Another weekend trip! Europe (and Italy in particular) is so easy to get around. The train system can take you to so many destinations for a very reasonable amount of Euros. For those students studying in Rome in the coming semesters and years, I personally recommend going on weekend trips to other cities around Rome on about half of your free weekends. By free weekends I mean that, through Cornell, you will be going on some truly amazing 3-day to 10-day trips to some of the most famous art and architecture sites of Italy, and so will not always be in Rome. On the times that you do have a chance to explore on your own, I recommend balancing getting to know Rome intimately and getting to see as much of the country as possible.
That being said, I highly, highly recommend Assisi. Especially if you love churches, wine and unbelievable landscapes.
My friend Melinda and I went together to Bastia and Assisi a few weekends back. The first stop of our overnight tour was at the vineyard SAIO. Here we went grape picking and learned about the process of how the winery produced their different types of wines (its all based on the sugar content of the grapes). We started with a tour of the vineyard itself where, along the way, we stole some grapes that had been turned to raisins in the sun – they were so delicious and sweet!
The views from inside the vineyard were fantastic. When we weren’t busy tasting different grapes and learning about the fascinating process of choosing the correct type of grape to create a certain flavor of wine, we were staring at the beautiful landscape of this area of Italy to the northeast of Rome. The Umbria region is famous for its delicious reds and so of course we completed our tour by getting to taste and purchase some of the wines that SAIO produces.
The next morning we got up early to start touring something else this city is known for: its abundance of churches. Even with an early start to the day it would have been impossible to see them all, after 9 churches there were still more we could have seen! One of my favorite churches was the Gothic Basilica di Santa Chiara which had a single rose window, simple facade and huge lateral buttresses.
These buttresses were an extremely impressive thing to stand under, and structurally were a mystery to Melinda and I. We next continued through church after church, stopping in a few leather stores along the way. On the top of the hill is located the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi, which is a world heritage site.
This basilica is a three-part church, with a Franciscan monastery in the center and then an upper and lower church all completed in the 1200s. The complex is massive; visitors are able to see each of the three sumptuously decorated levels and come out on the top side facing the picturesque city.
These visits were amazing and after stopping for lunch to get some pizza, we made our way down to the valley of Assisi called Santa Maria. This extremely flat suburb of Assisi is home to the seventh largest church in the world, the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which is a 15th century church enclosing a 9th century church known as the Porziuncola (an extremely important site to the Franciscans). The Porziuncola is a tiny structure situated directly under the 75-meter high dome, centralized to the plan of the church. The interior is simple yet elegant and not overly adorned, really focusing the attention on this interior building. The exterior of the church boasts an extremely pronounced portico with monochromatic, detailed carving, making us seem extremely out of scale.
The weekend trip to Assisi was a great success. We had a great time learning about wine, exploring the hill town and its shops and making our pilgrimage through the churches of Assisi.
-Lauren