Orvieto or Bust

...seems like every day we spend going to a town or a city, I end up exhausted by the time we return to La Romita. There's just so much to see and I can't keep myself from exploring. We spent all of today in Orvieto. Our first stop was an area of Etruscan tombs... which was both creepy and cool. Just to see where the Etruscans buried their dead and to see how weathered yet preserved these tombs were was amazing. [group photo of almost everyone at the Etruscan tombs... where was Megan?]

Once we arrived inside Orvieto, our first stop was the Duomo. The zebra stripes were reminiscent of Duomo in Siena, but the frescoes inside this one were much more captivating. Portraying the events of the Last Judgment, these paintings by Signorelli wrapped around an entire room in the Duomo.

After the Duomo we had some time to explore the city and eat lunch. We found a nice pizzeria that wasn't too expensive, more of a hole-in-the-wall, but it was under five Euros so it was worth it. Later there was gelato as usual, and Sarah and I tried these really weird Spider-Man jelly sticks. Think gelatin in popsicle form. We then went on a journey to an old well near the edge of the city... there were four-hundred some steps and Sarah, Megan and I went all the way to the bottom and came back up. [image from the bottom of the well looking up] We encountered Jamie along the way, but because of the way the well was designed we could only find her on the way back up. The staircases were stacked one on top of the other so that people going down would not encounter people going up. Once back at the top, I got a picture of the group that had gone down before us while they were still recuperating from the climb [last image].

The bus ride back to La Romita was a quiet one. Or at least it was for me, as I slept the whole way. Dinner was great, as always, and then we watched a slide show about the history of the school and monastery here. It's so surreal to be in a country with so much history. Most of these buildings have existed in some form longer than the United States. It's going to be interesting to see how I look at our architecture when I return.