The chronicles of Narni

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Mini day trip to Narni today. Narni used to be known as Narnia, and about a century ago a young man named Clive Staples Lewis saw it in his atlas and thought it would make a pretty good name for a magical kingdom. The real Narni is almost as enchanting. Part of it is medieval, and they've certainly striven to maintain that if-she-weighs-more-than-a-duck-she's-made-of-wood-and-therefore-a-witch charm about the place.

At this point you're thinking, holy sweet fancy Moses, she jumped right to the point of the story instead of rambling about breakfast and how finding all those dead flies in her bedroom probably means that she should have a shower but then she didn't, and then she saw a dog on the road...she's finally figured out how to tell the events of a day in a way that's interesting!



Hahahahahaa....no.



The plan this morning was to have our usual yoghurt and fruit breakfast and coffee and head out by nine. Other than once mentioning that we blew up a stove top, I don't think I've mentioned what the standard of coffee making is over here. It is a sophisticated species of cowboy coffee. There is a little jug-thing, made of metal, and you unscrew the bottom and pack it with ground coffee, then you pour water around the coffee area, screw the thing back together, then put it on the burner until the water has been forced up into the top chamber through the ground coffee, making drinking coffee. While it is doing this, it sounds like a jet engine chopping its way through a flock of geese. The end result of all this noise and sometimes explosions is two cups of coffee for four people.

Since I seem to be taking inventory of things about our arrangement that are not convenient, here're a few others to flesh out the experience (and I'm trusting the pictures I've been posting of the area all along to flesh out the wonderful aspects of the experience):

The acoustics are extraordinary. It is very echo-y, so that you can hear exactly what's happening in any of the three bathrooms, but not what the person in the next room is saying

There is no colander/pasta strainer, salt or pepper, towels, ice cube trays, toilet paper hangers/dispensers

The laundry machine got jammed with all of Geoff's clothes inside today, yet to be solved

The table and chair height is depressingly mismatched, so that my legs (which now resemble the size, shape and consistency of pillowcases stuffed with overlooked pasta), jam up into the table and upset everyone's wine glasses

There are other things, but the benefits of staying in this wonderful place still far outweigh the few inconveniences of life here.



So we got on the road and had a nice drive to Narni, stopping in a small town and checking out a church on the way (did I even need to write that? Can we all just assume it's a given?). The weather today was less nice, eighteen and raining in the morning, and low twenties with sun in the afternoon. My dad does this really cute thing when the weather starts to clear where he reports on whether there's blue sky visible yet every forty five seconds.

Narni is an interesting town with a history of being conquered by a few peoples, including the Romans. It prospered in the middle ages, and it is this look that has been maintained. Wonderful cobblestone streets, banners, iron brackets for street lights. It's also a university town, to which it owes its creepy-hip cafes. It took us a lot of pop-in, look around, run for the doors before we found a little hotel at which to eat. The tiny dining room boasted almost no natural light, no people, and the most sullen server ever to darken the door of service. Oh and the centerpiece of the table was a small furry fox surrounded by winter foliage. However, the menu looked tasty, so we stayed. It turned out to be a good decision, as the server perked up and the food was good. Dad tried the classic regional pasta dish, manfricoli, which is not, as I first guessed, frittered man, but a thickish spaghetti cut in 10 cm pieces. It was very good.

We also went to the Duomo, or main church in town. It was by far the creepiest of all the churches I've entered on this trip, which if you've been following, is saying something. It dates all the way back to the seventh century and is really dark, with weird art, and crypts and it's just all kinds of creepy.

So after getting my skin to crawl back on, we went for a nice walk around the village, and then set off to the nearby Porte d'Augusto. What is that? It is defined thusly: The Roman Bridge of Augustus (Porte d'Augusto) was built in 27 BC, and was one of the two tallest road bridges ever built by the Romans, along with the Alcántara Bridge in Spain (ca. 42 m high). The Narni Roman bridge was 160 m long and its remaining arch is 30 m high. Stylistic considerations suggest that it was restored, like the Via Flaminia itself, in 27 BC. The Via Flaminia was an ancient roman road of enormous importance. It starts at Porta del Popolo in the Aurelian Walls of Rome: Via del Corso (Via Lata), which connects the Campidoglio to the gate, can be considered the urban stretch of the Via Flaminia. The road then runs due north, considerable remains of its pavement being extant under the modern road, passing slightly east of the site of the Etruscan Falerii (Civita Castellana), crossing the Tiber into Umbria. From there it made its way to Ocriculum (Otricoli) and Narnia (Narni), where it crossed the Nera River by the largest Roman bridge ever built, a splendid four-arched structure.

The importance of the ancient Via Flaminia is twofold: during the period of Roman expansion in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, the Flaminia became, with the cheaper sea route, a main axis of transportation by which wheat from the Po valley supplied Rome and central Italy; during the period of Roman decline, the Flaminia was the main road leading into the heartland of Italy: it was taken by Julius Caesar at the beginning of the civil war, but also by various barbarian hordes, Byzantine generals, etc. A number of major battles were therefore fought on or near the Via Flaminia, for example at Sentinum (near the modern Sassoferrato) and near Tadinum (the modern Gualdo Tadino). In the early Middle Ages, the road, controlled by the Eastern Empire, was a civilizing influence, and accounted for much of what historians call the "Byzantine corridor".

The bridge began to collapse in ca. 1050: today, only one of the arches survives, although the rudiments of the others can be seen in and beside the river. The view of the bridge is extremely romantic and among the many artists who painted it the best known is Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot whose famous 1826 painting, "The Bridge at Narni", hangs in the Louvre. The standing remains of the bridge have been restored and cleaned in recent years, and lights mounted for viewing at night.

The bridge looks brand new because of the recent refurbishment, and even after a couple hours of research it's not clear to me whether every stone of the standing structure is ancient roman or whether those poor boobs in the middle ages were able to contribute anything. The large pieces of fallen bridge give a better representation of the natural state of the stone, I think.

After climbing up a piece of the ruin and soaking it all in, we drove back home for "feets up" and a delicious dinner, followed by the first movie of our trip, Margin Call, a good depiction of a fictional stock market crash.

Tomorrow is our last day in the villa before we drive back to Florence (in some delirious previous post I had written Vienna, but if I took time to correct all my past typos there'd be no time to blog), and then we take the train to Paris, which I'm incredibly excited about. It will be so nice to be able to communicate a tiny bit. One of the priests today only spoke italian and French, no English, and it was so nice to be able to follow a few words instead of none.



Important counts from today:

Dead flies in my room: 8. I really should have a shower. Not only is my stench attracting flies, it's then perversely killing them



Desserts: 3. Cream puff after lunch, Cherry gelato and Vienetta ice cream (which always makes me think very fondly of my grandparents Harley and Lavone) after dinner

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Photos

Outlook from the town of Lugnola
Town signs have a strike through the name of the town, leading to our hypothesis they serve to tell you where you're not.

Comments

[Auntie Jeanie]

The coffee thing...
...is it a percolator? It sounds just like the item used by my parents to make coffee as long as I knew them. I love the perking sound - very companionable.

[Lavone Jansen]

Mary, we're loving these blogs !