Italian Christmas

Italian Christmas, 2004

What a whirlwind of a trip. We visited 3 regions in Italy: Tuscany, Umbria, and Rome.

This journal documents our trip beginning with our planning, our stay in Cetona, and ends in Rome.

Highlights: Florence - The Santa Maria de Fiori; Saint Peter's-the Vatican, the Duomo in Assisi and the Etruscian town of Cetona.

Quick Tips:

Four tips: 1) Leave plenty of time for planning and researching options, buy tickets ahead if going to Uffizzi Gallery or the Accademia Galleria. 2) If staying in a villa, stay closer to the city you will be visiting most often (reduces travel time). 3) If driving, buy a good map in the States before you leave. 4) Watch for pickpockets in Rome. Everything you read about petty thievery is true. Our friends daughter had her camera lifted on the very last day of our trip.

Best Way To Get Around:

Everywhere but Rome: a car. For us a car was indispensable. We could have done buses or trains, but it would have added hours or days to our trip. Driving was NOT a problem. Roads were well marked and easy to find or navigate. (Much better than Ireland.)

We rented our car in Perugia and from there we drove to Cetona, our little "villa" in Tuscany. From Cetona we took day trips to Florence, Perugia, Assisi, Pisa, and Siena, and some of the areas of southern Toscana. For our Roman leg of the trip we dropped off the car back in Perugia and took the train to Rome. We stayed in Rome, near the Campo de Fiori and walked everywhere.

Situated in a small city between Pisa and Florence on the Autostrada, the only thing that really lent itself to this place was the price and location. It was a tired hotel with a small portable black-and-white TV in the room and single low-wattage bulbs in the light fixtures. For us it was simply a place to crash for the evening before going on the Florence the next day. The best thing about the hotel is that it didn't come with Florence hotel prices.

Our room was big enough for two queen-size beds and slept the four of us comfortably. One bed was hard as a rock, the other was comfortable. It did have a private bath and shower. Outside of our room was an anteroom that was shared with another bedroom, making a small suite. The anteroom had a large dining room table and buffet that was used to store linens and towels.

I give it two stars out of five.

This was our first "real" Italian dining experience. The restaurant specializes in local cuisine. We had appetizers, pasta, main courses, a bottle of wine, and coffee and tea afterwards. The antipasto was shared bruschetta and a plate of salamis and cheeses. I had a black-truffle risotto as my prima piatta and wild boar for my secondi piata. Other dishes we had included a pesto pasta for the first plate and rabbit for the second plate.

While I can't comment on what others had, the thing I remember best is the black-truffle risotto. Scrumptious! It's nothing like any mushroom I've ever eaten and has to be tried at least once.

The boar was cooked in a local barbecue-type sauce and was delicious.

We had so much food; we could barely walk; we ate so much. No wonder it takes Italians so long to eat! You have to digest half your dinner before you can finish everything!

Recommended by the woman at the desk of the hotel, Il Sole, we weren't disappointed. A local trattoria, the restaurant specializes in Tuscan dishes and cuisine.

As is our usual custom, each of us tried to find different things on the menu to order. Here we ordered Crustini Musti as our antipasta, gnocchi and lasagna for our primi piatti, and coniglio (rabbit, or hare) for the secondi piatti. As at La Laterna, the food was outstanding and a treasured experience.

In particular, the gnocchi was so fresh, it felt like it would melt in your mouth. And the coniglio, of all things, tasted like chicken, grilled outside in your backyard. Both were delicious and noteworthy dishes.

Is travel planning always this complicated?

With our daughter studying abroad in Italy this fall (2004), it seemed that there would be no question of going to Italy while she was there. What seemed to make most sense was to go when her semester was finished so she could join us. It would be a family vacation. Her academic program was to start on September 1st, but she had to be there for orientation on August 30th. The program she was with was to leave from Newark, NJ as a group on the 29th. The last day of her program is December 18th.

The main questions I had to answer were, can I schedule her flight over and back to coincide with ours, how much would it cost, and would it be reasonable enough to afford?

There were a number of the wrinkles in putting all this together. One was that because it was a group trip, they get a group travel rate. Another wrinkle was that she was to be gone for four months (none of the standard discount fares would apply). A third was that the flight would be on Air France. A fourth was that I wanted her to go with the group and return with us. If she came back on the same day as us, she had to come back to the same airport, or no one would be there to pick her up.

After hours of reviewing schedules, costs, and different alternatives, I finally found that we could change her return date to coincide with ours coming back into Philly and not Newark. As it all worked out, she would leave with the group on the front end of the trip and return on the same day with us. We would be on US Airways, she on Air France. We would leave Rome about a half hour after her and get in about 40 minutes before her in Philly. This felt like no small accomplishment.

Hopefully, the rest of the trip won't be as complicated as this. We don't know what we are going to do, where we will stay, or how we will travel in the country, but we have our tickets!

The tickets booked, we have begun to plan the actual trip. We will be meeting our daughter after her study abroad program is complete for an almost two-week stay in Italy. Planned destinations are Umbria, Perugia and Assisi, Tuscany, Florence and Pisa, and Rome. I'm also hoping to make it to San Marino if we have time.

After booking the airline, the next article of business was were to stay.

I first started by reading journals from other people and looking at the map of Umbria and Tuscany. Since we will be there for almost two weeks, it soon began to make sense to find one place that was centrally located and then drive or take the train/bus on day trips to cities nearby.

I began by looking at hotel costs in major towns. Ugh. With the exchange rate, hotels for three people began to be a bit more expensive than I had planned in our meager budget. Isn't there anything out there besides hostels that could fit the bill?

Again, after an exhausting -- though certainly not exhaustive -- search, I began to figure out that it would be worth our while to rent a villa. I finally found a place that rents villas, and they had a local office for me.

Still skeptical and hoping that it wasn't a boiler room operation, I drove to the office and spoke with the people there. I was very pleasantly surprised.

The name of the place is called Doorways. They rent villas in Italy, Spain and France, though they focus primarily on Italy. We found a small villa in a southern Tuscan town called Cetona.

Cetona is one of the many small towns that dot the hill country of southern Toscana. If any one is interested, it's near Chiusi. Pictures of the villa we are renting are attached to this entry.

Using guidebooks for the rest of the trip, I booked a hotel for the last few days we will be in Italy for Rome.

It's amazing how much time researching airlines, fares, and schedules, making the actual reservations, and figuring out the basic scheduling takes. One of my givens is that I always want to make the most of our time in any new place, so that means for me that I spend quite a bit of time researching sights, opening and closing times, and alternatives like train schedules.

This week I made the second payment on the villa with Doorways in Bryn Mawr.

If you have never rented a villa, it can be challenging (if your schedule doesn't match theirs) and expensive--like renting a house at the shore for a week. Plus, many places will accommodate 6 or 8 people--some even 12 or 14. My criteria for a rental unit were like the transportation criteria, complicated and unusual. We only needed space for three or four people at most.

In my search, I found that most places will only rent a place from Saturday to Saturday. Because we aren't arriving in Italy until Tuesday, that presented a challenge. Half the week would be over, and we'd have to vacate the place on Saturday. Since Christmas is on Saturday this year, the likelihood someone would check us out was minimal. So, my challenge had been to find a place that would go for a week or more, from Tuesday to Tuesday, over the Christmas holiday. In addition, I really wanted to stay 8 or 9 days instead of just a week.

I posed that question to Doorways, and they said they would contact the owner. I waited a couple of days for the answer to come back. Yes, they would be willing to rent the apartment for that period. Hooray!

One of the other criteria was to find a place that was as centrally located as possible, but not too far from Rome, Perugia, or Florence.

While not the most modern or lively looking of towns, if you do an internet search, Cetona fits most of the criteria I had in choosing a place. The location was good-- near the border between Tuscany and Umbria and within about 3 hours of Florence, Pisa, Rome, and Perugia. It was not far from the main highway between Rome and Florence and was near a main train station (Chiusi). It was off the beaten path (definitely) and a place where we will get a flavor of real Italian life. By the way, Cetona is mentioned by Frances Mayes in her book, Bella Tuscany.

As our departure time draws near, I feel the excitement building. Fortunately I am so busy that my mind stays occupied with other things.

One of the other things Doorways has provided us with is their own booklets on Tuscany, Umbria, and other places. They have their own restaurant guides and booklets of information about the area from their own travels. So far, I would highly recommend them to anyone. The final recommendation will come after the trip, when we see how our overall experience went.

We have 6 weeks and counting! Today's date: Nov 6, 2004.

One of the "rules" of traveling is to remain flexible enough to change plans or adjust when something unexpected happens or when you have an unplanned surprise.

It's a little more than 3 weeks before we leave and so far we've had one surprise (wrinkle)--the daughter of our close friends, who is also studying abroad this year, will be joining us while we are in Italy.

This immediately brings up questions: Will she be able to stay with us? Where will she meet us? How long will she be with us? etc.

After a lengthy exchange of emails over 3 days, we think we have it worked out. She will fly from Marseille to Milan. We will take the train to Florence, spend the day in Florence, and meet her there. We'll then drive back to the villa, or to Perugia and the villa, depending on whether the owners will allow her to stay with us.

It's a joy to have her with us, and we are looking forward to having an additional friendly face with us in our travels. It will also be nice for our daughter to have a friend to share her holiday with as well.

The plans changed... Italy here we come!

One week to go.

I don't know about you, but before a big trip like this, I tend to get the butterflies. Time seems to alternate between madly racing towards departure time and dragging on forever. As the date approaches, we've continued to make preparations, scouring the Internet for helpful tips and scheduling details. The Internet has been invaluable in helping make preparations.

Did you know that for most museums, you can purchase tickets in advance? At most of the major museums you can buy tickets online, avoiding long lines and queues. You can also check the hours and holiday schedules. This is doubly important because Italy closes down between the hours of 1pm and 4pm on a normal schedule. Around the holidays, they close even earlier.

So far, I've booked tickets to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and have times and phone numbers as well as opening/closing schedules for a number of museums like the Accademia Galleria and Vatican Museum (Sistine Chapel).

Be mindful, too, that just like in the States, many of the museums are closed on Mondays.

My son Jason and I found this out when we were in Rome for a three-day stop-over around New Year's of 1996-7. It shouldn't surprise anyone if you really think about it, but it's one of those quirks about planning trips around holidays. My only advice is to plan for early closings, call ahead, and check schedules.

New Year's, too, is a big social event. Italians celebrate much like Americans, with a few notable exceptions. If you are in a city on New Year's Eve, keep an eye on the sky. One of the favorite things for Italians to do is to throw out old stuff and start off the New Year with new things. They can throw anything out--furniture, bottles, dishware--anything. And I mean throw... they will do it from the third-, fourth-, or fifth-floor windows. Woe to you if you happen to just be passing by at the time. I've heard tell that one person even saw a toilet that someone had thrown out an upper-story window.

Monday going into Tuesday 12-21-04 was our longest day. We started the trip sitting on the tarmac at the Philadelphia airport for almost 2 hours. We were scheduled to leave at 6pm, but there were "baggage" problems. After a while of sitting, you become more attuned to attendant conversations. One of those conversations, about six rows back, was with a passenger going to Cairo about their bag. It made me stop and think and realize again that the world has changed since 9/11. At about 7:30pm, another load of passengers got on the plane. This completely filled up coach. Since Debbie was up in business class, she was unaware of all of these things going on. The stewards kept coming back and trying to find seats for everyone. There was a lot of shifting going on, etc. After a few minutes, one of the attendants came back and asked me if my wife was up front. I said yes. She asked me if I minded changing - of course not! So, I got a business class seat. This allowed me to actually get some sleep (about 3 hours).

The worst part about leaving late was that we were late getting into Rome. It took us until almost 11am to go through customs and get to the main entrance. Our train was due to leave for Perugia around 11:15am, and we had at least a 30- to 45-minute ride to the station from the airport. I did print off a schedule, and there was another train at 11:45am, but the trains from the airport to the main station only run every half hour. This was not a good time slot, so we caught a taxi. The driver got us to the main train station by 11:30, and we got our tickets and boarded the train. The only problem was that this train goes through Chiusi and Terontola. We had to change once in Chiusi. We finally pulled into Perugia around 3pm. We were about 1 to 2 hours late. Fortunately, Emily was waiting for us, anxiously I might add.

From there we still had to pick up the rental car and all of her luggage and drive to Cetona (back near Chiusi.) We finally pulled into Cetona around 6:30pm. We have been up for about 30 hours with only a short nap on the plane and snacks to tide us over since dinner on the plane.

We opened the villa, unpacked, and set about making supper. We had cheese, crackers, salami, cookies, and Nutella for dessert and espresso from the stuff Emily had leftover from her apartment. It was a relief to be here finally. We soon crashed thereafter. Tomorrow we are headed to Firenze (Florence) to see David and pick up Vangie.

Ciao!

We started today by rising early, at about 7 am. Leaving around 8:30am, we arrived in Firenze (Florence) by about 11am. Driving new places takes so much more time than if you know where you are going.

We were able to make it the Uffizi Gallery by 11:30am, the time of our ticket reservation. Among the works we saw were pieces by Botticelli, DaVinci, and Micheangelo. We did see two famous pieces by Botticelli - Primavera and The Birth of Venus. We also saw The Annunciation by Da Vinici. We finished here at around 1:30pm and walked out for lunch and an afternoon foot tour of the city. If you ever travel to Florence, I highly recommend looking up the galleries you want to see ahead of time and making reservations. While we didn't have much of line on our first day, there can be a long wait.

After lunch in a nice sidewalk café, the San Firenze, we walked through the old city and across the Ponte Vecchio (picture to come). The Ponte Vecchio is the only bridge to survive WWII and is a bridge in the old-world style, with shops and residences on the narrow foot bridge.

From there, we walked up to the main Duomo (cathedral) in Firenze, The Santa Maria dei Fiori. This cathedral, started in the 1200s, wasn't finished until sometime in the 1400s. The main dome, which dominates the city skyline, was built by Brunelleschi and was the (literally) the crowing achievement of his life. There is a wonderful book by Ross King about the building of the cupola (or dome).

In the evening we picked up our "other" daughter from the train station and drove back to the villa. By the time we got back to the villa, it had been another longgggg day.

Today dawned bright and beautiful. Cetona, where the villa is situated, is a wonderful small Tuscan town. It's just like those picture postcards or travel brochures you see of the rustic Tuscan countryside.

Cetona itself is situated on the top of a hill just down from Monte Cetona. The town itself is small, the shops mostly being clustered around the square -- Piazza Girabaldi. In town is a grocery market, a butcher shop, a bread store, a few clothing stores, a wine shop, a real estate office, a tabacchi (smoke shop that is like a newsstand in the States), a bank, a local potter’s store, a church, and a few other miscellaneous stores. From the piazza, you walk in concentric circles around the small mountain. The villa is on the back of the hill and about halfway up the top of the hill from the piazza. It's quite a walk. Let's call it invigorating.

This morning found me buying groceries to stock the villa and practicing the Italian we had been learning in the States and that our daughters has been helping us with. As I went from store to store, I was welcomed with Buon Giorno and then I struggled with the rest of the Italian as much as I could. Pointing and saying one-word phrases seemed to suffice. Questa (this), pane (bread), pollo (chicken), and non when they picked up the wrong item and si when they got what I wanted. I at least had my first full conversation in Italian without any English. (I was determined to do so.) The celery really threw me for a minute too. I could have bought one stalk or the whole bunch. Finally, I understood another word, tutti, or all of it. I got the whole bunch. Together with the minestrone vegetables I bought, it was for a dynamite chicken soup I made later that evening.

The villa itself was very comfortable and pleasant. There were two bedrooms and a sofa that could fold out into a bed if we needed it. It was all of three rooms and a bath, but we didn't need much more. It was well-equipped and well-appointed and even had two small tabletop Christmas trees that we decorated for the holiday. Since it was wet, cloudy, and misty, it was just the place to hang out for those 2 days when we knew nothing would be open.

December 23, 2004 - In the first 3 days in Italy, we've covered a lot of ground - and I do mean a lot! Day 3 saw us back in Perugia, then on to Assisi, and finally back to Perugia for dinner before heading back to Cetona for the night. By the end of the day, we will have logged almost 600km by train, foot, or car.

Perugia, like Cetona, is built on top of a mountain. The differences are that it's a city, not a village, and it's a mountain, not a hill. On top of the mountain is the oldest part of the city. The top of the hill is dominated by the square and lined with hotels, the fortress, and the basilica. In many of the buildings, one can see the various layers of settlements and buildings, from Etruscan to Roman to medieval to modern. There isn't anything in the U.S. to compare it to, with the layers of civilizations built one on top of the other using the same materials.

Our daughter enjoyed playing the role of tour guide, except that much of what we wanted to see was not where the students hung out but more about the history of the city. There are many things we could have done in Perugia, but over the course of 2 days, and during the entire trip, we had to pick and choose. We visited the Umbrian National Gallery, the main Duomo, the Rocca Paolino, and the central shopping area. We could have easily spent most of our time here and in Assisi.

The Galleria Nazionale dell' Umbria was founded in 1863 and has occupied the third floor of Palazzo dei Priori since 1879. The Gallery is the most modern and best-arranged gallery we visited in our entire trip. Devoted to displaying works entirely by artists from the Umbrian region, there were works by Perugino and other regional artists. The exhibition layout is organised chronologically and by painting schools. It documents the development of painting in Umbria from the Middle Ages to fairly recent times and includes several masterpieces of Italian art from between the 13th and the 18th centuries.

The things I like about the museum were that the artworks themselves were not crowded but aesthetically displayed (unlike the Uffizi or Accademia Galleria in Florence or Vatican Museum in Rome); each piece and room had clear explanations of the pieces, their importance, and a little history about each work; and the rooms were dedicated to the artist or school or artists so that you could get a sense of the progression of style by the various masters and their students.

The Duomo in Perugia too is unlike the Duomo in Florence. Besides being large (which all the main churches or cathedrals are in Italy), the facade is plain and unadorned. Inside it seemed more like a living church and less of a showplace.

From Perugia we went to Assisi and saw the Cathedral of St. Frances, along with the small chapel inside and the tomb of St. Francis. This too is a living place of worship and probably the most spiritual of all the places we visited.

Back in Perugia for dinner, we ate at La Laterana and had our first taste of the famous Italian black truffles. It's hard to compare the taste because it's so different from American mushrooms or even Porchini mushrooms. It is definitely worth going back for! Yum!

Finally, we had two days to kick back and sleep off the jet lag that had been plaguing us for the last couple of days. It was also cold and wet. Good days for it to rain... when nothing was open, and we could just hang out and rest.

On Christmas, we went to Mass at the local church in Cetona. Completely in Italian, we had a hard time following but managed to figure out O Come All Ye Faithful and Silent Night in Italian. The church, of course, was packed, with standing room only. The inside of the church was relatively plain. Behind the large altar was a stained-glass of an angel with a sword, accompanied by two small frescos and statues.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing, opening gifts, cooking our Christmas supper, and just generally hanging out.

After spending Sunday in Perugia again, on Monday we made our way through the Tuscan countryside to the northwestern coast of Italy and Pisa. The southern Tuscan region is mostly mountain and hills. It's hard to compare it to a place in the States, but I guess it would be most like some of the areas around the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia or some areas of Ireland, with rolling hills and larger mountains in the distance. Two differences are that Italy is not what I would call a wooded countryside--we have seen some forests, especially around Chianciano Terme, but mostly the hills are green pasture--and the valleys are plowed and furrowed fields waiting for the early Tuscan spring.

Arriving in Siena a bit after 11am, we spent a couple of hours visiting the cathedral there and the Piazza de Campo, where they have the annual horse races around the square. Siena is an unusual city in that it's divided into 17 districts, or families, and each family has a designation that hangs outside of the house. We found two: the rooster and the fish.

From Siena, we cut across the rest of the Tuscan countryside for Pisa, arriving shortly before dark. Along with all the other throngs of tourists, we did our part to help keep the leaning tower from falling. Deciding to not travel back to the villa so we could spend another day in Florence tomorrow, we spent this night in a town called Empoli, at a hotel called Il Sole. Halfway between Pisa and Florence, it seemed like an ideal place to stop for the night.

Italy doesn't have much comparable to Red Roof or Days Inns, so if you are looking for a place to stay, it’s in the center of a town and is usually an older hotel. Il Sole, while clean and comfortable, isn't what I would call a four-star accommodation. There’s no attached restaurant, and plenty of lights could use a few extra bulbs. The proprietors were saving money on everything--including having only one light bulb in a four-light chandelier. It did have beds and a good price for four adults.

As noted in the previous entry, we spent the evening of our seventh day in a small town called Empoli. Empoli is right off the autostrada about halfway between Pisa and Florence. (See hotel entry.) The only remarkable thing about Empoli was the local Trattoria where we ate dinner. (See dining entry.)

From Empoli, we spent the next day in Florence again. We took the opportunity to see a few of the things that we didn't see in our first visit to Florence. As before, the weather finally broke and we had a beautiful day to be out and about in a city.

Toward one end of the market, my wife found a really nice leather vest of which the proprietar was so "kindly" extolling the virtues, there was a whirlwind of a commotion. The guys who were on the corner with their "wares" spread out on a blanket on the ground, picked up what they could grab and fled the area. About two seconds later, the local constables rounded the corner after them. They didn't pursue them long and came back to pick up what pirated CD's and DVD's they had left behind. I had wondered how tolerated this was in Italy, compared to Philly and quickly found out that it's about the same.

Behind this end of the market is a large building that is amazingly similar to our Reading Terminal Market in Philly. Inside are many of the same kinds of things one finds here: stalls selling produce, fish, and meats, and eateries, along with shops filled with locally made products and goods.

After lunch we went to the Accademia Galleria. There were two things that really stick in my mind from our visit.

The first is not knowing when we would make it there, we didn't get advance reservations and had to wait in line for about an hour before getting in. After waiting so long all that time,I wondered how long the line would be on a spring or summer day when it was tourist season... so if you go Be Prepared for a wait.

The second was how disappointed I was with the gallery. There are essentially two rooms to the gallery if your are looking for art. The first room is the room you enter where there are paintings yb Pietro Perugio, Ghirlandio and Granacci with a smattering of lesser known artists. Walk through one door and you find the statue David at the find far end of the hall. Besides some other sculpture and a few paintings, the only thing there was the statue.

Now mind you, David, as a sculpture is grand. The scale and artistry takes your breath away. It is worth seeing on its own... but being used to Museums here in the states... I was disappointed with the museum, not the art.

Tucked in a back corner of the museum is a small musical collection. Now this was an unexpected treat. The first thing that caught my attention was a 600 year old hammered dulcimer, built around 1400 AD. Also, included in their collection were old harpsicords, pianofortes and an oval piano with removeable keys. Stringed instruments included a Stradivari violin and a few other instruments made in Florence. All of these were part of the Grand Duke Medici's family collection.

After Florence, we headed back to Cetona for our last night and then to Rome the next day.