ASSISI
Last weekend I took a trip to Assisi, Florence, Pisa and Cinque Terre. CEA scheduled a day trip to Assisi on Friday, so I and a few girls in CEA decided to meet up with my roomate Pepe in Florence afterwards instead of heading directly back to Rome. Pepe, the girls and I all wanted to see Cinque Terre so we made plans to see it as well. I booked our hostel in Cinque Terre and bought our train tickets, and on Friday morning almost everyone in CEA:Rome met at Piazza Bologna (the closest metro stop to our school, where we always meet for excursions) and boarded the bus. When we approached Assisi, we saw a beautiful stone town built against a hillside. The bus parked in a public parkinglot and we were greeted by our tourguide. We took an outside, covered escalator up the hill to the main gate of the city. Virtually all the town is made from a white and pinkish stone, and it looks clean since much of the stone was restored after an earthquake. I love stone as a construction material, and I also love the different Italian styles of building/architecture, so when these two are put together in an entire city I'm in awe. I walked around the city constantly taking pictures with every corner I turned and every minute architectural detail that caught my eye. After passing through the first main gate of the city and walking down the road, I watched workers in an adjacent olive orchard to the left (towards downhill) fetching the olives by scraping the branches and catching the olives in a net.
Assisi is known as the town of St. Francis. His basilica is located here along with the cathedral of his partner, St. Claire. Assisi is the twin city of San Francisco (because of St. Francis, go figure), my city of birth and the major city of my home, the bay area. St. Francis was a wealthy individual who wanted to become noble to gain more power and social statues, so he became a knight and fought in battle in order to gain a noble title. During a battle he was captured by the enemy and imprisoned. His time in prison changed his life, and when he was released he came to Assisi and started living a spiritual life. He met Claire, a beautiful girl, and convinced her to cut her hair and live a spiritual life as well.
We first visited St. Claire's cathedral, and while approaching it I saw flying butresses, which got me excited. The cathedral also has a horizontal stripe pattern on the outside (alternating layers of pink and white stone). Horizontal bands are a typical style of Italian cathedrals. When we went inside we went down into the crypt and saw the preserved body of St. Claire (covered in wax) as well as some preserved artifacts of St. Claire and St. Francis such as their clothes, rosary beads, etc.
Then we headed towards the Basilica of St. Francis, and along the way we passed by the main piazza where I saw an ancient Roman temple which is now turned into a church. When we first entered the basilica we headed down to the crypt to see St. Francis' tomb. Most of the crypt was used as a shrine to him, and his stone coffin was located in one side of a stone circular pillar which we walked around. I noticed several small wallet-sized portraits of people thrown in the iron-gated spaces along the stone pillar. We climbed back up the stairs to the nave of the basilica and started examing paintings on the walls. The basilica of St. Francis is worth seeing not only because it is an impressive piece of architecture and houses the tomb of St. Francis, but also because it has some of the most important pieces of work depicting the developement of Renaissance style painting. Giotto, the famous painter who created linear perspective painted several frescoes inside the cathedral. It is interesting to see the development of linear perspective throughout the basilica as Giotto and his followers tried to better depict reality in their paintings. The mentality of artists in this era is fascinating to think about; they were on the brink of a transitional age in art from extremely symbolic to a much more realistic representation of space in paintings/drawings. Most of these magnificent paintings are located on the upper level. The frescoes on the ceiling and walls at the end of this level is severeley damaged due to an earthquake (much stone fell down yet the stained glass windows were not damaged)!
After the basilica we had a large, 5 course meal with meat and cheese platers for apetizers, 2 pasta dishes, a meat dish (with lamb, veal, chicken and potatoes) and a delicious lemon-merange-like pie for dessert. After the late lunch we had a little over an hour to split up and wander around the town before meeting back outside the main gate and getting on the bus. The beautiufl valley and hills in the distance as well as the beautiful stone architecture surround me made for a very pleasant experience. Assisi is one of my favorite cities in Italy and I highly recommend it to anyone. As usual, the pictures don't even do it justice for how beautiful Assisi (and the rest of Italy for that matter) actually is! We boarded the bus and the girls and I were shortly dropped of at the Assisi train station to head to Florence!
FLORENCE
After Assisi we got on the bus and were dropped off at the local train station to catch a train to Florence. It was just Maritza and Nicole with me at this point because Cara and April slept in and would meet up with us later in Florence. When our train arrived I followed the main road to the Duomo, next to where Pepe’s apartment was located. We met Pepe at outside and walked into his apartment to drop off our bags. After about an hour Cara and April arrived so we met them near the train station, dropped off their bags, and ate dinner at a nice restaurant Pepe recommended. I had a calzone with a beer… absolutely delicious! We spent the rest of the night sightseeing. In the morning we saw Michelangelo’s David in the Academia. I was impressed just by the sheer size of the statue, yet as I got closer to the statue I noticed and appreciated the fine detail that went into Michelangelo’s work. The veins in his arms for instance gave David the allusion that he wasn’t just a statue but a live giant marble human being. Some other interesting sites which I saw in the academia were the half-completed statues of human beings taking form from their marble blocks, a room full of plaster preliminary statues with their wire frames sticking out, as well as some old renaissance clothes and a book from medieval times. During the day we also saw the Duomo (cathedral) with its famous dome designed by Brunelleschi, Pointe Vecchio which was the only bridge not bombed in Florence during WWII and has been lined with gold shops since the time of the Medicis, and the Palazzo Vecchio, which was my favorite building in Florence. The first time I saw it I was stunned by how tall it was (it was hard to believe that an unreinforced stone tower could be built that tall during the Renaissance and still be standing today). It was originally the building of the city council but the rich and powerful Medici family bought the building so they could live in it and built another building next to it (now the Uffizi Gallery?) for the city council to meet. There was also a private elevated walkway connecting the Palazzo Vecchio and across Ponte Vecchio to the other side of the river so the wife of Medici wouldn’t have to walk in the stench of everyone else below. The last thing we saw before leaving Florence was the Palazzo Pitti, where we walked up its back gardens and had a great view of all the major sites we saw that day. We walked by the Forte Belvedere and walked back down the hill and at pizza and drank wine in a small pizzeria. After lunch we hopped on our train towards Pisa and Cinque Terre.
PISA AND CINQUE TERRE
We had a little less than an hour wait in Pisa before our next train to Cinque Terre so we all headed quickly to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was surprisingly far away from the train station for such a small city, taking us over 20 minutes to walk over there at a fast pace. We only had time to snap a couple of quick pictures and then the girls took a small cab back to the train station while Pepe and I ran back. Pepe and I missed the train by a few minutes however, so we took the next one which eventually got us on the same train to Cinque Terre as the girls (their train must have stopped at more of the smaller stations along the way). Needless to say, we were all surprised to see each other when we got off our train at Riomaggiore, the lower of the 5 towns of Cinque Terre. We followed the road from the train station to check into our apartment for the night, but found a note outside the door with our keys (good thing no one took it)! The stairs up to our apartment were dark but once we opened up the door we were pleased with the apartment. It was nice to have an entire small apartment to ourselves for a night. We spent the rest of the night having dinner, buying wine and drinking it down near the small port on some rocks right by the ocean. I really liked the scenery… many tall colorful buildings with typical clothes hanging outside them on clothes lines, stone roads, and the small Italian town-feel all next to the ocean. The next morning we checked out of our apartment, bought some tasty pesto pizza for breakfast, and headed towards the beginning of the path to hike on to the next town. Before we entered the hiking trail, near the train station, we had to pay a small fee for a pass and then we were on our way. It was a fairly short hike to Manarola, taking only about 15 minutes, but the hikes would get harder to each successive town. Each path we hiked ran right along the with stunning views of small Italian towns on the edge of vertical cliffs in the distance. Manarola looked much like Riomaggiore except it was built more against the sloped terrain so it had many terraced buildings and vineyards which we hiked up to. During our hike to the next town, Corniglia, we crossed a chain link bridge (like a rope bridge) which was exciting since it was unstable. Once we got to Corniglia we had to climb up several flights of steps in order to enter the actual town on the top of the cliff. It seemed smaller than the previous two towns but had more terraced vineyards and had an awesome viewing platform, where we could see the towns we just visited and the ones we were planning on seeing. The next two hikes were supposed to be much more lengthy and hard so we decided to take the train to them. The girls really wanted to see the last town, Monterosso, so we headed there first. When we arrived we realized that the town they actually were thinking of was Vernazza, the most famous of the 5 towns, so we decided to quickly explore Monterosso and then head over there. Monterosso was much more spread out and had a lot of beach space so I went down there to collect some gravel for my sand/gravel collection of places I’ve been. The ocean was a clear light green which is a nice contrast from the murky ocean I’m used to back in California. We got on a train in the opposite direction but didn’t realize that it was a direct rain back to the first city we visited, Riomaggiore, so we walked back into the center of town to pass some time before the next train. However, we didn’t realize how quickly time had passed so we just missed the train back! We decided to spend the rest of our time until our train out of Cinque Terre arrived sitting near the small port like the night before and had some snacks and wine, and enjoyed our last minutes in Cinque Terre. It was too bad that we missed the main town, Vernazza, but I still had a great time and that is always a reason to come back to Italy! =)
Aound the world in...
14 years ago
