks, with breaks in between in order to absorb and process what you have seen, so that you can really appreciate what you are seeing.