Called on account of rain

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We've stayed in Rome instead of heading to Orvieto for the sole purpose of seeing the Pope lead a procession celebrating the stations of the cross on Easter Friday. The cool bit is that makes a speech in front of the colisseum next to a flaming cross, then leads the cross inside, simulating the stations along the way. As cool as this sounds, I found some pictures on the internet and it seemed a bit prosaic. Cool or not, the damned thing got rained out. Instead of going, we grabbed desserts and liqueur and headed of to Orvieto a day early.

Our train trip and subsequent ride from the city were uneventful, and dinner that night at Nigel's was fantastic. Several courses with plenty of wine topped by a good torta ricotta and better scotch sent us all to bed warm, sated and happy. Despite the next day's rain, I bullied the others into going into Orvieto for a look around. It's a small medieval town on top of a hill, with a distinctive striped brick cathedral. The exterior of the cathedral is covered with ornate architecture and statuary, and I do mean covered. The standard hallmark of Italian churches is attention to detail, but the Orvieto cathedral takes it to an amazing extreme. Very impressive. The interior is also a bit abnormal, with an emphasis on hell. A chapel off to the side depicts judgement day, replete with demons torturing the damned in several creative and explicit ways. Very dantesque; creepy and disturbing. It was a nice change from the standard Maddona and Child and lives of the saints.

After the cathedral, we strolled through the town, getting a nice dose of tiny streets and medieval architecture. As a finale, we visited a small church on the opposite side of town from the cathedral. It had a bunch of clearly quite old frescoes that I'd guess to be pre-Renaissance. Although the cathedral was large, ornate and creepy, I liked the smaller church much better for its simplicity and antiquity. We'd of liked to stayed longer, but the Easter celebration had started and we felt a bit out of place. We stropped out and down the mountain, had another great dinner at Nigel's, and waited in vain for Easter fireworks. For some reason they didn't launch.

The next morning was too rainy to do anything but eat, so eat we did. All day long. Eat eat eat. It was great. Back to Rome!

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