Pillar #3: Romans are somewhat skeptical of technology

This may be too broad a claim to make at this point. I mean, I've yet to see a Roman texting on an iPhone (most all have normal cell phones), or working on a laptop on the tram, and generally speaking they don't seem to be as gadget crazy as we are. Our school has 4 Macs that are shared between 50 students. It could be that the extremely high cost of electricity in Italy is a factor, which is almost double that of the United States. (Not to mention gas prices, which equate to somewhere around $10 per gallon, give or take.)

The only real basis for my most recent observation is my return from a whirlwind weekend tour of Umbria, where we were directionally assisted--sort of--by our driver's TomTom GPS device. Alternate titles for this blog post I considered were, in no particular order: "Italian road maintenance is low on the priority list"; "Italians are horrible drivers (yet manage to avoid accidents)"; or "Romans trust TomTom like Julius Caesar trusted Brutus." As it turns out, GPS technology is not quite as advanced in Italy as it is in the U.S., and combined with a far more complicated road system, it made for an interesting trip. Let's just say round-abouts and weird intersections really confused TomTom and our driver, and there are a LOTS of those between Rome and Umbria.

GPS issues aside, however, it was a truly fantastic trip. Umbria is a very mountainous region of Italy north of Rome between Lazio (Rome's region) and Tuscany (Florence, Siena, etc.), and from what I gleaned from my professor, Umbria is famous for "woody" wine, truffles, pigs (who dig up truffles), and hill towns. Between Friday morning at 6 am and Sunday evening at 8 pm, we quickly visited the towns of Orvieto, Todi, Perugia, Assisi, Spello, Spoleto, and Civita Castellana, which was literally a last minute addition "on the way back to Rome" and proved to be not very fruitful. I'd never been to any of these cities before or to Umbria for that matter, and our objective was to study the armatures and public spaces of these hill towns (see post #2 for an explanation of armatures) in addition to any cool churches, frescoes, mosaics, paving patterns, doors, windows, lights, etc., etc. Needless to say, it was a lot of incredible information to take in during only a few days.

The common link between all these cities is their mostly Roman origins and the fact that they later were all jockeying for power within the Catholic church and control of the Papacy before it settled in Rome. Each had a "Duomo," or cathedral, of various (usually large) size and elaboration, among other churches and religious functions. Not to bore you too much with the details, but it's worth mentioning a bit about each city. Orvieto was great because we arrived at 7:30 am Friday morning and got to see the city waking up. It was surprisingly clean for a Medieval city, and one of the coolest things was the way the various towers and churches were "framed" by the buildings while walking up and down streets. Todi is famous for its large central piazza (with the Duomo) that is L-shaped and has a great view of the valley and surrounding mountains. Perugia is the capital of Umbria (they won out eventually) and has the widest main street of any of the cities we visited (keeping in mind that the narrowest streets can be around five feet wide and the widest are typically 20-25 feet building to building. VERY dense). It runs along the main ridge of the mountain, and the surrounding neighborhoods, or borgs (from which we get bourgeoisie), ring the top of the hill and have steep sloping roads.

After a rainy and foggy Saturday morning in Perugia, we went to Assisi, "a mythical land like Narnia," that had mostly sunny skies just 30 mins south. It was probably my favorite, and as we drove up you could see it white and gleaming on the side of the mountain. It has two separate Catholic orders, the Franciscans after St. Francis of Assisi and the "Poor Clares," founded by St. Chiara (Clare). The two churches/monasteries were on opposite sides of town and linked by the main street that ran through the original Roman forum, where a church had been built behind the some of the surviving columns. The complexity of the plan and the way it climbed the mountain was, to me, the most fascinating part, although it was tiring climbing up and down through all the levels.

In Spello and Spoleto we experienced more of the same types of spaces, but Spoleto in particular was great because we walked to the top of the town behind the fortress to a 13th century stone bridge that crossed a huge ravine and into the woods. A hike in the woods was the last thing I expected to do this semester, but it was really nice to be out in the wilderness for a bit before we returned to Rome.

I will post some pictures once I go through them all, but I will leave you with this from Spoleto.