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.