One Man’s Grand Tour of The City Part I

The town itself isn’t large with fewer than 6000 inhabitants on top of the cliff. While there are many other towns that would claim your interest, this one is special. You may have been on your way to Rome and suddenly there’s this cliff rising up over the valley. It might be spring, the trees along the river are a soft feathery green and violets are nestling in the grass below. Something calls you, a lure to get you to stop hurrying to some other place. So take a break as you decide to explore what lies on top of that rock, presuming there’s a way to get there. There is of course. The cable car that takes you from down below to Piazza Cahen at the top immediately raises a question in your mind. Why that name, which is obviously a form of Cohen, and you wonder what happened to the Cahen family when the racial laws became effective.

So you are at the top and most of the other passengers hop on a small bus to the Cathedral. “I don’t think it’s all that far” you think, “and I do have two feet and two eyes. I’ve been sitting for too long. Why not walk?” The three roads all seem to be going in the same direction and you opt for the road on the left up which the bus just left.  Passing houses with rose bushes in full bloom on either side of the entrance and trees in full leaf leaning out over the street, on the right there’s a lone structure set back from the street. You ask a passerby what it is and they tell you it is the ASL, or health clinic. Stairs with railings and plots left to grow wild lead up to the stairs. Tall grasses, possibly wild oats, are waving in the breeze and there are clusters of blue flowers, possibly bugloss, and yellow starbursts. There is also bladder campion, with the much more poetical name of maidenstears, and an occasional flaming poppy. Your mind immediately goes to Dürer’s watercolor of turf with its grasses and plantain. Behind you a lady is crossing the street, her brown curly-haired poodle in tow, well, seems to you it’s the poodle who has her in tow, as they head for a walled -in area with lots of trees. A dog park. How nice.

But you do want to see what that rather gaudy cathedral you’ve read about looks like and hurry along. ”It won’t take me all that long”, you think, “and I can catch the evening train to Rome”. But as you continue your walk, it gradually sinks in that you’ll probably need more than just the rest of the day.  Time has a way of stretching out or shrinking and what you thought was a day eventually becomes a week and then a month as you find yourself embarking on what might be called a private Grand Tour as you follow in the footsteps of the Grand Tour travelers of the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. They had horses and coaches, which struggled up the steep road to the top and for their excursions some even brought their own English roast beef. Yet even if they didn’t put much faith in Italian cuisine, they discovered the hospitality of the inhabitants, just as you do now, when you decide to get a cup of coffee and ask how far it is to the main piazza. Charles Dickens would have been a good role model. “If you are good-humored to the people about you, and speak pleasantly, and look cheerful, take my word for it you may be well entertained in the very worst Italian Inn, and always in the most obliging manner, and may go from one end of the country to the other (despite all stories to the contrary) without any great trial of your patience anywhere. Especially, when you get such wine in flasks, as the Orvieto, and the Monte Pulciano.”  The antiquities Dickens and those forebears were searching for were generally those built by the Romans, but you, like Dickens must learn to be interested in everything around you.