April 13th-16th - Passignano/Assisi


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April 16th 2009
Published: April 25th 2009
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View across the water from our campsite beach
Easter Monday dawned fine again, it’s been 9 days since we had any rain and the weather has been great. There was a queue to leave the campsite again but that was ok, they even refunded our unused bus tickets - bonus! The drive to Passignano was only another 80km and we had managed to successfully avoid toll roads since Pisa, a decision we had consciously made to try and enable us to see more of the countryside. The drawback is that the roads are nowhere near as well maintained even though a lot of them are still motorways. It was worthwhile trying to dodge the poorly repaired sections as they tended to rattle the bones a bit. We drove out of Tuscany and into Umbria but the landscape didn’t change much, a few more green leaves on the trees and a few big yellow fields of rape made it a bit more colourful but it was still a bit hazy. Our campsite was a couple of kilometers out of Passignano and had only opened for the season the week before so it was very quiet. (except for the managers dog that barked at anything walking past!) I donned the shorts
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View from the fields below
and we kicked back in the sun with a cold Heineken - bliss.
Another warm day followed the last 9 and we decided to take a day trip to St Francis’s town of Assisi 30 odd kilometers away. There had been something that both of us had thought about but never dared to mention during our 13 000km of travel so far, for fear of jinxing our good fortune. Unfortunately our cautiousness/superstition didn’t pay off and the rough road took it’s toll on one of our tyres on the motorway. Luckily we found a place to pull over at on on-ramp, it was our right rear and the spare was serviceable, although lying on the ground in front of the van on the side of a busy road to retrieve it gave a little cause for concern. Anyway the change went without a hitch and we were moving again before any polizia noticed we didn’t have the mandatory emergency triangle on board. Assisi was another walled, medieval town built on the side of a hill whose claim to fame was St Francis and the Franciscan Order of Minors who had a dramatic effect on Italian art due to the highly
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Town square, Piazza del Comune.
embellished Basilica created for him (after his death) in the 14th century. He is the patron saint of animals (so Trudy’s best friend), and liked to retire from the world periodically by incarcerating himself in order, according to one of his biographers, to chase out ‘from the soul the tiniest speck of dust left in it by contact with mankind’, - hmmm. The Basilica is actually a group of buildings consisting of two churches and St Francis’s Tomb which are all open to the public. The upper church, the Basilica Superiore, is tall and light with frescoes depicting the Crucifixion and St Francis’s life, while the lower church, the Basilica Inferiore, is dark and sombre with many more frescoes adorning the walls. The tomb below was more sombre still with a constant steam of both tourists and mourners. Overall it was a most impressive set of buildings with the dozens of frescoes very interesting and very well preserved. Assisi itself was a nice town and has a temple in the central square dating back to the 1st century BC. The hillside setting was also quite picturesque but made most of the streets really steep, a good days exercise. We drove
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The 1st century BC temple, Tempio di Minerva, in the central square - converted to a church in the 13th C.
back to the campsite with no further ado and enjoyed a quiet night virtually alone.
Next morning, with the help of the campsite manager, we found a shop in Passignano to repair our tyre which unfortunately was stuffed and needed replacing and after that spent the rest of the day relaxing and blogging at the campsite. The lakeside there was quite shallow and murky so unfortunately not much good for swimming, otherwise I may have been tempted - honest!
After a relaxing time at the lake we took off the next morning (Thursday) for Rome hoping that the Easter crowds will have dissipated.



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Street leading down to St Francis Basilica
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The famous rose window on the upper church
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Basilica di San Francesco


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