Stroll (aka Race) through Orveito

Orvieto, just another small town in Tuscany, or is it? We had our first Saturday Stroll yesterday and it was so much fun.  Orvieto is definitely a small town, but there was so much to see and so little time to see it, despite the fact that we were (mostly) all up before 7am to catch the train.  Some people rolled out of bed a little late, although none as late as Leanna who planned the trip! Colin’s phone call woke her up at 7:20 and it’s a 20 minute walk to the train station.  She barely made it to our train before it left at 7:43. 

Once we got to Orvieto, we took a tram up to the top of the hill. Once there, we walked into the old castle courtyard to see the amazing views of the countryside/city below.  The fog and clouds made it hard to see much, but it was still a great view.  We got some great pictures and then headed into the city to find some caffeine and the Duomo (the city’s cathedral) so we could buy our tourist tickets. A few of us got a little lost from everyone else because we got distracted taking pictures, but we eventually found the Duomo and it was beautiful:

 

 After we bought our tickets, we walked through the interior of the cathedral, which was just as amazing as the outside.  It was massive inside and the frescoes were magnificently preserved.  Everything was in such amazing colors and the contrast of the bright paintings and the black and white walls and floors was incredible. We didn’t have much time inside because we had a tour of the city’s underground, but one could definitely spend hours staring at the frescoes and still not take it all in.

Orvieto has a huge underground, with over 1200 caves beneath the city. They had a variety of uses, including storage, bomb shelters, quarries, and olive oil making.  We visited two of the caves, one that was a quarry/olive oil press and another that was a pigeon roost. Getting into the caves was rather interesting, especially for those of the group that were over 6 feet tall.  The olive oil cave wasn’t so bad, but getting into and through the pigeon roost was definitely interesting. At one point, we ascended a very steep and narrow staircase that wasn’t bad for me, but Connor (who is about 6’5”) barely made it up.

 We also went down into a well on the edge of the city that is 175 feet deep. The stairs were steep and set at an awkward incline, but we all made it to the bottom and back up.  It was a little daunting, especially with the damp steps and having Colin and Michael racing through the well, but it was a lot of fun.  We definitely got some good pictures out of it too.  After we escaped the well, we attempted to find the Etruscan Necropolis ruins just outside the city, but we got lost several times in the process. We went to the museums by the Duomo instead, which were cool but were just expansions on the Ivan Bruschi museum that we had already seen here in Arezzo.

However, we did get directions to the ruins and we managed to find those as dusk started to fall.  The walk to the ruins wasn’t horrible and the Necropolis was breathtaking.  I was really grateful that I had taken that Roman Religion class last semester because I knew a lot about the necropolis and why it was outside the city and how it was used.  We spent a little time walking through the ruins and enjoying the sense of peace that the ruins radiated. 

Unfortunately, we didn’t have much time before we had to rush back up the hill and through the city to catch our train back to Arezzo.  While the walk down to the ruins hadn’t been horrible, the race back to the top was brutal.  The stairs and inclines were almost cruel at this point in the day, and by the time we go to the top we were all wheezing.  On the bright side, we made it back to the train with time to spare.

The cliff that we had to run back up from the ruins

It was a really fun and exhausting day.  We all walked almost 12 miles throughout the city and were on our feet from 7am to 8pm other than the hour train rides and the hour for lunch.  Definitely need a plan before we set out on our next Saturday Stroll.