Day 13: Sunday, May 4, Rome/Assisi

Today started with a trip to the Scottish Presbyterian Church in Rome. It was a very small and very diverse church. About 1/3 of the church were African natives (i.e. not Italian-born Africans). Others were from all over. There were about 12 visitors including us. They had a guest pastor in from Geneva because their own was at a conference. The liturgy was surprisingly similar to that of my own church back home in some ways. They did something that was also done at the American Church in Paris – they had a “children’s sermon” in the middle of the service. It’s a 5/10-minute kids’-level talk.

After that we booked it to the train station and hopped on a train to Assisi. I should have explained this before, but I was in Italy for about two weeks with a Texas A&M trip the summer before my freshman year. The travel, etc. was all prearranged. That made this my first Italian train trip as my own guide. We had to switch trains somewhere but we realized we didn’t know for sure where. Our ticket said Orte, which from a map was about halfway between Assisi/Rome and was a train hub, but the conductor said we switched at some other town further along the way. In the end we just obeyed the conductor and it all worked out, but now I’m pretty sure that there were multiple combos of trains that would get us to Assisi and he just told us a different way to get there. After that I learned how to read the departure boards at the train stations. The trains run on the same schedule seven days a week and always arrive at the same platform. The board lists all departures in a 24 hr period by time of departure. The train is labeled by its final destination, and stops are in small type beneath it along with the time of arrival. You have to know where you change trains, and then you at the train with your departure time, figure out its final destination (because that’s how you ask for the train/what the platform label says) and find out the platform on which it arrives. Since it also gives the arrival time for each stop along the way, you can have a very accurate idea of when to be ready.

Wow, this street is wide enough for two cars!

Our arrival in Assisi marked my return to what I first think of as Italy: small towns built around ancient hilltop ruins, whether Etruscan, Roman, or medieval; a slower pace of life; steep and narrow streets that were never designed for cars; and plenty of local life once the day-trip tourists disappear. (Note that we were up in "old Assisi," and only 1 of the 29 thousand residents of Assisi live within the old walls. The rest are spread out into the valley.) Here we stayed in a hotel that was a lot nicer than I thought it was going to be. Our rooms were big by any standard and huge by European standards. We just wandered the first night there, generally avoiding the touristy central piazza. Candles at the entrance to an alley marked the presence of an open restaurant since you frequently couldn’t see around the corners or over terraces. There was a medieval festival that was happening over a couple of nonconsecutive days, and we were there in between two of those days. The first night we heard what sounded at first like bagpipe music as we returned after dark to our piazza. It turned out to be a group of people playing a medieval instrument that looked like a recorder (but had the thin timbre of the bagpipe) while girls practiced some medieval dancing. A sizeable crowd had gathered to watch.

I have seen a surprising number of shirts in English that make no sense. I expected European shirts to be better, but maybe not. Today I saw a shirt that said “Eel: Useless Trinket.”