Buon giorno,
We are not having our usual apero today because it is October 14, a day I celebrate the Norman Conquest of England, which I imagine is a fairly unpopular thing to do among those who actually think about the matter.
After my underground tour I repaired to the fancy pastry shop to employ my gift voucher. I came away with a piece of chocolate naughtiness called a Sobbriona. The green tea in my cup will counteract the sugar and fat, I'm sure. Let's have a bite. There's a chocolate cookie affair as the base and then two layers of chocolate goo. It's very rich. If you were here . . . well, I still wouldn't share.
The hot water was out again this morning, but my host came and fixed it, and my hostess is looking for a technician to really fix it.
I booked a spot in the English tour for Perugia Sotteranea. Now I happen to have a taste for archeology, and I've done city foundation tours underground in Naples and Lisbon, and they have been fun and informative. Our tour in Perugia takes place right under the Cathedral because that was close to the site of the Etruscan Acropolis. You can see the Cathedral in the photo above. The entrance to the underground tour is just beyond it.
This is the cortile behind the Cathedral where we gathered and began to follow our Guide.
We had to go down many flights of stairs. Now stairs are not my friends, but I wasn't the only elderly person on the tour, and there were handrails, so I was fine albeit a little slow. Most of the tour featured the Etruscans, which is what I was there for, but we also saw a few Roman fragments. On one part of the tour we walked on the stones of a Roman road. The Guide was obviously proud of his city and heritage, and we really needed his commentary to make sense of the stone blocks and vaults we viewed. He also had a tablet from which he could show us some historic recreations of the sites.
Here are a couple of shots where the light was sufficient for me to take a picture.
I learned that in Etruscan Perusia the chief deity was the Goddess Uni whose temple sat at the highest point of the acropolis. Unfortunately the temple and city were burned because Augustus Caesar was offended their support of Marc Antony. Uni is the Etruscan version of Juno or (if you are Greek) Hera.
The tour finished off with us sitting on stools putting virtual reality headsets on. Then we were taken on a fascinating virtual tour of the sites we'd visited including the house of an Etruscan noble, the marketplace, and a. trip up to the Acropolis to see the Temple of Uni.
Once above ground I went to get my pastry. The shop is small but fancy, and the service is not exactly efficient, but I got what I wanted, and boy oh boy was it good! I had to chuckle inwardly because the guy who waited on my did my takeaway order in a an elaborate package including a plastic tray, a wrapping tried with ribbon and a bag. I was all like, Dude the second I get home, I'm going to rip all your hard work apart.
Ciao for now
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