We headed out of Orvieto at 9am this morning and drove about 30min to Chivita.
Now before I get into Chivita, the vans we take are interesting, I need to take a picture of them sometime. They are 8 passenger vans, and I swear these things are the largest cars in Italy that I have seen. They are huge, and barely fit down the tiny winding roads, the drivers drive the heck out of them, recklessly... but somehow we have managed to not get hit, or crash, etc etc.
So, Chivita, This town is like the Centralia, PA (google it) of Italy. It is a town that is pretty much falling off a cliff.. but the whole town is on a plateau... so the whole thing is slowly falling apart. I think we were told that about 12 people still live in the town.
The town does offer amazing views, and it is absurd seeing doors and windows that go nowhere... and having those windows to nowhere right next to someones living room window...
The best part of the trip was the we got hustled by this really old lady. We were walking down the main path in the town and we were greeted by this old lady who promised an amazing terrazzo through a little doorway. We went through and sure enough there was an amazing terrazzo with an awesome view, and it was all groovy.
We went to leave the awesome terrazzo with the awesome view, and the old lady was blocking the door. She was demanding that we pay for being on her terrazzo! crazy indeed...
Me on the terrazzo:
On the way out of the town, we stopped by the bathrooms... and by bathroom, I mean hole in the floor...
So moving along, we left that town since it offers little but an awesome view, and we made our way to Bolsena.
Bolsena is a volcano (or Stromboli as we found out that means volcano in Italian) that blew a long time ago. To make a long story short, it is now a lake. A beautiful lake that you should all go to.
We first went to the duomo there and a small museum to get the scholarly stuff out of the way. At the Duomo were some catacombs we were allowed to peruse around and read the history of. Here is a shot inside, the catacombs were probably about 20' high walls full of niches where bodies were buried, the tunnels went back a lot farther than we were allowed to go, but the area we could wander in was minimum 150'-200' of tunnels in this manner:
We then we made our way down to the lake where we would spend a few hours.
My group of people wandered down the beach and found this nice little restaurant that was on the beach, so we grabbed some drinks, some lunch, and enjoyed watching the lake and stuff.
After that we all met up at the beach and enjoyed the lake like nothing else. I was wandering up and down the beach, and there were tons of pieces of terra cotta in the sand (I use that term loosely) under the water. Some of the pieces has glaze on them, some has grooves, designs, etc, etc.
My jeans ended up getting wet, and didn't quite have time to dry out before piling in the vans and heading back.
Here is me looking conteplative on the shore:
Here is Orvieto on our return so you can see what the city looks like!
And... "Its made of people"
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