At the end of January I attended a conference near Rome put on by the European Space Agency. The conference was intense but rewarding and I was happy that my presentation seemed to generate a lot of good discussion in the coffee break afterwards. After five days straight of nothing but polarimetric-interferometric-synthetic-aperture-radar presentations though, I was happy to have a weekend in Italy and slowly wean myself off my multiple-espresso-a-day habit.
The flight to Rome was great; I had a window seat and it was a sunny day with a clear view of the Alps.
South of the Alps, Italy is much more green than Germany in January:
Since I’d been to Rome before, I decided to just spend Friday evening there. I managed to reach the coliseum at sunset, although the Roman forum was already closed.
I went for dinner with fellow students from the conference. The Turkish girl on the left thought she was in the Arctic and never pulled her scarf down, not even for the camera! This picture is on the way back to the metro after dinner. The coolest thing about Rome is just turning a corner and being blown away by 2000-year-old buildings such as the Parthenon you weren’t expecting.
The next morning I caught a train to Orvieto, a small Italian town between Florence and Rome built on a hill overlooking Umbria to one side and Tuscany to the other. There was a surprising amount to do there for such a tiny town. They have a long history of occupation by the Etruscans, then the Romans, then Papal rule (the pope sometimes hung out there for a few decades whenever Rome was sacked, since being high on a hill it could be easily defended).
They also have a great tradition of white wine; if you ever get a chance to try an “Orvieto Classico” I’d highly recommend it.
I feel like I had an authentic Italian experience since literally no one except the woman at the tourist information office spoke any English. No French or German either, although I did come a little farther with hastily-modified-Spanish and hands and feet. The most challenging part was convincing my Bed&Breakfast that I’d already paid 20% over the internet. Buying a sandwich in a foreign country is easy. Explaining the intricacies of Internet-online payment schemes, not so simple.
The city’s pride and joy is the duomo: crazily striped in black and white (basalt and travertine):
Inside are Signorelli’s frescoes of the Last Judgement, which supposedly inspired Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Apparently Signorelli depicted a lot of the people in the village getting skewered and wasn’t so popular in town afterwards.
The town was celebrating carnival on the weekend I was there. This is a pretty stereotypical Italian family where the daughter is dressed up and is having fun dumping an entire bag of confetti on the ground. Kids were doing that all weekend. Sometimes, at the encouragement of their mothers, 3-year olds would dump bags of the stuff on each other, at which point I saw one mother prod her kid to get some revenge with an encouraging “Vendetta! Vendetta!”.
And yes, sporting ski parkas appropriate for sub-zero temperatures, sunglasses and smoking cigarettes seemed to the be “the-look” for all Italian males in the town.
All the butcher shops in Orvieto had stuffed a boar somewhere near the door to mark them as such. This guy was hiding around the corner waiting for unsuspecting passer-bys.
One of the coolest things I did in Orvieto was to visit the labyrinth of caves under the city which have been dug out over the past 2000 years for various purposes including drilling for well-water, a cool place for wine storage and olive pressing, dove and pigeon breeding and burial tombs. The entire hill is tufa, a soft volcanic rock, out of which most of the buildings of the town are built. About a hundred years ago though they figured they had better stop digging since they were slowly destroying the town’s foundations. Since then erosion has actually made things worse. After 1999 when a bus literally fell through the street, extensive supports have been built and they started giving guided tours.
Former cellar deep in the underground caves.
Examples of dove cotes where tens of thousands of pigeons were raised. Pigeons were so popular because during times of siege they were an important source of food. Pigeons would fly away every morning to find food in the countryside, but come home every night to nest.
The ubiquitous tufa out of which everything is built.
Back on the outside :
View of the duomo from the tallest tower in town: 
Main street: (a little narrow! Cars, bikes, motorcycles and pedestrians all share the road. Speed limit 20 km/hr. Nobody gets anywhere in a hurry).
Below the town is an ancient Etruscan necropolis with about a hundred tombs laid out in a rectangular grid. It was kind of creepy walking around there completely alone although it was broad daylight. The chambers are open to the public although it was difficult to will myself to go into a damp, dark burial tomb, where for all I knew, some wild animal would be sleeping.
The Etruscans had a written language although unfortunately no books have survived. The only evidence left are scripts such as these identifying who was buried there. 
One such wild animal. The place is crawling with cats although they don’t like to be touched. 
Etruscan bronze artwork. Gives “table leg” a literal meaning…
Sigh; time to head back to Munich. Next to the check-in counters at the airport were these guys who for 10 Euros would cocoon your bag in hundreds of layers of saran-wrap to keep it safe. I’d never seen this before in any other airport and it didn’t exactly give me confidence in the Rome airport authorities, but my bag arrived unscathed.
