Assisi, Italy

The home town of our Italian Culture and History Professor. It is another hill town. It is widely know for its religious connections to St. Francis.

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Basilica di S. Francis

Made of three major parts, the crypt, lower church, and upper church. The crypt protects the body of St. Francis and four of his close companions. The lower church and the upper churches have wonderful frescos. Sadly no pictures were allowed in the church. Fun fact: most churches are covered in frescos with the primary reason of writing down stories in a way the commoners could understand, because the written language was in Latin and was only known by the aristocrats and the clergyman. The more I look at churches the more I like this idea, its like having stationary cartoons. I always liked picture books.

Piazza del Comune

I decided to mention this piazza, primarily because this is were we stopped our tour with Marco. It is also the location of the store I bought my new cookbook. My new cookbook is all about pasta. It has recipes for meat and pasta, baked pasta, sauces to go on pasta, and how to make fresh pasta. I plan to eat lots of pasta! Gretchen and I have found a mutual love of pasta, so we’ve been cooking most of our meals together.

Rocca Maggiore

I walked into a restraunt for lunch and had a flat bread sandwhich. It had cheese and salamie; it was delicious. While I was in there I ran into some classmates, so I got my sandwich to go and joined their group. On the way to the Rocca Maggiore (pretty much a castle), we came across a bakery. I bought a cannolo and a carmele. The cannolo was delicious it was white chocolate with coconut. (I should really learn how to make cannoli!) The carmele was kind of like laffy taffy..the outside was tough; good thing I carried my pocket knife with me that day.

While Ellie choked on her meringue puff, we climbed the hill to the Rocca Maggiore. It was splendid. Its one of the high points  in the Assisi hill town. We looked down at the valley, where you could see the roads bisecting land. The sky was blue with big cotton ball clouds. I took some cloud pictures for future montages and renderings; I’m always short on sky images. I can’t ever seem to get on that is at the right angle.

One thing we noticed while exploring Assisi was all the stairs. The stairs alone had and interesting design. The stairs were in the middle of the path then along the sides it was a paved slope. Either this was so water would run along the edge of the stairs or it could be used by people pulling little roller baskets. I must say I enjoyed running down the slope until I almost slipped on a patch of moss.

Basilica di S. Chiara

This was our meeting place before walking down to the bus. I spent time taking more pictures, when I should have been sketching instead. Oops, I’m still working on convincing myself to sketch but its so much easier just to pick up my camera and snap a photo. Pros to sketching- you notice details you might miss in a photo. You can express mood and manipulte how others will see the scene. Cons- there isn’t anywhere to sit and if there is it is usually on a cold piece of stone.

HaHa…I really am a creature of comfort. I like to be comfortable in all that I do. Shoot right now I am writing this blog in my pjs on a couch with a pillow and blanket. It’s a wonder I haven’t fallen asleep.

So Sad news…the morning of our trip to Assisi, I accidently killed my battery charger. All I did was plug it in and it popped and the fan spazzed out. So I might be taking few pictures and be forced to sketch, but I’ll try to post some of my sketches.