The Coolest Bridge You've (Probably) Never Heard Of

Italy is starting to feel long ago and far away, so it's past time I finished blogging about it. This post is about two Umbrian towns: Todi, which Tyler and I visited together after our night at Titignano, and Spoleto, which I went to see by myself on Tyler's last day of measurements in Perugia.

Like Assisi's, Todi's buildings have a remarkably consistent look. Every street in this hilltop town looks much like the one below--i.e., every street is lovely.

Count the arches!

As usual, we found a church tower to climb. The sweep of red roofs in all directions made for beautiful views.



The arches over the doors of the church, like so many in Umbria, were adorned with column after column, each carved in a different intricate pattern.



One of the wonderful things about Italy is that there are drinking fountains everywhere. (All of Germany's decorative fountains have plaques proclaiming them "KEIN TRINKWASSER," and American-style drinking fountains are almost unheard of.) I particularly liked this angry yet helpful duck.



For those interested in sociological aspects of our travels, I photographed this notice board announcing deaths in Todi. Some of them are funeral announcements, some are from families thanking the community for its support in their time of grief, some are memorial notices from societies the deceased belonged to. We saw boards like this one in a few other Umbrian towns, too. I think it's both a nice tradition and a good way to learn some new Italian names.



As you can tell, Todi was very pretty, but not the most stimulating place we visited. The most exciting part of the trip was trying to get home. The train station was at the bottom of the hill, and though there was a bus, we feared that it would get us to the station to late to get tickets. Google told us it would take about 35 minutes to walk down to the station, but not that we would have to walk on the shoulder of a small highway the whole way. When we finally made it to station (with shoes full of plant matter, but otherwise none the worse for wear), the ticket office was closed. A sign informed us that we could buy tickets at a shop on the main square--back up at the top of the hill. Luckily, the conductor sold us tickets on the train with no more reproach than a weary look that clearly said "turisti."

Spoleto's train station is a mere 10-minute walk from its old town, and the slope of the hill it sits on is fairly gentle, so it was the easiest of the hill towns to visit. As you'll see, though, the buildings get cooler the farther up the hill you go. This is a picture of a section of the city wall in which you can see several different building techniques, from several different centuries. The earliest part, the middle-right section where the stones are unshaped, dates from the 1st century BC.



After a lunch of polenta with gorgonzola sauce and roasted vegetables (every bit as delicious as it sounds) I followed the signs for the Roman theater, my first. A church and cloister were built over it some time in the Middle Ages. The church, now an archaeological museum, still stands, taking up about half of the space that used to be the stage.

The back of St. Agatha's Church and the orchestra, with remains of its colorful marble floor still visible.

For a measly two euros I was allowed the clamber all over the benches and run through the tunnels underneath.

A cool column in the yard behind the theater.

The remains of the theater's facade.

I loved the theater, but I was on a quest to find Spoleto's most famous sight, so I soon continued up the hill. Spoleto is just as lovely as Todi, but has a much greater variety of styles.

A house with a fountain built into the facade.

I pulled myself away from churches, piazzas, and interesting twisty streets until I came to a wide promenade encircling the crest of the hill. Only the fortress stands above it, and the whole town is spread out below.

The cathedral, as seen from the promenade.

I followed the promenade around to the back of the hill. With my goal in sight, I went down into this olive grove to get a better look ...



... at the Ponte dei Torri (Bridge of Towers).

View of the bridge from the olive grove. You can only see about 3/4 of its height in this picture. The gorge at the bottom is steep-sided but dry.

The bridge was built in the 13th century, though according to Wikipedia, some scholars think it was built on the remains and to the plan of a much earlier Roman bridge. It connects Spoleto's hilltop to the much higher hill behind the town. The fortress stands above it on the Spoleto side, and a ruined guard tower at the other end.

The bridge is only wide enough for two, maybe three, horses to ride abreast.

View of the bridge and guard tower from the other side.

I spent about an hour walking across the bridge, climbing on the ruins, and gawking at the view from as many angles as possible. Afterward, I still had some time to walk up to the fortress and wander back through the town before my train came.

Wild poppies growing along the road up to the fortress. We were too early to see sunflowers in Italy, but we caught the poppies right at their peak.

Fortress tower and roses

Fortress training yard with Umbrian hills beyond

Flowers growing on the wall above the training yard

I love how you can see the painted ceiling of this covered terrace from below. Quite a few buildings in Florence and around Umbria had top stories like this.

Here is the cathedral and main piazza. The clouds very obligingly made a dramatic backdrop but refrained from soaking me.



The cathedral boasts amazing frescoes by the Florentine painter Filippo Lippi. It is dedicated to Mary, so the fresco at the front depicts important moments from her life: the Annunciation, her death, the Nativity, and her coronation as the Queen of Heaven.



I saw a lot of Annunciations in Italy. I wish I could tell you about all the different formulations of the scene that I observed, but I'll just point out one odd thing about this one: the Holy Ghost is about to strike Mary on the shoulder.

Female prophets, sadly damaged.

I'll leave you with a picture of the floor of the cathedral. At the time I couldn't think where I'd seen something similar, but during our friends' visit last week I realized that it looks rather like the floor of the Aachen Cathedral.

The Maany Sights of Maastricht

A couple of days after Christmas we took Jaren to his fourth country of the trip, the Netherlands. (He claimed to have already been in the Netherlands; we held that the airport doesn't count.) We went to Maastricht, a city of about 120,000 (though it felt larger) on the Meuse/Maas river. According to Wikipedia, Maastricht is the oldest continually inhabited city in the Netherlands (since 500 BC!), and is a member of the exclusive Most Ancient European Towns Network (ha!). Luckily for us, Maastricht is only about an hour away by fairly cheap bus, and has theaters that show movies in English. We'll definitely be going back.

Another great thing about Maastricht is that a very high percentage of its buildings are pretty/cool. In fact, I'd say it has one of the highest percentages we've seen. A lot of the buildings have stair-step facades, like this one.

This is the main square, in which the Christmas market was still going strong (though, in contrast to German Weihnachtsmärkte, it only sold crap). The two churches are Sint-Jans (aka the Red Church) and Saint Servatius Basilica.

We'd read that you can climb the tower of the Red Church for fantastic views. Climbing it was our intention (you know how we are about church towers), but we couldn't find a way in. I suppose it was still closed for Christmas.



I think this doorway was historically the main entrance to Saint Servatius, though it's now closed off to create a little room. I like that it's painted. I've read that other such doorways (like the main entrance to St. Paul's in London) were originally painted, too, but the colors haven't been maintained.



All the churches (and many of the squares) we've visited the past couple of months have had at least one creche on display. Saint Servatius's is one of the more tasteful ones we've seen. I particularly like that Joseph is clearly psyched about Jesus's birth. Most Josephs just kind of stand there looking tired.



We didn't have much on our list of things to see and do in Maastricht, having never been there before, but Tyler had read about an awesome bookstore we had to visit. Yep, this is a bookstore:



Here's the interior. Though it's hard to tell from this picture, much of the ceiling is covered in (damaged) frescoes from its church days. Since most of the books were in Dutch, we didn't spend much time browsing, but it was nevertheless extremely cool.



As is our wont, we'd scoped out a couple of restaurants in advance. This is the back of a bakery where we had a light dinner (which was naturally followed by plenty of heavy treats). Bisschopsmolen has been around since the 14th century, and still uses a mill wheel to grind its own wheat for its breads. Our dinner consisted of bread and cheese and more bread, with a few greens on the side.



The heavy treats we were determined to sample in Maastricht were waffles and frites. On the way back to the bus station we found a frites place with a line out the door. While the boys waited for their frites, I took pictures of the square.



Tyler and Jaren followed the frites guy's recommendations and got theirs with mayo, curry ketchup, and raw onions. I didn't partake because it sounded scary, but they looked quite pleased with the result.



In just a few minutes of "research" for this post on Wikipedia I found out about of lots of other cool things to see and do in Maastricht. (There are caves! And castles!) With all of our trips to bigger, livelier cities, we've been feeling a little down on Aachen lately. Sadly, these trips have also drained our bank account to such a degree that we won't be taking any more for a few months. So we're especially excited to have discovered Maastricht, where we can escape some Saturdays for a change of scenery and to drown our sorrows in waffles.

Minoan Stuff

Note: Our trip to Greece is so breathtaking that we needed to split it into four-and-a-half blog posts to cover it all. This is part three. You can skip ahead to parts four or the epilogue, if you'd like, or you can go back to parts one or two. But take your time--it's really beautiful!

Crete has a tumultuous history, as I indicated in my previous post. Before all those conquests, though, there were the more than 1000 years of (relative) peace and prosperity of the Minoan period. Lasting from about 2700 through 1400 BC, Minoan Crete was Europe's first great civilization. I got to see three different places with significant Minoan stuff--the Archaeological Museum in Heraklion, the palace at Malia, and the palace at Knossos.

The Archaeological Museum was amazing because I got to see in person several artifacts I recognized from textbooks. I managed to restrain myself from photographing every single item in the museum, but just barely.

Here's an artifact you'll probably recognize: the famous Bee Pendant. Apparently the craft for producing those tiny balls of gold in the middle has been lost. Humans don't know how to do that any more, but the Minoans figured out how to do it 1500 years before the birth of Christ.



There was tons of cool pottery, but this piece is probably my favorite.



I couldn't resist including this Minoan board game.



I recognized this guy, too. It turns out he's a very fancy drinking vessel.



The Minoans were into extreme sports. This fresco shows a man bull jumping--doing a somersault on the back of a bull.



Probably most famous of all, the Phaistos Disc! Both sides are covered with hieroglyphics that spiral into the center. Notice the prehistoric mohawk.



In addition to a writing system that still hasn't been deciphered (known as Linear A), the Minoans had great taste in jewelry.



As part of our excursion on Saturday we went to the ruins of the palace of Malia, where we listened for a very long time to our tour guide talk about storage of various foodstuffs, multiple theories for the use of each room in the palace, and the opposing archaeological philosophies of the British/Americans and the French/Greeks. I got the sense that, though the excavators at Knossos in fact made some questionable choices in their restorations there (more on this later), the French and Greeks are mostly pissed because the Brits and Americans got the cooler site. Not that Malia isn't cool--it is, and you're allowed to climb everywhere, so in some ways it's more fun than Knossos. But there was way more left to find at Knossos, including frescoes, walls made of sparkly stone, an actual throne, and rooms with multiple stories.

Without further ado, the palace of Malia.



Nice backdrop, huh?

I went to Knossos by myself on Tuesday, our last full day on Crete. It's a little way outside the city of Heraklion, and can be reached by a (mercifully) cheap bus.

Here is one of the iconic shots of the palace:



This structure nicely illustrates the controversial steps that Sir Arthur Evans, the main excavator of Knossos, took in preserving the site: he did a lot of rebuilding, and he placed copies of frescoes found on the site in new locations. Apparently, just a few years into the excavation, the ruins were getting badly weathered. Something had to be done to protect them. At Malia, the archaeologists used cement very conservatively, just to cap weathered stones, fill in cracks, or stabilize walls. Evans, on the other hand, protected the ruins at Knossos by (in many places) building cement structures that represented his ideas about what the palace originally looked like on top of them. Obviously, there are several problems with this--most importantly that by doing so he imposed his interpretations on all future visitors to the site. That's not my biggest problem with it, though. From this fresco you can see that what he recreated looks quite a bit like at least one contemporary depiction of the palace.



No, my biggest beef with Evans is that he didn't make his buildings pretty enough. From a distance the modern structures look striking, but up close they're totally cheesy. The fact that they're made completely out of cement is painfully obvious. Parts are cement painted to look like wood. Also, there are metal grates and poles, fences, ropes, and roofs all over the place that are rusted and mildewed and cluttering up the views. I also don't like that some of the areas are fenced off so you can't get a close look.

Despite all this, Knossos is still very cool. Also, the signage is excellent. (There's no signage at Malia.) Here are a few of the most interesting parts.



Amphitheater:





Really large pithoi (urns for storing olive and other foodstuffs):



The floor of the throne room (totally original):



A copy of the throne (the original was alabaster):



Drainage:



The "Queen's Megaron":



Road leading to the Minoan town nearby:



Minoan stuff, although not my favorite part of the trip, was very interesting and totally worth seeing.

One final note:
Before I got to Crete, I thought that the labyrinth in the Minotaur myth was real and had been discovered. Sadly, this is not the case. I overheard a tour guide at Knossos talking about theories on the origin of the myth. First, humans and bulls lived together at Knossos (see above re: bull jumping). Second, the palace itself was labyrinthine--there were over 1500 rooms! So some people, at least, thinks that the palace is the labyrinth. I prefer to think that is still out there somewhere, buried, and someday someone will find it.

On to Santorini! Or back to Crete!