A Jaunt in Orvieto

This past weekend, I made the executive decision to not go on a long trip. I love Italy and I love studying the language and I definitely love traveling, but it's all very exhausting. It's a kind of bone-deep weariness that doesn't leave easily. So I spent Saturday in my pajamas, eating Nutella-stuffed French toast and scrambled eggs with Helen and surfing the Internet.

But when Sunday came, it was time for a change of scenery. Despite the complaints of my body, I got myself up before noon for a short trip. We took a late train to Orvieto, a small Umbrian town about two hours away. It was raining, the trains kept getting delayed, and we spent more time traveling than we did in the city itself, but I have to say that Orvieto is one of my favorite places here in Italy. The Duomo of Orvieto is, according to my guidebook, "funky." The paintings in one of its small chapels inspired Salvador Dali, if you should need any evidence for that description. And yes, the chapel was beautiful, but I kept turning towards the entrance of the church, like a desperate little sunflower.

Despite being worth a thousand words, pictures cannot do it justice.

The proportions were perfect, the ceiling deceptively simple...I could probably rapture about it for much longer than you would care to listen. Helen felt the same way about this particular Duomo, which made me feel slightly less crazy for adoring it so much. It was a wrench to leave. To me, it achieved something beautiful: it made me look up and smile. And that made it feel like an actual house of God, rather than just a particularly magnificent building.

Delayed by the Duomo, we didn't have any time to tour underground Orvieto, so we spent our remaining hour wandering the streets before we took the funicolare (cable car) back down to the train station for the long ride back. It was too short a time, but even a small taste of Orvieto was a treat.