Orvieto

We made an early departure from Rome, and, despite the cat-herding nature of our bus boarding that we’ve experienced so far, actually managed to get on the road before 9:00am. Our destination is Firenze – that’s Florence to you Anglophones – but we were stopping at the picturesque town of Orvieto on the way.

Orvieto is mainly known for the wine of the same name. The old city has been around since the Etruscan civilisation which pre-dated even Rome. The old city is on a high cliff face, with the more modern city down below, connected by a funicular. We were interested in the old bit, and met our guide at the bus park, who then took us around the city, pointing out interesting things. It has a remarkable cathedral which we were initially unable to enter, as the bishop has some mad idea about running church services in it, of a Sunday. We admired the exterior and continued on our tour. At the end, we arranged a meeting place for later, then all headed off to lunch. Many of us had espied café Montanucci, which served that rare delicacy which has been missing from so many of our meals so far…vegetables! We pigged out on salad and roasted vegetables, augmented with pasta pesto (‘er indoors) and chicken for me. We found that we had just enough time for a ten-minute tour of the cathedral – bumping into Kelly, one of our guides there, so we knew we weren’t late – before rejoining the rest and heading back to the bus.

The walk back to the bus, and a quick look around the ramparts at the town below, actually proved quite exhausting, as temperatures by this stage had climbed to 30°C. The tour had been arranged in springtime specifically to avoid the higher temperatures, but Northern Italy is currently experiencing a spring heatwave, which is expected to last a couple more days, when temperatures are expected to plunge to around 17°C, and rain.

Back aboard the bus, and it was a couple of hours to Firenze. We had to debark a little before reaching the 25Hours Hotel, as it’s in the heart of the Old Town and inaccessible to tour buses. A five-minute walk brought us there, and our luggage arrived separately by minivan.

The hotel is themed around Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the rooms are split into Heaven or Hell. We are all allocated rooms on a Hell floor – the blurb in our room tells us our sin is violence, in the inner circle of the seventh ring of hell. The décor reflects this, with red walls and dim lighting, and Welcome To Hell!!! inscribed on the toilet and shower doors. But everything is modern, and one of the complaints about the last hotel in Rome - the high-sided bath to step into to have a shower - is now obviated with a decent-sized walk-in shower.

We settled in and explored the local area – finding both a pizzeria and a launderette. We’d checked out the hotel’s laundry prices and were resigned to dropping $300 to clean our clothes – but no! the local automat came to our rescue, as did two extremely obliging locals who showed us the ropes, told us how much things cost, and all the rest. The local pizzeria proved extremely helpful too as we were able to sling everything in, walk back to the hotel bar for a quick beer and cocktail, then load the drier and sit eating pizza whilst it did its stuff. We nabbed the penultimate table at pizzeria Centopoveri, and queues were forming outside the door whilst we ate. Top-hole pizza, with a side salad (because you never know when you’re going to see salad again, apparently), and we returned to our hell-hole with bellies full and clothing laundered. Result!