Our Bonus Day In Umbria: Foligno, Bevagna and Spello

"All Journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware" - Martin Buber

The gently rolling landscapes of Umbria, of farmland and ancient towns, deserve as much time as can be spared. Due to a lucky mistake we still had another twenty four hours in Umbria after we left Perugia, having booked train tickets to Rome from Foligno a day later than I had planned. We decided to stay in Foligno for simplicity and it was a very useful base with good bus and train links

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We did manage to get completely ripped off by a taxi driver who failed to turn on his meter and demanded 15euro for a short ride across town. We wrote this off as stupid tourist tax but when we told the lovely lady at our hotel reception she rang the taxi company and gave them a piece of her mind.

Foligno

We decided to spent half the day in Bevagna, which is a beautiful typical Umbrian town except that it is mercifully flat, unlike lovely Spello, where we ended the day climbing like mountain goats. In retrospect we should have done it the other way around.

Outside the walls of Bevagne we enjoyed wandering through a shady park with beautiful trees and terrific play equipment. The weather was truly beautiful. We have heard lots of complaints about how mild the weather has been this summer but you will hear no complaints from us. I was originally expecting our time in Italy to be very hot and uncomfortable but we have been very lucky.

Bevagne is a town for strolling, easy and compact, as if designed for wandering, soaking up the serene atmosphere, window shopping and enjoying gelato.

 Lunch was a memorable experience with lovely wine and scrumptious fresh grilled meat, vegetables and homemade pasta in a restaurant called La Trattoria di Oscar. The kids spent most of our lunch break entertaining a baby at the next table and later when we walked past the same family in the street the bubby giggled with glee making us all smile.



Walking through Bevagna feels like stepping back in time, a feeling aided by the comparative absence of tourists in the street.

We briefly visited two Romanesque churches dating to the end of the 12th century, St Michael Arcangel and St Sylvester. It is funny how rather than having to convince the kids to visit the churches it is them who lead us in, even now after all this time on the road.

After catching a bus back to Foligno we hopped on a train to Spello and after a bit of a walk from the station we arrived the foot of the village. 

We didn’t make it the whole way to the top of the town in Spello. We kept being diverted by cute shops selling everything from wholefoods, smallgoods, tourist tat and works of art.

In a square halfway through the town we found groups of well dressed older locals sitting on park benches enjoying an evening chat. Back home in Fremantle we have long noticed similar groups sitting together on park benches in their Sunday best. Rob told me years ago that he aspires one day to join their ranks with his mates, most of whom he has known since primary school or earlier, sitting discussing the state of the world and debating how it can be set to rights.

A highlight of our visit to Spello was a visit to the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, particularly the Cappella Baglioni. Sorry to say but I could not photograph this marvellous chapel painted by Pinturicchio, this masterpiece brought tears to my eyes. I paid only 2 euro to enter and the kids planned to stay with Rob for a rest but the lady told me that I should take them and let them in for free. I'm so glad she overcame their objection, I think perhaps they have had enough "art" to last a while now, but they really enjoyed it also. The chapel is screened from view from the outside but inside this helps create a feeling of being immersed in the paintings. The kids and I looked into the faces of these very lifelike people and were transfixed. After we left Emma and Julian wanted to buy postcards to remember these beautiful paintings.

Off to the side of the town square we found a terrace with panoramic views over the Umbrian countryside. We had planned to walk to the top of the town then eat dinner in Spello and catch a train home but found ourselves very tired and so we decided to throw in the towel and catch a taxi home and eat at our hotel. It turned out to be a very good idea after all.

Our hotel, Albergo Le Mura, had a wonderful restaurant with a wood fire inside the dining room where wonderful dishes we cooked for all to see. The kids were watching the chef mesmerised as the chef worked his magic.

He would take bread dough and place it in a heated cast iron clamp that looked like a sandwich press. There were two hinged circular disks that flattened the dough out paper thin and the whole thing was placed close to the fire to cook. The flat bread was then removed and sliced in half and filling such as prosciutto and cheese added then after popping the top piece back on it was back into the fire for a minute to warm the fillings. The kids excitement must have been obvious as he made them one to try and brought it over for us to share at it was delicious.

We decided to order at random from the menu which was in Italian but we could have had it translated by the attentive waitress but decided it could be fun. Mine turned out to be a huge baked fish and grilled vegetables which was delicious, Emma had a pasta that was seasoned with chili but she managed to eat and enjoy most of it. Rob ended up with guinea fowl, which the waitress mistakenly translated as pigeon but hastened back to correct herself. I think he enjoyed it even more once he knew it wasn't pigeon as we have seen rather a lot of scrawny looking pigeons on our travels.

After dinner we showed photos of our wood fired oven at home to the chef and he gave us a book about his cooking method to take home with us which was very kind. All in all it was a very lucky day when I mucked up our booking on the Trenitalia website, one of those things that was obviously supposed to happen.