Perugia

Yesterday I moved my base to a town called Foligno, which is in Umbria. The train took around 4 hrs and I had to switch trains once. It was a rainy day, so a good choice for traveling. My new hotel room is very abnormally (for Italy) spacious, except for the shower which, as has been the case with all the showers thus far, is super small. As in smaller than even a motor home shower. It is like showering in a tube.

Today I toured Perugia. It was located on the top of a big hill/mountain. When I got off the train I headed to the tourist info office, only to learn it was located on the top of the mountain, far from the station. So I had to figure out how to get there and began walking uphill. MAJOR uphill. I ran into a couple of women who explained it was a long way & inadvisable to walk and they explained there was a "mini metro" I should take. Basically a monorail but tiny car, similar to a ski lift cable car. When you arrived at the end of the end of the mini metro line, you then had to take a funicular up to the top of the hill to enter the historic town center. Thank God I met those women! Why they don't have an information booth of some sort at the train station is beyond me. Or how about a poster written in English and a couple of other major languages that explains how to get to the tourist area?

I started wandering around the area and found a couple of the things I wanted to see, right as they were closing for the midday break. If I lived here I might like the midday break but as a tourist it is a pain. Outside the Duomo (Cathedral) I heard a couple speaking English and I pounced on them to see if they had any info about who to see. It turns out they are from Australia and are traveling for 3 months in Italy and have been here a couple of times previously. The takeaways from our conversation were that their experiences this trip were basically congruent with mine:
- Italians are not very friendly
- they see trash and grafitti everywhere and said the trash & graffiti in Sicily is absolutely horrific, as in piled high and graffitti covering everything
- little English is spoken (but they believe it to be purposeful)
- lots of begging and hustling taking place by migrants, who appear to be from somewhere in Africa
- they find that a lot of things here are fairly backwards, particularly with regard to tourism revenue
So they basically confirmed my experiences and I found that reassuring. They feel that it is largely due to the fact that it is a poor country, fairly high unemployment (around 11-12%), and that people are angry & anxious. I might add that, while I did prompt them on some points, they rapidly & enthusiastically agreed with the things I had noticed. They said this was very different from their previous trips here.

I toured a palace that had been turned into an art museum, another church, and then spent time just wandering the streets.Read more