Day 346: Assisi via Spoleto

Out at 10am, heading further south-east into the hills. After an hour or so we crossed out of Tuscany and into Umbria, the hilly province of central Italy. Ironically, this actually wasn't too far from where we'd been a couple of weeks earlier with our previous car (Ravenna, Ancona etc).

First stop for the day was around midday in the town of Spoleto. Just outside town is a list entry for our second-longest running site visit - the Longobards of Italy. This world heritage "site" has multiple locations, some of which we'd visited back in early September 2017 in the north of Italy.

Here we visited a small church in the centre of a graveyard which had been standing since the 8th century. It was quite underwhelming, sadly, since you couldn't go inside (though we knew this in advance) after an earthquake had done some damage. The earthquake had been in 2012 but hey, nothing happens that quickly here.

Went into the town itself for lunch which was semi-interesting, though we've seen nicer Italian towns. I was a bit annoyed as well because clearly the town's marketing department had gotten the World Heritage site memo but missed the bit about it just being a tiny church a few kilometres outside town, as there was signage everywhere about how Spoleto is a world heritage town and all that sort of thing. A little frustrating, because it's blatantly not true! Alas.

Had lunch at another pizza slice place (these are literally everywhere and very popular), then headed on. Next stop was our final entry on the Longobard journey, a temple in the town of Clitunno. It had apparently been converted from a temple to Minerva in the 4th century, and then renovated with Longobard decorations in the 8th century. Definitely more interesting than the earlier spot, but still a little underwhelming. It's been a very esoteric site this one, since knowledge of the Longobard kingdom is fairly scant and disparate. Hopefully that doesn't come across too much in the video.

Drove another 45 minutes or so to our digs for the night just outside Assisi where for the first time yet we had a problem - we couldn't find it! It was the right street number, and matched the pin location between google maps and Airbnb, but we were standing in front of an apartment building which clearly looked nothing like what we'd booked. Called up the hosts who came to get us - we were only a hundred metres away from their driveway entrance, but I don't know why they haven't provided clearer instructions! Surely this would happen every time.

Oh well. Checked in to our little apartment - small but comfortable enough. Despite being on the edge of a small city (Assisi), the internet connection is really crappy and basically unusable. Thankfully the 3G reception is decent and we can both do tethering!Read more