Another lovely day!

 

Ciao!

(NOTE:  I wrote this on Wednesday afternoon, but for some reason, the computer was really having a tough time.  No idea why, but now at 1:34 am things seem to be fine!)

Up this morning about 7:00 (that is when I woke up…no telling when early bird Robert got up!)

to find that Robert was working away on Caltech business.  It had rained during the night, and was continuing on during the morning.  In fact, the forecast for the day was for rain on and off.  It had been forecast the same way for several days now, and fortunately, we’ve been really lucky, but today looks rather like one of those all-day kinds of rain.  

Beautiful cloister in Tuscania

Beautiful carving!

I like these sea creatures!

And as always, my lion!

Beautiful metal work

View of countryside from Tuscania

Oh my ...

R's steak and chips!

My pasta with sausage & onion

R's sour cherry and ricotta cake

My Happy Cake!

We had a nice breakfast – salami, prosciutto, bread, cheese and blood orange juice.  Yum!  Then, I settled down with the maps to plan out today, and Rcontinued to work.  He was busy until about 10:00 am at which time we decided to head out to the Tuscania museum, which isn’t far from here.  By the time we got to the street the rain had stopped, although everybody (including us!) seemed to have their umbrellas in hand.  

It was only about 20 minutes to Tuscania, and again, another beautiful small city!  (Whoever knew about these places – Tarquinia, Tuscania – stunningly beautiful and not overrun with tourists!  Who knew?!) The museum was at the north end of town on the top of a hill.  Easy to spot from a distance, and lots of nice parking in front of it.  And, for some reason not understandable to us, all we had to do was sign in the welcome book and put down our place of residence, and we were in – free!  How nice!!

Turns out, the museum is located in a former convent that had become vacant sometime in the 1960’s. The city had decided they wanted to turn it in to an Etruscan museum, but weren’t making very much progress – until a devastating earthquake hit in 1971!  Then, it was either emergency build or everything was coming down. Fortunately, they chose to rebuild, and have done an excellent job.  There is a lovely cloister, open to the sky, with stunning frescos of St. Francis of Assisi working his miracles.

Most of the content of the museum came from necropoli immediately surrounding Tuscania.  In fact, there are so many sarcophagi that they really ran out of room in the museum – and have therefore taken to putting them in public spaces around town!  What a great idea!  The necropoli that have been excavated were mainly the final resting places of three or four very powerful city families.  In fact, in one case, the names on the sarcophagi were able to be followed through four generations of one of the families.  And these necropoli were literally quite stuffed with sarcophagi!  As we toured through the various rooms, it did occur to me that if I had been the archaeologist first excavating one of these Tuscanian tombs, how weird would it be to have only a flash light for light, and there were all these folks on the tops of their resting places, just waiting to have a feast with you!  I can imagine them saying:  You’re late! What kept you?  Weird…

From the museum, we headed to one of the necropolis – and it was closed!  On the gate is says they are open Tuesday-Thursday 10:00 am – 12:00 pm. And, of course, we were there on Wednesday at 11:50 am and the gate was locked.  So, don’t know if the “-“ between Tuesday and Thursday” meant that those were the only two days they were open, or if they were open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  Hum…So think we may try back there tomorrow morning.  

From Tuscania, we decided to see if we could find Aquarosso, which we had learned about yesterday at the Viterbo museum.  Robert very accurately managed to get is to the spot, but again – only open on Saturday and Sunday.  So…headed back to Viterbo for lunch!  I do want to comment that, all this time, since breakfast, there hasn’t been any rain at all, and the day has turned nice and warm! Yeah!  [The weather forecasters here, it seems, are just as good as those at home.  – R]

Lunch.  Tried first Tres Re, but they had just been visited by a very large tour group, so no space for us. So, headed back to the Osteria del Vecchio Orologio where we had had dinner the other night.  Nice and crowd free and excellent service.  We started with their cheese, salami and bean (?) plate for starters. It was amazing!  Only one cheese, but salami, and prosciutto and several different types of sausage.  There was also something that turned out to be fried pizza!  Whoever heard of that??  It was absolutely FABULOUS – like a fresh donut but salted and much better! We also had a nice bottle of white wine and several bottles of sparkling water.  

For mains, R had a steak (from a Maremma cow!!) which was cooked rare, and served with homemade potato chips.  He ate every bite!  I ordered their spaghetti with sausage and onion.  It was very chewy, but honestly, after the starter plate, I didn’t have a whole lot of room for anything else … except for dessert, of course!

I ordered their Happy Cake which had such an intriguing title!  Turns out that it was a dense chocolate cake with apricot jam and cream anglaise.  YUMMY! Rhad their sour cherry and ricotta cheese pie, which was also excellent. I can tell we are now both through for the day as far as eating is concerned!  Wow!

Back in the apartment, and Rheaded for a nap.  I want to finish and post the blog and then take my nap, so that R can have the computer all afternoon.  So, take care, lots of love, and more later!

m

xxx

Footnote: Again, we are struck by the fact that so much of what we see of the Etruscans really relates to the funerary of the aristocracy.  So little remains of the Etruscan villages that we do not have a sense of how the normal people lived.  Unlike other early cultures, the Etruscans left almost nothing in writing. Very tough to get a feeling for this.