Random travel thought: How hard can it be to design railroad stations where the level of the platform meets the level of the rail car floor when people are boarding or disembarking, often with heavy suitcases either in hand or on wheels in tow? As it is now, you’re pretty much almost always struggling either up or down a three or four-step rise through a narrow rail car doorway and grasping a handrail to help steady you. If – as was my case last fall – one’s mobility requires help from a cane, it becomes an exercise bordering on a Cirque de Soleil routine to manage what should be a ridiculously simple process. Airlines and pretty much all city subways have this one licked. Why can’t railroads?

… which crossed my mind when we arrived back at the Rome Terminus to connect to a southbound train (Great! song by the way – for all of us boomers – by a classic Canadian rock band, Steel River. When you’re in the mood for an interlude, it’s here. But I digress.)

The Rome rail station, travellers take note, is an excellent place to have a meal while you’re waiting for your train – southbound or northbound. On the upper level, they have a huge multi-station buffet covering just about every kind of food you can imagine, hot or cold, along with some very well-stocked coolers full of some really good beers and wines.

Once aboard – this time on the Frecciarossa AV, which departed to the minute precisely at its scheduled departure time, we sped south towards Naples, covering roughly three times the distance as we had covered from Orvieto to Rome in the same amount of time. The reason for this is that AV is an abbreviation for “Alta Velocità” – “high-speed” in English. And is it ever! A helpful overhead monitor shows you your velocity en route and, at one point, we topped out at 300 km/h.

Even at that, I had time to notice as we passed one of the most famous monasteries in Italy, best known for all the wrong reasons.

During WWII, the 6th century Abbey at Monte Cassino dominated a commanding view of the land approaches to Rome. The Germans, on the defensive as the Allies pushed north, used it as an observation post to keep an eye on the approaching allied armies in order to help them better plan their defence of Rome and as an artillery spotting post to guide their guns in an all-out effort to prevent the Allies from reaching the capital. In one of the saddest examples of deliberate monument destruction in the war, the Allies eventually opted to flatten Cassino by aerial bombardment, rather than risk any more soldiers’ lives trying to take it by means of an infantry assault.

The Abbey on February 15, 1944, after 1400 tons of Allied bombs had done their damage. (Photo: www.monumentsmen.com)

The full story is here. It is liberally laced with ironies, including (i) the German commanders, sensing the likelihood of an Allied bombing mission, saved dozens of truckloads of priceless Abbey artworks, papal documents and library archives when they evacuated them to the comparative safety of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome; (ii) after the bombing, the shattered rubble provided even better cover for the German defenders. As a result, it took no fewer than four brutal ground assaults until (iii) a Polish unit finally moved onto the hilltop only to discover that, by that point, only 30 German soldiers – too badly wounded to be moved – remained among the Abbey’s ruins. The rest of the defenders had pulled out.

The Abbey today is a beautifully restored structure, but its bitter WWII struggle stands as both a tragedy and a triumphant story of tremendous heroism depending, of course, on whose history you’re reading. Military cemeteries that are the final resting place for soldiers from several nations – one of the biggest is Poland’s – have been added to the surrounding terrain. Even passing at 300 km/h from a couple kilometres away, it was a moving sight to see.

Naples

One of the things we learned on this trip is that most Italians classify themselves first by the region from which they come, rather than as “Italians”, and that there are feelings ranging from a spirit of friendly competition to outright animosity (the kind that leads to violent soccer riots today and, before the unification, outright war) between certain regions. On two separate occasions we were told that the “calmer” part of the country is found northward from Rome, while the “livelier” section flows southward from the same city.

One thing on which everyone agreed when they described this regional difference to us… Naples is pretty much insane.

There are lots of clichés about driving in Italy that, in Naples, are not only true, they are understatements! Our taxi ride from the Naples rail station to our hotel (The Palazzo Turchini on Via Medina) was, from the passenger seat, an exercise in frequently repeated eye-closing (mine, not – thank God – our driver’s) and the discovery that any pavement markings seem to be doing nothing more than serving as attractive graphic street paintings.

The evening we arrived, we met the rest of our group tour and at this point I insist on the blog author’s privilege of a digression to applaud this particular tour company.

Leslie and I have annually attended an Ottawa Christmas house party at a friend’s for years and it was at the 2012 edition that we got talking with another guest about our upcoming trip to Italy, some aspects of whose planning at that time were still in the options-under-consideration stage.

Somewhere during the conversation, she suggested we look into a small-group tour company called Back-Roads of Britain. (Despite their name, they also have packages all over the continent, not just in the UK.) Leslie’s online research, coupled with our party friend’s ringing endorsement, led us to sign on because, as it happened, they had a weeklong tour that included a great many of our “things we wanted to do on this trip” wishes, and a very big “thing we did NOT want to do” – visit the Amalfi coast but NOT by driving ourselves around the region in a rented car.

The next few hundred paragraphs (basically until we get ourselves back to Rome) will be related to the tour we took with this company. We were ten paid tour members typically in the company of at least two guides – the full-time tour organizer and a graduate student in archaeology. Plus a driver for those portions of the tour spent on the road.

Here’s their website’s Canadian front page. Our particular tour was their “Enchanting Southern Italy” program. From this point in the trip diary until we get back to Rome, the organization and planning was all their work. And yes, that was a shameless plug.

So… back to Naples.

Our introductory group event was a sidewalk café dinner gathering over pizza and wine and it wasn’t long before our introductory event began to feel like a class reunion. In addition to Leslie and myself, there was one other Canadian couple, three people from Australia and three Americans (two from California and one from the east coast).

On the recommendation of our waiter, a couple of the pizzas were “Pizza Margherita” and being who I am, I expected to see it arrive festooned with lime wedges and a ring of salt around the outer edge of the crust.

You won’t be surprised to discover it is nothing of the sort and, in fact, comes with a significantly more important pedigree than simply being a popular way to work tequila and lime onto flatbread.

Now you might hear, “crust” and “tomato sauce” and “mozzarella cheese” and “basil”, and think, “Really? McCain’s does that and freezes them rock solid in boxes of four for those desperate nights when you’ve got the munchies and can’t wait for the delivery guy to show up.” Well, the Margherita is actually the signature pizza of Naples and its official preparation is every bit as fiercely regulated as the famous Bavarian purity laws (Reinheitsgebot) that govern the ingredients allowed into German beer.

Its crust is restricted to a specific flour, natural Neapolitan yeast (or brewer’s yeast), sea salt and water (Neapolitan water preferred but others allowed). The mozzarella has to be mozzarella di bufala Campagna. And if you haven’t had authentic buffalo mozzarella, I cannot suggest strongly enough that you put it on your bucket list of foods to try. It has the appearance of an oversized ball of hardboiled egg-white and is so creamy that slicing it releases a small amount of milk. You won’t find it in a generic grocery store; in Ottawa, for example, it requires a specialty cheese shop or a well-stocked Italian grocery, but it is truly worth the hunt. But look at the label carefully; there are quasi bufalas in abundance and some people even claim that the much more widely available bocconcini is simply “baby bufala”. That might be true in Naples and environs, but not on this side of the ocean. So accept no substitute; you’re looking for a label that says “mozzarella di bufala Campagna”.

As an aside (actually, this whole pizza thing is an aside, so never mind) the “buffalo” as Italians understand it is a monstrous and monstrously ugly example of the bovine family.

Personally, I would require an uncommon reservoir of courage just to tuck a milking stool under one of these things – even the girl version (‘cause that’s where the milk comes from, city folk!). Maybe that’s why authentic bufala mozzarella is so darned expensive! (Photo source: www.castlehill.org)

Other components are just as carefully regulated, including the basil and extra virgin olive oil, and of course the tomatoes. (I’m not making this up. If you’re interested, check out the Wikipedia note that describes “Neapolitan pizza”. You don’t ever want to cross the Italian division of the European authentic national food regulatory board, the Specialità Tradizionale Garantita, or STG.) ‘cause they’ll break your kneecaps if you try to make a Margherita ‘za with anything but authentic ingredients.

And finally, not only does the pizza have a fortress of protective regulation, it has a royal history. In 1889, Neapolitan pizza baker Raffaele Esposito baked three special pizzas to mark a visit to the city by King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy. (See what’s happening here?) As the story goes, the Queen was especially taken with the simplest of the trio he made because, to her, it evoked the colours of the Italian flag: red (tomato sauce), white (buffalo mozzarella) and green (basil leaves). In return, he named it in her honour and the rest, literally, is history. (“The History of Neapolitan Pizza”, at www.famoso.ca Photo source: www.Italianfoodforever.com)

Every day’s a school day on the internet!

Next day was, I think, planned by our guide as an early test of group dynamics to see how we managed the simple act of keeping together on a city walkabout. I think our post-tour report card likely would have an “F” in the box beside “sticks together”, with the notation, “rather too easily distracted”.

Well, duh! There’s something about being in a bustling city teeming with activity that routinely causes one’s head to snap around every which way, often at the expense of keeping an eye on the direction the rest of the group went – even a small group like ours. By afternoon, our guide Sharon (for the record, an absolutely delightful whip-cracker, and her name is pronounced with the stress on its second syllable – sha-RON) assembled us for the first of what would turn out to be a few “it’s important we try to stick together” reminders. (Frankly I was amazed she managed to assemble us all in one place to get that message across!)

A couple of the highlights on Day 1… Naples has an ancient history, hardly surprising considering that the sheltering Bay of Naples offers an ideal harbour to what has always been a maritime part of the world. In fact, it has been a continuously inhabited city since at least 1500 B.C. Its residents heard sermons delivered by the apostles Peter and Paul, survived the eruption of Vesuvius across the bay in 79 A.D., the fall of the Roman Empire, the Gothic Wars in the mid-500s, the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800s and it was the single most frequently bombed city in Italy in WWII.

In the late 1200s, Charles I, an Angevin Duke, was crowned King of Sicily (with which Naples was amalgamated at the time). He relocated his capital from Palermo to Naples and built the Castel Nouvo to mark his rule. That massive fortress still stands today and a brief stop at its huge bronze gates was the first stop on our walkabout.

The Castel Nuovo was, in its day, all but impregnable. In fact, so well-constructed is this structure that its Barons' Hall served as the meeting place for the Council of the commune of Naples until 2006.

In 1470, a white marble triumphal arch to commemorate the entry of Alfonso of Aragorn into Naples was sandwiched between the two towers of the castle’s western entrance. In a brilliantly planned bit of construction, this eliminated the need to heavily reinforce the arch as a stand-alone structure since the towers themselves did (and to this day continue to do so) provide two mighty architectural “shoulders” for the arch to lean on.

There are two other highlights to mention in today’s walkabout before we leave this update. Leslie is our resident family art historian and over the decades of our marriage, she has introduced me to some amazing artists, their techniques and artworks in locations as diverse as Paris, New York, Chicago, Montreal, London, Rome and yes, even Ottawa. But I have never before encountered such an incredible representation of stone-carved fabric as I saw when we entered Naples’ Sansevero Chapel Museum in the heart of the “Old City”.

In the middle of this beautiful chapel is a work by a sculptor named Giuseppe Sanmartino called Cristo velato – in English, the “Veiled Christ” – a gorgeous example of the subject we know as a “Pieta”, a representation of Christ after his body has been taken down from the cross. In most, the body is typically shown cradled in the arms of His mother, Mary, but Sanmartino has chosen to cast it as the only figure in the sculpture, draped in its shroud before being entombed.

But it is in the carving of the shroud that the work earns its label among some as “renowned the world over”. There aren’t enough superlatives to describe its effect on the sculpture. So delicate is the stone “fabric” that the brutal wounds the Romans inflicted on the body as Christ was dying on the cross are visible through it. Yet, at the same time, in Christ’s face, one sees almost a repose, a knowledge that, His purpose having been fulfilled in redeeming all of mankind by allowing Himself to be crucified, He could rest.

(Hmmm… obviously, if it is the kind of work that could allow a typically flippant observer like me to become a little philosophical, it’s damned impressive.)

And speaking of “typically”, it is also something that has to be actually seen because no matter how good the camera, the typical two-dimensionality of photography can only hint at the power of this sculpture.

So here’s one image I found online (at www.the-fresh.it) that does provide just such a hint.

Back to flippant.

The Naples National Archaeological Museum is exactly what one would expect in the heart of a region with such an overwhelming body of Greek and Roman antiquities from which to choose for display – with one admittedly giggle-inducing exception. It is also home to the world’s worst-kept secret – a “secret cabinet” that presently is off-limits to minors under 14, unless accompanied by an adult, because of the – not to put too fine a point on it (so to speak) – “priapic” imagery in the sculptures, Pompeii mosaics and “objets d’art” displayed in it.

The cabinet (actually a room) has an almost slapstick history of being opened, closed, opened again, closed and triple-locked, even literally being bricked up in 1849 in the hopes that the corrupting memory of its contents would fade and eventually vanish (Oh yeah, that’s going to happen), all depending on society’s views of morals, censorship, eroticism and pornography each time the rules of “secret cabinet” access were changed.

On a more traditional note, the Museum is particularly renowned as the home of some really beautiful and unbelievably detailed mosaics recovered from the excavated ruins of Pompeii.

Leslie and I ended the day separating ourselves from the group (because we were allowed to do so since the Museum was not all that far away from our hotel and our day was officially concluding with “free time”) and enjoying a relaxing dinner at a wonderful restaurant about a half a block away called the Osteria L’Angolino on the Vico Medina.

There’s the old adage that goes, “When in Rome…” etc. Well, when in the ancient seaport of Naples, order fish. Leslie had a perfect bluefish fillet and I had a perfect tuna steak with which we defied the white wine with fish / red wine with meat custom and ordered a wonderfully robust red, specifically a 2005 Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.

That night, we slept like the proverbial logs.

You thought Lorenzo de’ Medici was “The Magnificent”?

Well get ready to meet Lorenzo Polegri.

The scenery and deliberately quietened pace of a few days in Orvieto were part of the reason for our including it on this trip’s itinerary, but a second reason arose from an almost casual comment I had made while on our first Italy trip last Fall during our stay at an Umbrian villa. The kitchen was magnificent and lacked nothing. With the couple we were travelling with, we made several dinners there. During some of the food-related chit-chat, I speculated that in such a well-equipped kitchen, having a local chef come in at some point and guide you through a couple of traditional recipes and basic cooking techniques might enhance any vacation in such a setting.

(Coincidentally, my sister-in-law and brother-in-law vacation annually in Costa Rica and told us of a thoroughly enjoyable experience they had one year at a rented accommodation there, when they hired a local cook to do just that.)

So after a little pre-trip looking around online, Leslie found a strongly recommended cooking experience in Orvieto with a well-known Etruscan chef named Lorenzo Polegri who owns a restaurant in town called The Zeppelin.

Chef Lorenzo and two of his staff in the dining room of his Orvieto restaurant, The Zeppelin. Hanging overhead in the background is the restaurant’s namesake – a meticulously-scaled model of the Hindenburg, with a slight alteration to the dirigible’s markings to partially expunge the Nazi swastikas from its rudders and leave instead simple black crosses.

At one point during our day with Lorenzo, I asked what prompted him to decorate his place with probably the most infamous representative of Zeppelins, which was best-known for having gone down (literally) in history when it exploded, crashed and burned in a titanic fireball in May 1937 with considerable loss of life. His reply was pure Lorenzo, “Well yes, but that was in New Jersey!”

Our day with Lorenzo began with a cappuccino at a little café directly across from his restaurant’s front door. In another one of those HOAWGTBH moments, Leslie had arranged our course to coincide with market day and, as you might expect, the local instructor in the fine art of Etruscan cooking is really popular among the vendors in the market.

Two things about going to market with Lorenzo. First, the man treats coffee pretty much the same way a four-engined aircraft treats aviation gas – as fuel. He also consumes it at roughly the same flow rate. We discovered that coffee in an Italian café is served by default at a temperature you and I would call “lukewarm”. If you want it piping hot, the way it is typically served in Canada and the US, you have to specifically order it that way and in Italy, you will typically add a qualifier to your order like “bollente” (“boiling”). Lorenzo pretty much wiped out his first coffee while we were still sliding our chairs up to the little bistro table, which was also a concession to us – Italians at the start of a workday typically slam the stuff down standing up at the café’s bar.

The second thing is that the market vendors – and this may have been out of deference to our host’s local renown, rather than normal behaviour – will offer a taste of their product to help you decide to buy it. Our first stop was at a truck that was occupied by a man named Tiziano, who’s known locally as the “Ambassador of porchetta”. Porchetta – the “ch” is pronounced as if it were a “k” – is an amazing seasoned roasted side of pork – basically the cut from which we get bacon.

Before cooking, the fat side of the slab is scored and the entire cut is then laid fat side down. Next, you lay down a line of whatever you want on top of the meat – and porchetta royalty guard their ingredients closely. But it can include fresh herbs, garlic, dried fruit like figs or prunes, more fresh herbs, fresh garlic, mint leaves, sundried tomatoes… the list goes on forever. Then you wrap the slab around whatever you’ve chosen to fill it with, tie it off, rub the outside generously with olive oil, dust it lightly with salt, and bake it in a really hot oven for at least a couple hours (if you’re using a convection oven; longer in a conventional oven).

You need a drip pan because it’s done when most of the fat either has cooked or dripped off, leaving you with an amazing seasoned crust – some call it “crackling” – on the outside of the finished roll. Slice, serve, taste, close your eyes and moan with pleasure…

So… uh… where was I?

Oh yes, the “sample” that Tiziano – the “Ambassador of Porchetta” – gave to each of us was about the size of a dinner plate! Leslie and I stood there hoovering down this incredible seasoned pork for about 15 minutes until Lorenzo said, “OK, let’s have a coffee”.

About 90 seconds later, we found ourselves in another café as Lorenzo returned from the bar with two cappuccinos and an empty cup (he’d drunk his while covering the half dozen steps between the bar and our table) and a sweet pastry about the size of a standard baseball. It looked like something that a cartoonist might have created if given a palette of electrically bright colours and told to draw a peach. In fact it’s called a “peche” and, as one might expect, has peach as – sort of – its central flavour. But it’s a combination of a thick custard cream centre sandwiched between two syrupy sweet cake halves and sprinkled with candy sugar – not something for the faint of heart and guaranteed to red-line a blood-glucose meter!

I have also since discovered that what I mistook for “syrupy” is, in fact, due to the addition of a generous amount of something called Alkermes (or Alchermes), a local liqueur that runs to about 60 proof and whose most distinctive characteristic is its brilliant scarlet colour. (The question as to how it gets that colour typically turns out to be something most tourists wish they could un-ask when they find out – it is due to the addition of Kermes, a “small parasitic insect” / Wikipedia)

Alkermes, according to Lorenzo in his book, dates back to a recipe created by Catherine de’ Medici while in France in the first third of the 16th century. Its history never makes it clear whether its purpose was medicinal or simply pleasure-driven but one can conclude that a sufficient quantity of 60-proof anything, even if it doesn’t cure you, will eventually make you forget you were ever sick!

Hey! I actually found a photo of one – three actually – online. So picture us already having consumed a huge “sample” of porchetta and then Lorenzo plunks down one of these on top of that – and we hadn’t even finished in the market yet, much less got anywhere near his kitchen. (Photo source: gracessweetlife.com)

Next we visited a fruit vendor and after the mandatory sample bought fresh cherries and fresh strawberries. Then over we went to a vegetable vendor for a large bunch of radishes and a variety of tomato even smaller than what we call “grape tomatoes” – “datinis”, we were told. Our next stop was a fresh herb stall where we acquired several large bunches of some stuff I recognized (mint and arugula) and some stuff I’ve never seen before or since. “This looks and tastes like grass,” said Lorenzo, offering me a taste of an herb that did indeed look a lot like it had come from my back yard. “But stir fry it with some garlic and olive oil – amazing!”

The cheese vendor was next and there I learned that pecorino is simply a generic name that applies to any kind of cheese made with sheep’s milk. At one to two years old, it’s OK but doesn’t reveal anything extra special. But after aging for two years, pecorino gets amazing. It takes on the sharply flavoured, hard dry characteristics of parmagiana reggiano, but hits you even more with each of those characteristics. Look for a tan colour that the cheese takes on at about two years old, rather than the pale buttery yellow or almost white colours that indicate the younger cheese.

By the time we got back to The Zeppelin (there was, I’m sure, at least one more coffee in there somewhere), we were loaded down with a pile of fresh ingredients and had eaten enough to constitute a good-sized dinner. And we hadn’t yet even opened a bag of flour to begin to prepare what eventually would be our own lunch.

Over the course of the next couple hours, under Lorenzo’s more than able guidance, we produced a fantastic porchetta of our own, several varieties of bread-based products using a dough we made from scratch – including two huge rectangular pizzas, one topped simply with black olive and fresh sage, the second with the tiny “datini” tomatoes and cheese; rolls that baked up beautifully through the simple expedient of slashing a shallow “X” in the top of each before they went into the oven; focaccia. We also made homemade ravioli stuffed with asparagus and ricotta; a sautéed herb side dish (that “grass”, which cooked up gorgeously and was a perfect complement to the porchetta); and a dessert that began with a scratch-made custard, topped with sautéed cherries blended with balsamic vinegar (yep, vinegar), sugar, a pinch of salt and a splash of olive oil and was topped off with slices of fresh strawberries.

Two shots of just some of our output for the day -- an array of our bread-based goodies, and several slices of our porchetta. The "ambassador"'s title is secure, but we were pretty darned proud of this!

I have to add a word about Lorenzo’s cooking philosophy, which in his October 2012 book he makes clear spills over in a big way into his philosophy of life in general. Once the dust had settled from all the preparation and cooking, he sat down with us for a while in his dining room and opened up a bit while we very much enjoyed the lunch we had prepared in his kitchen. For our part, Leslie and I had already worked through a shared bottle of prosecco, a second shared bottle of an Umbrian red and a couple glasses of marsala we drank while preparing the dessert. It goes without saying that we were, by then, feeling pretty darned “philosophical” ourselves!

In two pages at the end of his book, Lorenzo summarizes everything he says you have to do to appreciate cooking as Italians do. Then he ends by simply wiping those same two pages clean: “You have to forget what I wrote in this note, because you have to find your own way, your inspiration and your truth in cooking. Listen to suggestions and create your style. And don’t always listen to the recipes.”

Throughout the day of preparation, he practised what he preaches. Achieving the perfect elasticity in the pasta, for example, basically started with a measured amount of flour, but then yielded to his experience in determining how much oil to add. He told us at one point that variables like humidity can affect it – but after a while, “you’ll know when you’ve got it”. Same with the bread dough. Allowing it to “rest” before shaping it, we learned, was critical to a successful outcome.

He and his restaurant have a website. The photo that greets you captures what we experienced of Lorenzo perfectly. Sitting with his partner, American chef and Boston resident Kim Brookmire, he wears an impeccably clean traditional white chef’s jacket and a smiling, but somewhat wistful expression as he holds an inverted – and sadly empty – coffee cup in hand.

A day in The Zeppelin’s kitchen is something we cannot recommend strongly enough if you’re planning an Italian trip that leaves you enough time to enjoy Orvieto. Lorenzo is a wonderful host and will ensure your trip sends you home with – quite literally – the experience of a good deal of local flavour under your belt (… BUUUUuuurp!)

Before leaving our Orvieto experiences and moving on, I want to add a PS about a day trip that Leslie and I took to another nearby hilltop town called la Civita di Bagnoregio. It’s about an hour’s bus ride from Orvieto and its attraction is simply the fact of its incredible placement in the Umbrian landscape.

Bagnoregio is perched atop – in fact it absolutely fills – a cliff of tufa that is now seriously threated by falling to pieces as more and more of the clay underneath the stone is exposed. Its population falls off (uh… maybe considering the town’s geology we should say “dwindles”) to as few as 12 people in the winter and rises to not much more than 100 in the summer tourist season.

According to its online history, it was first founded by the Etruscans about 2500 years ago and was located where it is for the same reason many such fortresses or fortress towns were located over the centuries – because assailing it would require almost unlimited patience waiting out the defenders’ food and water supply; either that or a squadron of precision bombing aircraft. And while Leonardo might have produced a few speculative drawings about several aircraft designs, unless it lies in an as-yet undiscovered notebook a tactical bomber was not among them.

Do you know what actually threatens (and has threatened for centuries) this town most? It’s the nature of tufa – the soft Italian lava rock – on which it is built. In fact, the birthplace and boyhood home of the town’s most famous offspring – St Bonaventure, who died in 1274 A.D. – “has long since fallen off the edge of the cliff”. (Wikipedia)

Over the centuries, earthquakes, erosion, WWII and “unregulated tourism” have combined to present so much risk to the crumbling understructure that the World Monuments Fund in 2006 placed it on its “Watch list” list of the 100 most endangered sites.

Plans are rumoured to exist to buttress the cliff face with some sort of steel reinforcement structure but an Italian economy crumbling faster than Bagnoregio’s tufa and a tax base of 100 souls at most might be putting the town in a less-than-priority position on any of the country’s “must preserve” lists.

For our part, in addition to the stunning architecture frozen in the late medieval era, another reason for preserving Bagnoregio was the discovery that there is a purveyor of incredible frozen gelato right at the start (or end, depending on whether you’re heading up or down the long footpath leading to its gate). The Gelateria MaLuBa (which actually has its own Facebook page!) offers a surprisingly large variety of flavours and (again depending on your direction of travel) works equally well as fuel for the long hike up, or a reward for having returned successfully from the same. We each had a double cone – Leslie’s was half banana / half lemon; mine was half banana / half stracciatella (a lush vanilla with generous shavings of rich chocolate throughout). Deliciousness was a tie.

On the downward trip from Bagnoregio, one of the local residents came out to thank Leslie for dropping by.

(I know... pretty lame caption. Well, it was either that, or work one up about Leslie patting some Italian’s ass. As the ancient Grail Knight informed Indiana Jones in “The Last Crusade”: “You have chosen… wisely.”)

Up next, we head south and join a small group tour.

Umbrichelli... wasn't he a neo-classicist post-Impressionist or something?

“’Umbrichelli… are noodles, resembling thick spaghetti, very tasty. They are made with just flour and water, and a little oil. You make the dough, let it rest for half an hour and then you pick up a little piece of it and you roll it like… like women used to do in the old days, on their thighs, like this,’ and I proceeded to demonstrate to the audience how to roll umbrichelli on my thigh, while lady Red stared at me. Without thinking, I also added, ‘And it seems the pasta got some special flavour while being rolled out…’”. (Chef Lorenzo Polegri, explaining how he slightly shocked a woman TV interviewer, in “The Etruscan Chef: Memoirs, Food Stories and Recipes from Chef Lorenzo”)

Can anyone deny that one of the all-time great pick-up lines anywhere has got to be, “Hi, I’m making pasta and wondering if you’ll allow me to roll my umbrichelli on your thighs…”?

We were in Orvieto for two reasons – to slow our pace a little, just for a few days, and to take a day-long cooking course in the kitchen of a restaurant called The Zeppelin, owned by the above-quoted Chef Lorenzo Polegri. (I think we booked a half day, but it began bright and early in the morning and lasted until we dragged our food-and-wine-bloated selves back to our B&B at about 3:30 in the afternoon. So we’re calling it a day program.)

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. We’ll get back to Lorenzo in the update following this one.

Leaving the dead at rest behind us in the Catacombs and Capuchin Crypts, we left Rome (just for the time being; we’ll be back in a couple weeks) the next day and made our way by the Inter-City Express (IE) train to spend a few days an hour north of the capital among some wonderful examples of the living in the ancient hilltop town of Orvieto.

(We found that Italy’s high-speed bullet trains depart on time almost to the second. Their IEs obviously are poor second cousins; the one we took to Orvieto finally got away from the Rome terminus about 45 minutes later than its scheduled departure.)

Orvieto is a distinctly schizophrenic town whose history goes back centuries before Christ. Schizoid because when you step off the train on the platform, you sort of wonder what all the fuss is about until you pass through the station and find yourself looking up – waaaay up – over 300 metres at least (1,000 feet) from “new” Orvieto, where you and the train station are, to “old” Orvieto, perched atop what seems in some places to be a sheer cliff.

And to get to old Orvieto you ride a “funiculare” (cable car on rails) to the top.

You get a bit of a sense here of the divide between old and new Orvieto, the old part being on the heights and the new far below.

Old Orvieto is the kind of town you can walk end to end in about half an hour, but its narrow, seemingly randomly aligned streets and character-saturated buildings jammed shoulder to shoulder across the entire hilltop ensure that every day will offer you something new and completely fascinating to explore.

Italians are a little loose with the concept of “elevator”, if this conveyance between new and old Orvieto is any indication.

Note: We’re pretty much entirely in the hilltop “old” Orvieto from this point on, so I’ll call it simply Orvieto, unless there’s a need to indicate otherwise.

From our arrival at the upper end of the funiculare (that’s pronounced “fun-eek-you-LAR-ray” if you’re storing travel notes for future reference), we immediately set ourselves on pedestrian mode and followed a pretty good city map we got at TI (Tourist Information) to a very comfortable B&B called the Michelangeli. There, we were met and warmly welcomed by an incredibly charming woman named Francesca who seemed to decide that if she started every sentence with a word or two of English before switching to Italian, the sentence qualified as having been spoken entirely in English.

Smiles and miming won the day, however, and half an hour later we not only had several recommended places to visit and have dinner, Francesca had promised to make a reservation for us at one of the best – la Palomba – the very first place mentioned in Rick Steves’ guide to the best of the town’s dining.

Our room at the Michelangeli was unique. After unlocking the street front door, a massive obstacle formidable enough to stop a cannonball, we entered the dining room. Just beyond it lay a very well-equipped kitchen. To our left, just inside the front door, a narrow circular staircase wound up to the loft bedroom. Meanwhile, at the far end of the kitchen a second, only slightly less narrow circular staircase wound up to a second bedroom and the bathroom.

(I immediately issued a mental memo to myself: Finish your “business” every night before tucking into bed because you do NOT want to have to make your way in the middle of the night in a state of barely being awake down one indoor fire escape and up a second just to reach the loo.)

Orvieto notes

The architectural centrepiece of Orvieto is an incredible basilica, the Duomo. The town fathers need feel no embarrassment at using the same name as Italy’s signature Duomo in Florence. Nor, frankly, does their Duomo need to take a back seat to Florence’s. In fact, given the much tinier population of Orvieto, the Duomo here is probably all the more impressive for a magnificence that is out of all proportion to the number of faithful it serves.

It is best known for its façade, which has been called the “liveliest” in the country, and for good reason. It is festooned with scenes from the Bible that together relate the history of the world from Creation to Final Days. But what really sets it off, in addition to the “busy-ness” of its face, is the fact that much of the colour used to separate and decorate the individual images is gold. In the early evening, when it is bathed in the softer late-afternoon sunlight, the face of Orvieto’s Duomo is simply stunning.

Even on a cloudy day, the face of Orvieto’s Duomo seems luminescent. If you’ve ever been to Monument Valley in Utah and looked out at the pair of towers called the “mittens” late in the afternoon, you get a sense of a mood that changes with the light almost minute by minute. The face of this Duomo – if you’re fortunate enough to catch it amid a series of changing skies, as we did sheltering from a powerful blast of rain and hail that was supplanted by a clearing sky and the sun’s breaking through – does exactly the same thing. And this is just the upper half, zoomed in to capture some of the detail.

Here’s a ¾ view showing the full façade in the late afternoon. But really, to feel the full aura this basilica radiates, you have to stand off maybe 50 feet from the front door at this time of day. A lowly camera, no matter how many pixels are jammed into its memory capacity, cannot even begin to do it justice.

In the central part of Orvieto is the Morro Tower, a great climb to give you spectacular views of not only the entire town, but also about a bazillion square kilometres of the surrounding Umbrian countryside. In the first of these two views, you get a feel for the dominance of the Duomo in the architecture of the Old city, and in the second view, you get a feel for the 175-step climb required to enable you to enjoy the panoramas such as the one in the first view. (Did I mention that my sciatica is much, much better now?)

It’s also worth noting that if you happen to be atop the tower when the chimes go off to mark any given “o’clock”, it’s probably best not to be still de-fuzzifying yourself from a slight excess of really fine Italian wine the night before. And here’s a bit of trivia for Ontario white wine lovers. One of the products on the LCBO shelves is a wine that the region is best known for – a gentle, light, thirst-quenching Ruffino white called Orvieto Classico. On the label, that structure front and centre on the label is the town’s Duomo.

(Image source: speedygal.files.wordpress.com)

One or two updates back, you will recall I mentioned the general pain in the butt that ancient ruins create for new building, or renovation, projects in a city like Rome where just about every square foot of land is simply the uppermost layer of what occasionally turns out to be an archaeological gold mine.

By way of contrast, in Orvieto, apparently residents and business owners alike occasionally embark on an active subterranean search through the lowest floor of their property in the hopes they will find a buried treasure. One such example that yielded a truly astonishing find is a site that is today known simply as the Well of the Cave (Pozzo della Cava).

It began as a local project in 1984 to renovate a family-owned trattoria; it opened what is today a “vast underground network of Etruscan-era caves, wells and tunnels” (Rick Steves). Since then, hosting visitors to this special section of underground Orvieto has pretty much relegated the family trattoria to a sideline.

The cave network is ancient and today is generally thought to have been carved from the very beginning to serve successive generations of the hilltop’s citizens as a self-sustaining underground living quarters and fortress in which families could safely seek shelter. Along with an assured supply of food, water and even wine – made and stored on site to help them last out a siege, the hope was that a point would be reached where any besieging force would eventually give up and move off in search of easier pickings than the very well (literally) dug-in Orvietans.

Excavations in the cave to date have exposed facilities to make wool, a ceramics kiln, baking oven, fresh water storage tank and a channel through which fresh water flowed via a lengthy passage underground into the cave. It was renovated in the decade from 1527 – 1537 by Pope Clement VII who, in a “Diefenbunker”** style of emergency preparedness, reconstituted it for use as a Papal retreat in the event of a successful barbarian assault on Rome.

** The “Diefenbunker”, for the benefit of non-Ottawa-resident readers, was a fully-stocked and equipped underground shelter built during the post-WWII “Cold War” era into which the Canadian government under Prime Minister John Diefenbaker (hence its name), senior bureaucrats and military leaders were supposed to be able to retreat, seal themselves in and survive a full-scale nuclear attack on downtown Ottawa.

Thing is, it was built in the community of Carp, about a half hour of driving – at the best of times – from downtown Ottawa. In the mid-1950s, from the moment of launch to the moment of impact an inbound Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile required about 27 minutes of flying time. You can see the problem. The Diefenbunker today is preserved and is open for public visits as a Museum of Hopelessly Misguided Cold-War Mentality (although I’ve been told that’s not its official name). But I digress.

The grape press in the cave. Occupants clearly were determined that either they were going to survive a prolonged siege in style, or get too drunk to give a damn.

The vertigo-inducing fresh water storage well was kept filled by an unlimited source that flowed into the cave via an underground feeder channel. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to give you the perspective in this somewhat abstract shot that this well tower is probably about 100 feet deep.

I joked about the family trattoria’s being sidelined by the underground attraction. It’s not; in reality, it’s a beautiful bistro, part of which (here) is outdoors in quiet green surroundings among some ancient walls of still-used buildings, and a second part of which is indoors.

A permanent feature in the indoor portion seems to be a charming little old man who takes a great deal of mischievous pleasure is taking hold of the arm of any woman visiting the cave and steering her across the floor towards a table, only to trigger startled screams when she suddenly finds herself crossing a thick glass section of the floor under which is a full three-to-four storey drop to a distant floor of the cave far below. He caught Leslie like that and she returned a most rewarding reaction for his amusement.

I realize at this point, we must be looking somewhat like moles, given the amount of time I’m spending writing about the various places where we went underground. But for the record, even cumulatively they were just a small portion of our touristy wanderings. (Although there will be a couple more to come.)

Quick aside: There’s an old Tweety and Sylvester cartoon set in Venice. At one point, Granny is lounging in a gondola and sighs to herself, “Everything is just so cacciatore…” It became a passcode for Leslie and me, whenever we were thoroughly enjoying the leisure of many of the moments during this trip – usually about the time we’d come halfway through our second glass of wine or ice cold beer.

Orvieto is also the kind of place where everything, indeed, is just so cacciatore. Frequently, it seduces you into doing nothing more complex than simply wandering about its side streets and then, when a little thirst or hunger hits, turning back a couple blocks (because it’s always no more than a couple blocks, no matter where you are on the hilltop) to the main street and one of several little sidewalk caffes, where coffee, wine, beer, light snacks, whatever, combine to recharge your batteries.

Walking about Orvieto’s little nook-and-cranny side streets, I realized I could probably fill an entire album of photographs of nothing but doors, many of which are set into beautifully arched but robust stone frames, making them works of art in themselves.

Next update… we return for a day spent in the terrific company of Chef Lorenzo – whose art is largely practised behind this door, the entrance to his ristorante, The Zeppelin.

Jerry Garcia would've loved this tour!

Longish update this time, but hopefully you’ll agree with me that this day is worth it!

First a caveat… Depending on how you view my (so far) efforts at learning to use a relatively new camera, choose “Fortunately” or “Unfortunately” to put in front of this sentence: most of the photos in this update will have been taken by someone other than me.

The reason is that, except for a few exterior snaps, photography was forbidden in all three stops on our day-long Dark Rome tour: the Catacombs, the San Clemente Basilica and the Capuchin Crypt.

We met up with our guides – (“If you enjoy the tour today, we’re Mike and Massimo; if you don’t, we’re Bob and Ralph.”) Mike and Massimo at another piazza – this one not too far from Rome’s famed Spanish Steps – the Piazza Barberini. Unfortunately, the piazza’s main attraction at most times is a fountain sculpted in the 17thC by Bernini called Triton, a Graeco-Roman “minor sea god”. "Unfortunately", because today it was completely occluded by a high plywood construction wall and so, instead of admiring the Bernini work, we spent several of the pre-tour minutes looking at the increasing number of other people assembling in the piazza and wondering if they were on the tour, even as they spent several of the pre-tour minutes looking at us and wondering if we were.

With the arrival of several people wearing “Dark Rome” vests and one of them carrying a clipboard, the speed with which most of us gravitated to him provided a swift answer to “Who’s on the tour?”

Turned out there were enough of us to create four separate groups and we were all given one of four different colour dots to stick somewhere on our clothing. Then off we went, by colour-group – two of the colours (us included) to a bus parked nearby to begin one of the most interesting days of our entire Roman experience. (“One of…” There were certainly others.)

From the outset, there were two things emphasized repeatedly to us, almost as a warning. The first was that even though (with one minor exception – read on) there no longer are any human remains in that portion of the Catacombs that we were about to tour, it nonetheless is very much a cemetery and was, in fact, the final resting place for the almost unbelievable number of over a million people!

The second message started with somewhat of an opposite advisory. The Capuchin Crypt is still very much occupied by human remains, but arranged in such a way that it has seemed bizarrely macabre to many of the visitors who have been there over the past 160 or so years since it was opened to the public. Because our tour group included a couple of children, our guides stressed that this part of today’s tour in particular would not exactly be a Disneyland experience and made sure to let the parents know that they should not feel the least bit embarrassed if their children balked at entering the place. (And as you can almost predict, the kids loved it. If anyone felt a little squeamish, it turned out to be some of the adults.)

So, to the Dead-Mobile, Batman!

1. The Catacombs

The first thing that absolutely floored me was the revelation of just how extensive the network of catacombs is that extends under pretty much all of modern-day Rome that has been built up outside the original City Walls. So far, there has been an astonishing 105 km of the underground tombs’ passageways discovered and mapped, and the general belief among archaeologists is that there likely are more – many more – that still remain hidden. In fact, as one of our guides put it, once you step outside the walls of the original City of Rome, there is a high likelihood that there are ancient graves far beneath your feet.

During the trip to the Domatilla Catacombs entrance, one of our guides explained that a previously unknown section of the Catacombs is one of the most frequently discovered antiquity every time a new building foundation is dug, when that building is located outside the boundary of the original Rome’s city walls. And that, if you recall my earlier reference to excavation-related construction delays, is pretty much an automatic sentence of typically a years-long delay, if not outright cancellation depending on the perceived significance of the find. He further suggested that, for those of us staying in a hotel, it can be extremely rewarding to ask a staff person if the hotel is built on any “scavi” (ruins) and that we should not be surprised to be taken to a hidden access door at the back of a basement broom closet! Such finds are that frequent.

Neither a map of the London Underground nor a map of the trench systems on the Western Front in WWI even holds a candle to the complexity of a map of Rome’s City of the Dead.

Here, by way of example, is a map of just one section of the Roman catacombs – the passages that have been discovered so far that flow from the original Roman Road – the Appian Way. (Source: architecturalmoleskine.blogspot.ca)

Part of the reason that such an extensive network exists outside the walls of the original City of Rome is that burial inside the walls had always been forbidden. And part of the reason the network is so vast is that Rome – indeed much of Italy – sits atop a foundation of volcanic stone called tufa, and tufa is very easy to dig. (In fact, as we discovered, you can run your fingernail across a tufa rock face and you will leave scratch marks.) The Catacombs would eventually come to include whole excavated rooms where wealthier families would lay their dead for several generations in personal-sized cutaways in the walls.

Making things even odder, in a circumstance that turns traditional archaeological excavation on its temporal ear, the older Catacombs are the ones closest to the surface and, as more space came to be needed, later levels were added by digging below the existing crypts, creating not merely an underground network of “streets”, but a network, effectively, of whole apartment blocks underground for occupancy by the dead.

Actually, maybe “condo” is a better parallel to draw. Catacomb occupants were not likely to be renewing leases and paying rent by the month.

Specific to our tour, we went into just one small portion of a 15km network that is the oldest and yet is considered among the best preserved of all the Catacombs found so far: The Catacombs of Domatilla (named after – Surprise! – St Domatilla).

This actually is a pretty spacious layout, in contrast to the narrower “hallways” we walked through, but it does give an excellent feel for the size of the individual crypts and how close together they could be dug. (Source: walksinsiderome.com)

Damp. The Catacombs are first and foremost damp. And cool. Even on hot days, a sweater or jacket is recommended. (It’s also the reason that a tufa cave makes for an excellent wine cellar as we’ll see later on.) Eerie? No. But at one time they would have been. The Domatilla Catacombs have some modern enhancements, like electric lights and a means of circulating some exchange in the air. But before electric light and ventilation, the Catacombs were so dark they required candlelight and yet so short of a fresh supply of oxygen that in roughly 20 minutes a candle would be extinguished because of oxygen starvation.

Imagine yourself – on second thought, DON’T imagine yourself – a couple levels underground in a damp, narrow passageway into which you had taken who knows how many twists and turns after entering at ground level, when suddenly your candle flame dies for lack of oxygen. (No points for guessing what will be next to die from lack of oxygen. Yes, people died of asphyxiation in the Catacombs.)

I tell a lie when I say there are no human remains. This applies only to the oldest of the Catacombs – and the Domatilla Catacomb is, as already noted, one of the oldest. But our guide did stop at one crypt and, using a narrow-beam flashlight, illuminated what he said most archaeologists agree is a toe bone. Apparently some of the more recently discovered and opened Catacombs are revealing some remarkably well-preserved remains, as well as some very elaborate frescoes decorating the walls of some of the multi-generational family “rooms”.

As Michelin would say, worth a diversion.

2. The San Clemente Basilica

On the Dark Rome tour, the Basilica was referred to as the “lasagna” church because of the several layers that its foundations descend. They indicate that the present-day basilica sits on the rebuilt or strengthened foundations of no fewer than four (with a fifth quite recently suspected) previous structures to occupy the same place.

That it has become the amazing excavation it is today the archaeological world owes to the almost maddening persistence of a Dominican scholar in residence probably two or three hundred years ago. As the story goes, he drove his fellow theology classmates crazy with his repeated insistence that he heard water running somewhere “under the floor”. And so began a series of excavations undertaken by the Dominicans themselves.

What they found is now generally held to be one of the finest layered excavations in Rome and today, after beginning in the present-day basilica, visitors progress downwards through the foundations for each of these structures:

i. The present-day, or second, basilica: (Although “present-day” only means “most recent”. It was actually built sometime between 1099 and 1120 A.D., although it underwent a considerable renovation in the early 1700s.) Descending into its basement, visitors find themselves in…

ii. The first basilica, which existed from approximately 390 to 1099 A.D. Of particular interest on the walls of this earlier basilica is a fresco that was deliberately designed to make organized religion more appealing to the ordinary people of the day, who generally were less educated, if not completely illiterate and, thus, right out of touch with the formal Latin language used for church services. This particular fresco shows a purported miracle of San Clement, who is said to have tricked his captors into thinking they were dragging him off as a prisoner when, in fact, they were dragging a large log.

But it is the dialogue they are speaking that still startles scholars to this day. As the hapless would-be captors drag their log along the ground, one of them is berating the others and painted right into the fresco is this text that he is shouting to them in the street Italian of the day, “Fili de le pute, traite! Gosmari, Albertel, traite! Falite dereto colo palo, Carvoncelle!", which translates into English as: "Come on, you sons of whores, pull! Come on, Gosmari, Albertello, pull! Carvoncello, give it to him from the back with the pole!"

When our guide first indicated the text and asked if anyone knew what it meant, Leslie happily volunteered to have a go at it based on several classes she took of introductory Italian. As she started in on “Fili de le pute,” she said, “Sons of the… father?”, then said, “No, not ‘father’…” then gasped when she suddenly realized the actual translation, which in turn caused our guide Massimo to crack up before he finished the translation and told us the story behind its inclusion in this particular fresco.

No doubt to placate the senior clergy of the day, a more “proper” translation into ceremonial Latin is also included in the same fresco, and it is painted in the outline of a cross shape for good measure. It reads, “Duritiam cordis vestris, saxa trahere meruistis", which translates into the more politically correct exhortation, "You deserved to drag stones due to the hardness of your hearts."

Whether the gutter / street Italian version ever contributed to drawing in a bigger crowd for weekly mass has not been recorded.

Descending below the floor of the first basilica, visitors now find themselves in:

iii. The Mithraeum. This is a sanctuary in which followers of the Cult of Mithras worshipped their pagan deity from about 200 – 400 A.D. (Source: Wikipedia)

Trivia digression time! It is the Cult of Mithras that is almost entirely responsible for the fact we celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25. At the time, the Mithraists threw what was essentially a heck of a fun week-long party in conjunction with the winter solstice (December 22) and a lot of Christian clergy were becoming alarmed at how their own congregations were increasingly being bled off as members of their flock left to join the Mithraists. So the Christian clergy simply and arbitrarily declared that, “Hey, guess what? Jesus was born just a couple days later, and so we’ll have a religious celebration at the same time!” And the rest is history.

So when was Jesus really born? Well, the exact date is uncertain but there is a huge clue in the fact that in the Bible’s versions of the Divine birth, reference is made to the event’s occurring “while shepherds were watching their flocks”. “(There’s even a Christmas Carol entitled, “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night”):

And historical records of the time (essentially a book entitled “Shepherding for Dummies”) are unanimous. The only time shepherds actually stood watch over their flocks was during lambing season and sheep biology was as consistent then as it is now. Lambs are born in the Spring. So by rights, if we were true to the biblical record, we should be celebrating the Bethlehem birth sometime in late April at the earliest, or more probably sometime in May. (Man, it boggles the mind to think of all the family Christmas travel that wouldn’t have had to be mucked up by snowstorms over the centuries! Damn those Mithraists, anyway!)(Oh... wait. I guess they already are.)

And remember our Dominican’s assertion that he was sure he heard water “somewhere under the floor”? The Mithraeum in fact wasn’t fully uncovered until 1867 because when it was first opened up (wait for it), it was completely submerged! When the water was finally drained off, archaeologists discovered beneath it -- not the water table and bedrock -- but the foundations and workshops of what is now believed to be:

iv. the Imperial Mint of Rome. And in there, along one wall, finally, an excavation turned up the very well-preserved section of a side channel of Rome’s famous system of aqueducts, through which water was still flowing, the same babbling brook that had so long ago disturbed the good night’s sleep of our Dominican theology student with the almost super-human hearing!

Most online descriptions of the “lasagna church” largely end there, but our guide told us that as recently as within the past couple years, some exploratory excavation work has turned up evidence of an even older floor mosaic, definitely not the sort of thing one would expect to find in what was essentially a Roman coin factory. Other probing has apparently located evidence of walls and possibly even rooms, and there is a growing belief that there is yet another layer of ricotta in the lasagna – a private residence that gives some early indications it might have been destroyed in the Great Fire of Rome in 64 A.D. How old it is – in other words, when was it first built? – remains to be seen. And below it… who knows? (Cue the theme from “The Twilight Zone”.)

To give you an idea of just how far below ground we had come by the time we were in the mint’s workshops, consider that in this photo of the entrance, the red terra-cotta roof to the left of the present-day basilica’s front door is actually at street level and just to get through the front door, we descended pretty much the height of a single-storey building. And it was all downhill from there! (Source: Wikipedia)

3. The Capuchin Crypts

"What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be..." (Motto posted on one wall of one of the Capuchin Crypts’ chapels.)

If the Capuchin Crypts didn’t reflect such a devout belief in the ultimate resurrection of the body and, consequently, the need to preserve it for that Final Judgement Day, they would be almost hilariously macabre.

How else to describe five separate chapels, each of which is effectively a carefully constructed work of art and which, collectively, are assembled entirely from the bones of some 4,000 monks who died over a period roughly from 1520 to 1870? And how can you not laugh at a colloquial designation like the “hip crypt”, because its decorations – including chandelier light fixtures that hang over your head – are made entirely from human pelvises? But the one that almost – note that, almost – made me lose my own respectful composure was when our guide indicated a representation of the Dominican Order’s Coat of Arms that was made of, yep, human arm bones.

Noted travel writer Arthur Frommer describes it as “one of the most horrifying images in all of Christendom”. By way of contrast, the Marquis de Sade, after visiting it in 1775, declared it to have been worth the effort.

But really, if ever there were an example of the old saw, a picture is worth a thousand words, this is it. So here is a 4,000+ word equivalency on the Capuchin Crypts (all, of course, from other cameras than mine because visitor photography in the Crypts is forbidden.)

The Dominican Order’s Coat of Arms is all-too-literally rendered at the centre of the back wall of this Crypt, framed with hundreds of skulls and, in an irony almost too good to be true, thousands of humerus bones. The graves in the foreground are actually graves of the last of the dead monks to be interred in the Crypt, covered with soil especially carried from Jerusalem. (Source: Static.panoramio.com)

The desiccated corpses of three long-departed Dominicans are framed by thousands of pelvic bones in the “hip crypt”. The fact that each body is still possessed of leathery skin that is probably what tilts this scene away from the merely macabre to the horror-inducing terminology that Frommer used to describe the “attraction”. (Source: farm3.staticflickr.com)

In another Crypt, the wholly appropriate figure of Death hovers over the scene from his eternal position on the ceiling. He himself is composed of a nearly complete skeleton and in his hands he holds the scythe and the Scales of Justice upon which each life will be measured on the final day of judgement. He is encircled with an oval frame made up of hundreds of vertebrae. (Source: 4.bp.blogspot.com)

A “chandelier” and, slightly out of focus in the background, a small portion of an intricate ceiling pattern worked largely in rib bones.

Depending on how much this tweaks your curiosity, I commend to you a simple Google image search of “Rome, Capuchin Crypt”. If, on the other hand, you feel you’re sufficiently boned up (sorry) on Dominican afterlife interior design (as we certainly were when we arrived, head-shakingly, at the last of these five Crypts), then let’s move on, shall we?

But before we do, might I also send you streaming to the exits to the tune of this brief musical interlude? (Oh, come on! You just KNEW this was coming!)