Riding the Bus

Perugia is a city on a hill. No question about that.

We drove our car to the outskirts of the city center this morning and parked it. The Perugia city officials (thankfully) have installed escalators to take people up the hill to the city center. The early Etruscans didn’t have that same advantage, which probably helped keep the city safe.

After visiting the city’s largest church, we began wandering around, in and out of the narrow streets that wind around the city. Perugia is a wonderful town, the capital of the Umbrian region that was a medieval fortress surrounded by a large stone wall. The narrow streets now house restaurants, clothing stores, and lots of shoes stores. I don’t know how anyone could walk those cobbled, steep streets wearing the high heels shown on most of the shoes.

Around noon we decided it sounded like fun to take the city bus tour, and I have seldom been so happy that we made such a decision. The tour lasted an hour, and the bus drove up and down the narrowest streets and steepest hills I have ever seen. I seriously was praying to whomever the patron saint of car brakes is to keep the brakes from failing as we slowly made our way down a hill that I would have had trouble walking down. In the meantime, the views out of the window were absolutely amazing, and we were given a history of Perugia IN ENGLISH! Yay!

As Bill and I had been wandering in the morning, we had come across a restaurant and pizzeria that looked good to both of us. When we got off the bus, we decided that’s where we wanted to have lunch. The trick was to find it again. We walked around, in and out of alleys, streets, making our way through archways and narrow sidewalks, wondering why we hadn’t taken better care to see where it was. Finally, the travel angel who has been following us around on this trip led us down an alley that led – lo and behold – to the pizzeria. And just in time, as it was starting to rain. We started out eating al fresco, but pretty soon the drops were getting big and we moved ourselves inside.

Bill ordered a pizza with funghi (mushrooms) and I ordered spaghetti with tomatoes, olive oil, and basil. Up until today, I had not had a meal in Italy that I thought was absolutely amazing. But today we hit a home run. Our food could not have been better. The pizza was crusty and flavorful. Bill was so happy with it that he took a picture. The pasta, well, I don’t even know how to describe it. Simple and wonderful. We accompanied our lunch with a half-liter of red wine and were happy campers.

When we walked out of the restaurant, we saw that it had apparently rained very hard as there was standing water on the streets, but by that time the sun was peeking through the clouds. We walked around for a bit to get closer looks at some of the sights we had seen from the bus, but after a bit it became clear that it was working itself into another rainstorm. We grabbed a gelato and headed for our car, and then for our hotel.

After a brief nap, we walked over to the neighborhood alimentaria, which is a small grocery store, to sort of just look around and see what they had to offer. We bought a few things, such as cereal and milk (it’s still odd to me to buy milk off the shelves instead of refrigerated), fruit, meat, and cookies. It was fun to see who are neighbors were since this is clearly a neighborhood market. We will likely just have some meat and cheese on our patio again tonight if we can fit it in between rain storms.

Tomorrow we will drive somewhere else in the Umbrian region, maybe Deruta (which is where they make the pottery I love so much) or Assisi.