In Arrivo Ascendente

Meaning, that after we left the train station, we walked up. Like, up up. With our bags. And then down a bit, but mostly up.

In discussing how we were going to get to the city centre where we are staying, we noticed that it was only a 25 minute walk from the train station. As the crow flies maybe! It’s a steep walk, and the streets are very convoluted, so while we thought it would be nice to take in our surroundings (and the surroundings were lovely), our already weary knees are hating us.

Finally walking through the Etruscan Arch in which my father used to live, we are here. And that’s the main reason we’re here, to explore the city where my father lived and studied just over fifty years ago.

As a rival to Assisi for over 2000 years, Perugia has had walls built, destroyed and rebuilt a few times over. It’s miraculous that so much of the original fortifications, walls and temples have survived considering the long history of conflict that has taken place on this hill.

Etruscans vs. Umbrians, then vs. Romans. Romans vs. Carthaginians, then vs. other Romans. Ostrogoths, Lombards, Byzantines (really just more Romans), and Carolingians all took a crack at her gates. There were the factions Guelphs and Ghibellines  which saw Perugia fighting every other town around, and even Francesco di Bernardone (who later became St. Francis) stormed the storied walls to defend the honour of his home town.

I’m not sure if they’re trying to escape their embattled past, or the fact that Perugia is a university town, and also a university town for foreigners, but for some strange reason everybody we meet is super duper ridiculously nice. Now, I’m told there’s a great divide between North and South as far as friendliness toward strangers is concerned, but friendly Perugia is on the north side of the Tiber and its chillier rival Assisi is on the south! (Now that I think of it, maybe they just get fewer tourists–we’re the worst.)

Prime example: we walk into a restaurant at 2:30, having just arrived and wanting something to eat. Typically, lunchtime ends at 3PM. In other places, we’ve been ignored, if not shooed back out the front door. 3PM is the hard end time, and in my experience, doors are locked and the remaining stragglers are ushered away. In this place, La Bottega del Vino, we are warmly welcomed, and invited to stay and eat even though the kitchen is closed (no entrees, but their salad and crostone are flippin’ awesome). Sipping wine and slowly nibbling, we stick around with a few other patrons until 4PM, which is absolutely unheard of!

 

As I mentioned, we’re here to explore Perugia because fifty years ago my father (Paul, hence the title of this post) was here, so we start by checking out his school, Università per Stranieri di Perugia. Used to the drab and perfunctory architecture of our schools back home, to wander the baroque halls of the Palazzo Gallenga (where the university is headquartered), is something of a culture shock, never mind that the building itself is situated kitty-corner to a 2500 year old arch, surrounded by walls just as ancient, and overlooking one of the most beautiful valleys on the continent.

 

Since the University for Foreigners offers language courses on and offline, we have a lovely chat in the registrars office and grab some informational brochures. If I can afford the expense, it’d be nice to have my language studies properly certified at some point!

From there we walk down into the belly of the beast! The Pozzo Etrusco is a really, really old hole in the ground. It’s the well that has been supplying the residents with water from before the Romans were a thing until the modern era. During the Renaissance a rich family put a really fancy lid on it, but it functioned pretty well the same, being fed by four underground springs. Like most of the old structures in Perugia, you can see the different levels of construction, from the larger ‘dry’ (without mortar) construction of the Etruscans, to the more precise ‘wet’ style of the Romans, to the hodge-podge placement of bricks in the medieval era. This is even more apparent when we visit the catacombs below the cathedral, San Lorenzo, tomorrow.

We spend our evening getting lost in the city, finding ourselves in an old fort, which seems to now be the centre point in the pedestrian commute from the bottom to the top of the city. It’s weird walking through millennia-old halls to stumble into an escalator bringing you down to the metro, or up to the city centre above.

After an aperitivo break on the side of the wall, we head to the local Chinese restaurant, Bella Shanghai, to celebrate the first night of Chinese New Year! Buon Capodanno! The food is good, the wine is fine, and as we leave I practice one of the few Mandarin sentences I can remember, xīng nīan hǎo! Wishing our hostess happy new year in her own tongue seems to genuinely delight her (while there are many Asian students around, it seems that very rarely does a non-Chinese person try and speak their language), and she showers us in lucky red beaded bracelets. Wee!

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Our last full day has us checking off all the sights for my father, taking photos of his old haunts. Thankfully we’re in Italy, so everything’s within a ten minute walking radius. We’re also meeting an old friend of Antonella’s for dinner, so we buy some wine and gifts for their one-year-old. Laden with bottles and boxes, and now lacking in time, we dash toward the museum under the cathedral, making it just in the nick of time for the final tour.

 

Still an active archaeological site, this place is cool, both literally and figuratively. Below the cathedral, below the city streets, below medieval fortifications, below the Roman domus and below the Etruscan temple, we reach the original street level, chariot scratches still intact. The tour itself is in Italian, but I’m picking up the major gist of it. We’re shown the writing on the walls and the discreet layers of construction as civilizations built on top of each other all while being regaled with legends and histories millennia old. Our guide really knows her stuff! Unfortunately I’m unable to take photos since my hands are full, but there are better ones in the website linked above.

This final evening in Perugia has us visiting with Antonella’s friend and his family. Their little girl, Vittoria, is ridiculously cute and just won’t stop smiling. Apparently I’m a novelty, or at least my moustache is, as she just won’t stop staring. Thankfully I’m extraordinarily emotionally needy, so baby-smiles work wonders on my self esteem!

The first part of the conversation revolves around the North-South friendliness divide, as I begin our discourse expressing my amazement at just how lovely the people of Perugia have been. In fact, it’s kind of an oddity that even friends would invite each other to their own homes, and Luca uses his generosity as an example of true and proper Southern hospitality. Who am I to disagree? He has great taste in wine!

We go out to all-you-can-eat sushi in the one city in all of Italy that is about as far away from the sea as you can get. It reminds me of the time I took a bite from the sushi plate at a hockey game at the Saddledome in Calgary; like, just don’t do it. I’ll save the ethnic (non-Italian) food rant for another post, however. We have a lovely time, and I make the Italians try sake, which is a novelty for them since wine isn’t normally made from rice and served warm.

Final lesson of the night: Calabrian cheeky kisses! In the north, a man would only kiss the cheeks of a woman, starting from the left, and going to the other side once. In the south (especially the far south like Calabria where Luca is from), all people of both genders share their cheeky kisses in greeting and farewell. However, they start from the right cheek, and go back twice: three kisses in all! Since I have no clue what I’m doing, I start from the wrong side and get the aquiline schnoz of our gracious host directly in the back of my eye socket. Lesson learned and fun times were had by all!

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Rushing to the train station the next morning, we opt to take the metro, the Mini-Metro! Imagine a typical subway car, now halve it, and halve it again. Seriously super adorable, the mini metro is like a slow roller coaster ride down through the middle of the mountain–what a treat!

After grabbing a pizza for the road outside the train station, we’re on our way back to Brescia!