Campi to Arezzo (via Assisi)

Just one night in the lovely town of Arezzo as we travel north. We stop in Assisi for pastries on the way, in a cafe below the very same apartment in which we stayed on a previous trip. Donna, Gary and Bec - look familiar?!

We've accidentally timed our visit to Arezzo with preparations for the medieval Joust of the Saracen festival, and the whole town is decked with flags from the four town districts. 

The main piazza is a hive of industry with deep layers of sand being laid for the jousting on the Saturday night, which unfortunately we'll miss. (We didn't miss the very late night pre-jousting music fest though, half a block away from our accommodation...)

Arezzo Cathedral was stunning. We walked into the back of the church in quiet and gloom, but the altar was beautifully lit, the complete focus of the space. One I won't forget easily. 

Lots of memories on that balcony in Assisi!

 

Band rehearsals 

Termoli to Norcia (Campi)

So the reason that 'Campi' is in brackets is that this tiny, ancient village no longer exists. Most of the buildings continue to hang on to the mountainside, but walls have crumbled, windows gape and, six years after the central Italian earthquakes, weeds are overtaking roadways and growing up through cobblestones. The residents of the village now live in demountables at the bottom of the hill. There doesn't appear to be much hope that one day they might move back.

We stayed just below Campi, further down the hill, at a lovely B&B. Bizarrely, it was almost unaffected, despite being at the epicentre of the Norcia earthquake and only a few hundred metres from Campi.

The rest of the evidence is all around. There seem to be cranes in every village; road works and scaffolding everywhere; demountable shops and homes in every town. These aren't easy places to get to either. Campi is at 700m, on winding mountain roads. Castelluccia, not much more than 10km from Campi as the crow flies but 40km by road, is at 1400m. 

Castelluccia is famous for its wildflowers, and used to have B&Bs and restaurants to cater for the tourists that spring and summer would bring. The photos below show some of what is left. But the residents seem to be determined to keep the town alive - there was a thriving demountable bar and cafe trade, caravans selling local produce, a 'ranch' for local horse rides, and a landing zone for hang gliders. It was an extraordinary couple of days.

The entire facade of the church in Campi has gone

The ridge running horizontally across the mountain is the earthquake slip

Castelluccia 

Locorotondo to Termoli

Last Saturday 10th we left the 'heel' of Italy and started driving north up the east coast, to the town of Termoli. 

On the way we gatecrashed a wedding (thanks Rob for that description!), and checked out the boats and the beach - rows and rows of sun lounges and umbrellas marching for hundreds of metres down the length of the beaches.

Dinner in Termoli that night was a Fawlty Towers performance - don't let the pic below of Col fool you - but at least it was picturesque 😀

Sunday we went road tripping again, up into the mountains in a nearby national park. It was a different world to the coast - winding and steep, with deep shadows and flashes of ancient towns perched precariously on hill tops. We'd need years to even touch the surface of this country.

Locorotondo - Alberobello and surrounds

We're in Norcia this afternoon and it's raining, so I'm catching up on the last few days.

From Locorotondo we had a day's road trip to Alberobello, home of the 'trulli'. These are little dry wall huts with conical roofs. While they dot the whole region, Alberobello has more than 1500 of them clustered together, many in a kind of trullo Disneyland in which the buildings are beautifully preserved but hung all about with souvenir tackiness.

While the area was very pretty, it was impossible to get any sense of the way people used to live. The poster at the bottom of the photos below acknowledges the changes, with an early photo of children playing in the middle and colour shots of today's tourism each side.

The trullo Church of St Anthony of Padua

Sant'Agata to Locorotondo

 

Thursday was a travel day from Sant'Agata to one of Italy's 'most beautiful villages' called Locorotondo, and we were pondering the many contradictions of this country while we drove. 

There's such an attention to beauty - house numbers and letters boxes are detailed and often ornate, banisters and even bars on windows are in intricate swirls. A tiled border around external plumbing has an edging of stylised flowers. But the electrical wiring is a tangled spaghetti mess tacked to the building; there are new travertine marble steps in stairwells where the paint has been peeling since the 1700s; numerous whole bags of litter dumped by the highway, a reflection of Italy's ongoing battle with waste disposal; and unfinished buildings - multi-story carparks, office blocks - standing derelict in the middle of fields. 

Then we got to Locorotondo. The old town circles the top of a hill with views over the surrounding countryside. There are white cobbled steps and alleyways, big pots of geraniums and jasmine in bloom everywhere, tiny chapels like miniature jewels opening straight on to the streets. There's nothing that's not beautiful. 

Sant'Agati dei Goti - Palace of Caserta

We spent Wednesday at the Palace of Caserta, bigger than Versailles and about half an hour from Sant'Agata and a little east of Naples.

The palace itself was magnificent - all marble and frescoes and chandeliers - but 'the park' was equally so. Cascades and fountains run more than three kilometres in a long alley to the foot of a man-made waterfall (and funnily enough, more than three kilometres back again as well...)

Fashion shoot among the tourists

War damage is still evident in the chapel

The waterfall at the end of the basin is 
still a couple of kilometres away

Looking back from the waterfall to
 the palace

Sant'Agata dei Goti

 

Lovely quiet day today wandering the streets, grocery shopping, some bike riding (Col posing below 😀) and taking in the views of Sant'Agata.