Great Spontaneity Tour 6: Assisi

Assisi is beautiful, even in a grey drizzle. It’s a medieval hill town underlooking a fortress that changed hands every time there was a battle. So I suppose it was more fortless than fortress.

Still, it’s a great playground, like a gigantic set of monkey bars for aging tourists to climb about while imagining blood on the battlements and death in the dank, dark tunnels.

I found a nice little hotel (Hotel Sole) right off the main square for €35 a night (€100 for three), breakfast included. I could smell the croissants baking for the next day’s breakfast as I lay in bed at night. Mm mm. Fresh croissants for breakfast, and excellent coffee. If you ask for café latte they bring you two metal pitchers: one with hot, fresh, espresso, and one with freshly steamed milk. Triple Mm.

But the best thing about Italians . . . and I’m including the Roman Empire, renaissance painters, and Roberto Benigni when I make this claim . . . the VERY best thing about Italians is that they serve cake for breakfast. Everywhere—Milan, Assisi, Rome, Naples, Siena—everywhere, I tell ya, they’re servin’ breakfast cake! What’s not to love about that? There’s always a round, flat but very dense almond cake, and most of the time there’s a Bundtish cake too, often with a bits of citrus rind running through it. A couple places served upside downside cakes: peaches on both sides! Did I mention this is for breakfast?

What’s a man to do? You eat your fresh croissants with local preserves; slurp a couple cups of coffee. Try a piece of one cake, then the other, so as not to insult the cook. And then, if there’s one of those upside/downside cakes on the sideboard . . . well, at that point, it’s your breakfast dessert—everything else was the main course. Remember, you’re in a foreign land; their customs are not ours; it wouldn’t be right to insult them. And, look—I’ve watched a few full breakfasts go down in Scotland—herds of swine were sacrificed so their entrails could reappear in sausage formats, with eggs and greasy potatoes and baked beans—and sure, the brunch crowd looked happy. But give me cake any morning of the week.

They bring the tourists into Assisi by the busload. And many of those busloads come from cruise ships, which is a long trek. It must be 100 kilometres from the coast, either way. They drive them in (2 hours), give them a quick tour (2 hours), and then race back to the boat in time to catch the high tide. The trip home includes extensive sampling of the Umbrian wine they purchased at the mandatory stops in the designated local shops of Assisi, so it’s a cheerful jaunt.

I’m not going to criticize the boat people just because I can’t afford a Mediterranean cruise, but Assisi is a great place to hang around. There must be more restaurants than actual residents, all serving excellent Umbrian food for less than the cost of a cab ride in Geneva[1]; there are endless stairways you can wander too, and the Umbrian hills are just a few herb-scented steps away.

My days went something like this: I’d get up early, have breakfast, and by then it would be almost supper time. But if I finished before the sun went down, I’d go out for a few hours of hill or stair climbing, and make it back to the town square for a light lunch, with more excellent coffee. In the early afternoon I’d visit a site or two, or, if I wanted to get fancy, I’d find a café with one of the million remarkable panoramic views and chat up the woman who would later wash my delicates. I’m betting a laundry woman in Assisi can afford her own foreign travel in the off season, unlike a waiter at a sidewalk café in Milan.

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I didn’t forget to pay Frank a visit, either, just in case you were wondering. He’s buried a few floors down under this cathedral. (which, like all my photos, looks better if you have a HD screen, and best if I hadn't had to compress them enough so the website opens without a crowbar).

There was a very long line waiting to get in, so I hope Frank appreciated me dropping by. And then there was another long line waiting to trudge down to the second basement—let’s call it what it is, the crypt—to see his grave, although it’s not really his grave. I mean, it is, but it isn’t. They dug up the original casket, covered in plaster or concrete, and then hoisted it into a subtly-lit alcove above the crypt’s altar. The art director was crafty. It’s kinda dark as you descend. No windows. But there are stacks of long skinny candles waiting in the vestibule for the faithful (by donation), and there were enough candles burning by the time I got there to have warmed the 101st airborne during the siege of Bastogne (sorry, I just watched a rerun of Band of Brothers . . . I shoulda used an analogy from the Italian campaign). Anyway, it’s moderately impressive—a little eerie—but impressive, and way better than St Peter’s in Rome, in terms of saintly remains. Poor old Pope John XXIII is up at the front of the nave in St. Peter’s, in a glass box of formaldehyde, dressed in his red robes, Pope hat and everything. That circus-geek sensibility is happily missing in Assisi. See what happens when you have no women around to offer decorating tips?

Sadly, there was no miracle for me in Assisi, even though I was obedient—unlike the hundreds of Chinese and American tourists who squashed into the crypt with me. There was flashin’ and sassin’ goin’ on all around me, despite the signs in several languages asking everyone to be silent and not to take pictures. A little vice-principal monk kept popping up from his prie-dieu in a dark corner to chastise the sinners. You could tell by his expression that he longed for a return to the reliable practices of the inquisition.

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[1] That’s my new standard. If a meal costs less than the cab fare to the Geneva train station (and the restaurant is not owned by an international corporation), then it is reasonably priced.