Notes from Perugia

I always promised that this would be an eclectic blog, so - in that vein - here is the latest diary entry of a peripatetic friend of mine, Dino Deconcini. As with each of my entries, may it inspire you to a pleasant experience you might otherwise not have thought of pursuing:

The first thing we see every morning looking out our 4th floor bedroom window is the Campanile di (bell tower of) Santa Maria Nuova, added to the church in the 17th century by a locally renowned architect named Alessi. The church itself was built in the 13th century and rebuilt in the 16th. Our apartment is on the 4th and 5th (top) floors of the adjoining convent cloister, built in the 18th century. A few years ago the owners, the Frati Servi di Maria, closed the church, moved some of their great art to the National museum, and sold off two sides of the cloister to private interests. Franco and Anna C_______, our landlords and now friends, bought the top two floors and did an exquisite restoration - into a 2 bedroom, 2 bath apartment.

When I go upstairs to the kitchen every morning to make coffee and breakfast, the first thing I see out to the Northeast window over rooftops and the deliciously green Umbrian paesaggio, is Mt. Subassio with Assisi on its flank, about 25kms away. From the dining area of the great room on this higher floor, I see the Campanile again and some more rooftops with tiles of varying age and colors of red along with chimneys and TV antennas. The Southeast window overlooks some terraced, overgrown gardens leading up to the massive, medieval city wall with a park at the top. The railing of the park is lined with flower boxes, now blooming bright red, and there is a gazebo where we sometimes go for a picnic lunch. From the terrace where we have breakfast and supper, we look to the Southwest and can see a broad jumble of rooftops, churches with their campaniles, a few construction cranes (mostly involved in restoration projects), and the Palazzo Galenga, the main headquarters and main building of the University for Foreigners, about a 5-minute walk.

Palazzo Galenga was built in the mid 18th centure by the Antinori family, now more famous for fine wine, and sold sometime later to the Galenga-Stuart (as in Stuart dynasty) family. It was acquired by the University a few years after it opened in the 1920's.

Beth and I are both having a good learning experience. I'm at the 5th level on the Linguistic track, which is a bit esoteric but provides a good way to think about the language and hear it spoken extremely well. There are also lots of classes on history, music, art, literature. Beth is on the second level, having started at zero two years ago, and is making very good progress. The University provides more extra-curricular activities than we can absorb--concerts, movies, lectures by eminent authorities, and weekend trips to all over.
See stu@unistrapg.it for more information if you wish. Beth has turned up two other Italian teaching institutions of good reputation, but we have not had time to check them out yet.

Perugia is a neat little city with architectural reminders from Etruscan, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Fascist and modern periods. It was a fortified hill town that seemed to be mainly interested in warfare for most of its life, but now provides every type of desirable peaceful pleasurable product and activity, e.g. numerous museums from the Etruscans to the National Museum of Umbria, with an unsurprising large collection of paintings by Piero Vanucci, aka Il Perugino. Umbria Jazz deserves its worthy reputation and Spoleto is only an hour away. Other music, art and agricultural festivals are going on all over Umbria.

The micro scale is even more interesting. Most neighborhoods are like an upscale village with restaurants, coffee and wine bars, grocery stores, delicatessens, green grocers, pastieros (turning out all varieties of fresh pastas daily), butcher shops, internet points (the fastest growing industry in Italy), clothing boutiques, book stores, arts and craft shops, and on and on. We've gotten acquainted with some of the owners and really enjoy the walking\shopping tours.

Perugia also enjoys a great location on a hill overlooking the Tiber valley--two hours from Rome, 90 minutes from Florence and Urbino, 60 minutes or less or less from Siena, Orvieto, Spoleto, Gubbio, Cortona, Arezzo and a dozen other hill towns and places worth visiting, all reachable by bus and train as well as car. We got around a lot the first two years but are now content to spend spare time just walking around Perugia.