Team Basil has now spent so much time in the small town of Spoleto that we are thinking of setting up a company to provide guided tours of the town in English!
Yesterday culminated in us staggering about 200 metres to a lovely little restaurant where we whiled away a couple of hours enjoying some more delicious Italian food. I’m embarrassed to confess that we both went for pizza again – it’s an easy and cheap choice is my only excuse.
Our breakdown company has not been particularly helpful today. They are very friendly when we ring for an update, but they then have to relay our message on to their Italian counterparts who contact the garage and then back down the chain to us. Despite repeatedly being assured that they would keep us updated we have really only had one update all day and that is that the cost will be over €800 (ouch) and that Basil will be back with us tomorrow or maybe Saturday!
So we had to book another night in the hotel and then, this afternoon, Sarah came up with the clever idea of asking the lovely hotel staff to telephone the garage and see if they could get some clearer, more direct, information. One phone call and we were told that we could pick Basil up tomorrow at 11 am! Why couldn’t the breakdown company have provided us with that information?!
Today has consisted of wandering around Spoleto, which Percy Bysshe Shelley apparently called the most romantic town in the world. Well it might have been in the early 19thCentury, but I would struggle to agree with that description now.
We have walked the streets that we missed on Tuesday and came across the remains of a Roman Amphitheatre, which we can actually see from the window of our hotel room. The only discovery of note was the beautiful church of San Gregorio Maggiore. This is a Romanesque Basilica dating from the middle of the 12thCentury. Although its facade, which is pleasant enough, does not match the beautiful Cathedral in Spoleto, the interior is infinitely preferable. The restoration of the church has not resulted in the 12thCentury work being covered over with white plaster, instead many of the original frescoes have been preserved. This includes a painting of Mary breast feeding Jesus!! I’m not sure I have ever seen this before in the many hundreds of churches I have visited, but I must commend the radically forward thinking artist who grasped a natural biological fact which 800 years later sections of society, in England at least, is still bizarrely struggling to come to terms with!!
In yesterday’s blog I mentioned the escalators which take visitors up the hill to the high point of Spoleto. Today we have discovered that there is a whole network of mechanised aids to the people of and visitors to Spoleto. The town have built three large car parks outside the old town walls and each one is then linked to the higher parts of town by either an escalator or a moving stairway. This must have cost a staggering amount of money for a town with only 40,000 inhabitants. Today we used the moving walkway which is amazingly built in a tunnel under the town so when you get to the exit you need you then take a lift up to street level. It does make moving up and down town easier but I do wonder where the funds came from.
With luck, therefore, we will be back sleeping in Basil tomorrow. If we manage to get away before lunchtime we will head over the coast to start our journey down to Bari. If not I think we will be back to our favourite aire at Bevagna for the night, another town we could include our guided tours!
*** All photos today are by iPhone. I left my camera in Basil. I thought on a webpage that you would not be able to discern the difference – but you can.