Oy! I don’t have enough time to tell you about everything that happened this weekend. I’ll try to hit the highlights. In the morning, I took a train to Orvieto, a small hillside town about an hour north of Rome. The train was running late, so I didn’t get there until noon.
You have to take a funicular up the hill from the new town to the old town. At the tourist office, I bought a “key to the city” (La chiave per la città), which gave me access to about ten sites. Within one afternoon, I visited all but two of them.
I visited St. Patrick’s Well first. This required climbing all the way down and then all the way up the dual spiral staircase inside this old and very deep well. Then I visited the Duomo (cathedral). From the outside, it reminded me a lot of the cathedral in Siena because of its black and white stripes. Inside, most of the church was pretty plain.
However, there are two side chapels with frescoes that tell important stories. One chapel tells the story of the miracle of the body of Christ, which happened in a nearby town when the Blood of Christ miraculously appeared on the altar cloth during Mass. The cloth is stored at the Duomo in Orvieto, but it was not visible to me. They only take it out on special occasions.
Then I had some yummy gelato while sitting in the shade in the piazza outside the Duomo.
Later in the afternoon, I did the Orvieto Underground tour. This takes you into two of the 1,000 man-made caves under the city. It was nice and cool down there!
I also visited several museums and climbed all the way up their clock tower. See my Facebook page for a video from up there.
Dinner was back in Rome after another delayed train ride. Thankfully, my classmate had booked us a very fancy dinner at a rooftop restaurant. We splurged on this meal. We had five courses and a bottle of Riesling. To escape the heat of our hot dorm rooms, we shared a hotel room near the restaurant. I thoroughly enjoyed getting a good night’s sleep there and the lovely shower in the morning.
Sunday morning we slept in and made it to St. Peter’s Square just in time for the Pope’s Angelus at noon. He talked about the Gospel reading of the Good Samaritan and how everyone is our neighbor.
Next, we went inside St. Peter’s , where I had Confession (my first time in Rome) and then a 1:00 Mass.
We were very hungry after that, so we had lunch at a nice place near my Italian language school. We had left our overnight bags at the hotel, so we had to retrieve them and bring them back to campus, where we spent the remainder of the afternoon and early evening.
For dinner, I got to meet up with my author friend Leslea Wahl who is touring Italy with her family right now. It was fun to have our first in-person meeting in Rome!
