April 28: Perugia

Previous day: April 27: Bologna to Perugia

Today is our last day at Alla Residenza Domus Minervae. One large rant and a small rant (promise!) to start, then on to the good stuff. I continue to accrue evidence for my hypothesis that people around the world who design hotel showers never actually use showers, and thus have no idea how one works. The problem in this case was size. I’m a reasonably big guy (about 1.8 m = 6 feet), but not really beyond the norm. So when I go into a shower and my shoulders are nearly brushing the edges, and I have to bend down and can’t do it without rubbing either my head or my butt against one of the walls, this is a problem. Why do I need to bend down, you might ask? Because there’s no shelf, antigravity, magical spell, or other solution to hold your soap and shampoo at a convenient height, so you have to place them on the floor—where the soap dish fills with water and you knock open the shower door every time you bend for the soap. Attention shower designers of the world: Please learn how showers are actually used by real people!

The small rant: the breakfast at the hotel is free, but it’s not much to write home about. (And yet...) No granola or cereal with anything resembling fiber, no whole-wheat bread, greasy normal ham instead of proscuito or other good meat, the local Nutella equivalent instead of peanut butter or other proteinaceous nut butter, and envelope cheese the only other protein. (In Italy? Seriously?) On the plus side, the cornetti (sweet croissants) are decent, they have chocolate dolci for dessert, and there’s a bottomless coffee machine with reasonable-sized cups. So if you program it for a double espresso, and then leave the cup in place and run the program for a latté, you get a smallish but nearly American-sized cup of coffee. Two or three of these makes one decent amount of coffee. And that almost redeems the breakfast.
End of rants.

Our plan for the morning was to hit the local antique market, since we both love such markets and we figured on finding a few treasures, given this is Europe and all. And we did have fun browsing and sharing our discoveries. Much junk, of course, but lots of nice old heavy iron tools, beautiful wood boxes and furniture, ceramics and china, and so on. Particular treasures were old Italian advertising flyers dating back most of a century, old Italian touring club magazines, and old Italian literary reviews. Lots of book treasures too, including Mussolini’s fascist manifesto, a great many novels and comics (including the Shadow and Popeye) old and new in Italian translation, a newspaper front page claiming that Hitler was really Jewish and changed his family name to conceal this fact, and a copy of Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” in the original Italian. Speaking of Will, there was a lovely black and white ink sketch of “the infant Shakespeare”, done as a kind of nativity scene parody. If there had been any way to bring it home for Joan, we’d have done it in an instant. Difficult to photograph because of the glass and reflections from bright sunlight, but mostly succeeded:

Infant Shakespeare

The infant Shakespeare.

Lunch was porchetta (roast pork) at a stand that’s been at the same spot in one of the piazzas since 1916—more than a century! We shared a sandwich with mixed greens, a sprinkling of parmesan, and a delicious balsamic reduction glaze. Washed down with a decent red wine for Shoshanna and an even better Meadbrea amber ale for me. Yummy, and because shared, left room to share an orange–chocolate gelato.

The afternoon was spent wandering, people watching, and actually hitting a few museums along the way. Also a stop at an artisanal chocolate shop, where we got to try their chocolate lager beer. (Pretty good, but the HeBrew brand I tried many years ago was much better.) Because one museum that had an early Raphael fresco closed for lunch right before we arrived, we wandered well off the beaten track while we waited for it to reopen. We reached the northeastern edge of the Perugia plateau, far enough from the main tourist drag that we were alone apart from a handful of locals. Gave us a lovely gaze out over a different part of the landscape, with rolling hills and some fairly classic village architecture.

Another vista

Another vista from the Perugia plateau.

When the museum opened, we discovered they wanted 8 euros for essentially a one-trick museum, with little other than the Raphael to recommend it, so we took ourselves and our money elsewhere. Instead, we went to the Merchant’s guildhouse (Nobile Collegio della Marcanzia) and the Money Changer’s guildhouse (Nobile Collegio del Cambio , largely because of the beautiful wood carvings, frescoes, and paintings. (The money changers also had exhibits of standardized weights and books of conversion tables used to confirm that the money they received was not adulterated or otherwise doctored to increase the seller’s profit margins. Fascinating stuff, particularly given that standardized weights and measures remain a problem today.

Now pretty tired after a day in the sun, we basically ran out of steam for further museums. Instead, we headed down to the southwestern end of the plateau, where there was a pleasant green space in front of a Franciscan church. Sat and cooled down while watching the local teens sunbathing and flirting, and occasionally smoking some grass if we correctly interpreted the smell. This, combined with the higher proportion of bared midriffs, suggests that morés are a bit looser here than in Bologna, which we both found a bit surprising. Stopped back at the hotel to drop our stuff and relax a bit before dinner.
Dinner tonight was at Antica Trattoria delle Voste, which is located towards the end of the beaten track, so a little quieter than some of the more central places. It’s about half an hour walk from our hotel: up two long escalators, then a flight of stairs, then mostly up a gentle slope for the rest of the walk. The restaurant’s next to the “American” store, which has a big U.S. flag in front of it, plays U.S. pop songs, and caters to a crowd of about 80% teens and 20% miscellaneous ages. Not sure what they sell, and they closed before we finished dinner so we couldn’t check. But lots of traffic passing by to the store, and by the time they closed (around 8), the dinner crowd had largely replaced them.

We chose to eat outside, watching the passegiata and swallows hawking about in the fading light. I’d been craving pizza for a while, so for my primo, I ordered their parmigiana pizza (tomato sauce, mozzarrela, eggplant, basil leaves, and parmesan), whereas Shoshanna went for broad noodles (like giant canoli, but not stuffed like canoli and cut into short segments) with tuna, capers, and tomato sauce. She also ordered a plate of roasted veggies, which turned out to be eggplant, zucchini, and bell peppers. My secondo was thick noodles kind of like udon, but much chewier, in a tomato sauce with bite-sized bits of bacon-smoked duck and cherry tomatoes. We finished off with tiny shots of decaff espresso. All delish, and though I at least was tempted by dessert, it was far too much food to leave room for dessert.
As we say in the Hart family (or I do, leastwise): “tantus cibus, scanto chron”. That is, “so much food, so little time”!

Nice walk downill to the hotel for our last night before heading to Spoleto, where we begin our 6-day hike.

Next day: April 29: Perugia to Spoleto