Luckily Mabel has not learnt to tell the time and Melek will never move unless he’s forced to, or there’s the whiff of food, so with the clocks going forward overnight we got an hour extra in bed! It was a cold night however. When Sarah stepped foot outside there was frost on the grass. 21ºC in the daytime and below freezing at night. That’s quite a temperature difference.
We set off to explore Bevagna once things had warmed up. My Rough Guide told me that all the streets seemed to end up at the main Piazza, so I wrongly assumed there was no real need to look at a map. I was wrong. Team Basil seemed to meander aimlessly for ages without finding the central area of what is a very small town.
Bevagna, however, is a very pleasant please around which to wander. Endless narrow streets wend their way around this essentially medieval settlement. We passed a house which had incorporated parts of an old Roman theatre or temple within its construction and a whole series of small dwellings set along a curving street, which had been built into wall of what had once been the Roman amphitheatre.
Before we reached the central area everything was very quiet, but when we eventually found the central square there were a surprising number of tourists. Until recently Bevagna had very little infrastructure for tourists but now there are several small hotels, small tasteful shops and a variety of rather expensive restaurants, one of which was voted by the Guardian newspaper as in its top ten for the whole of Italy!
The central Piazza is a very pleasing space with the usual, large and impressive, Palazzo dei Consoli* and two very old Romanesque churches, both of which date from the mid 12thCentury. One had been falling into disrepair and no longer consecrated, which has not been helped by the fact that Bevagna has been repeatedly hit by earthquakes, the last major one of which was in 1997. Apparently Prince Charles visited Bevagna shortly after that earthquake and has been actively involved in raising funds for restoration.
In short Bevagna is an interesting place to visit, if time allows, especially in a motorhome because the aire is so nice, but is, probably inevitably, less impressive than its large neighbour Gubbio and I suspect Assisi, which will be confirmed or otherwise tomorrow.
One thing worth mentioning, adjacent to our aire is a small building containing a machine which dispenses water, either still or sparkling, at five cents a litre. We have seen these elsewhere in Italy, but this morning I was able to watch the machine in action as a queue of cars waited patiently as people filled up whole crates of bottles.
We tried to find somewhere to eat out at lunchtime but the restaurants open all seemed rather expensive for our taste, probably aimed at the lucrative tourist market**. However, we have found a more reasonable restaurant, with good reviews, which only opens in the evening and which welcomes dogs.
* There seems to be a Palazzo dei Consoli in the main square of most of the towns we have visited in Tuscany and Umbria. They are apparently the place where citizens meetings took place in the medieval period when most of these towns were the centre of their own city state.
** We are, of course, tourists ourselves, but because our touring lasts several months at a time our budgeting will not allow for regular dining at €40 plus a head. In the old days, when we took two week holidays, we might have considered it. Actually, come to think of it, we were always too mean!!!
