Italia – Giorni 6-11 Civitella a Roma

Disclosure – I’ve returned home yesterday but am continuing to document my amazing trip, as much for me as for you.

6/24/26 At the appointed hour, we left the house to go to Todi where, in the past, we have visited Marina’s Uncle Carlo, whose family palazzo sits close to the edge of the Palazzo Di Popoli built in 1214. A beautiful, not yet scorching day. Bob drove and we took “the back way” which was another beautiful winding road (caveat – though beautiful, 90% of the roads in Umbria are in terrible shape and must simply savage tires), but regardless, in about forty minutes, we pulled into the parking lot next to the ascensore (furnicular) which took us up the hill to Todi. Had a nice walk up past the first of the churches, Church of San Fortunato, a gothic church begun in the 13th Century, dedicated to the Poet/Brother Jacopone da Todi who lived there in 1230. Its steep stairs came down to the street and I joked that I could run up the hill to check the hours sign, an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper taped to the door but fortunately no one took me up on that. If you’d like to see more pictures of that church both inside and out, please refer to this post from that time.

Due to it’s perched position and sturdy walls, Todi was shielded from barbarian invasions. It struggled against the neighboring cities of Spoleo, Orvieto and Narni until it became part of the Papal states.

There is the Duomo in the Palazzo del Popolo, consecrated to Maria Santissima Annunziata up a steep flight of stairs with a beautiful rose window on the facade. After that, we found a Baroque chapel near by with frescoes adorning the ceiling and side walls.

The next day, 6/25/26, was our last full day in Civitella, and we didn’t waste any time. Bob and Carlo and I met at 9AM at Casalone to pick walnuts for the annual crop of nocino, a drink made from unripe green walnuts. You can see a recipe here for it. The nuts, according to Carlo and Bob, needed to be harvested by June 24th. We were a day late! And you only pick 60 walnuts in their green shells. We were going off to Rome on Thursday, so Carlo put the nuts in the refrigerator so that he and Bob could make the nocino on Monday. Once assembled, it needs to sit out in the sun for forty days, marinating in the alcohol and sugar and spices – cloves, cinnamon until it is done. (I don’t have Carlo and Bob’s secret recipe but the writer at the link above does).

I’ve neglected to mention the two extraordinary suppers we had at Marina and Carlo’s before our departure for Rome. Wednesday night with Director Danilo Carappezzina, whom we had met in 2024 when we toured Spoleto. Marino and Carlo, Marina, Bob and Sally had stayed in touch with him after he had been so kind in 2024 to give us a tour of the main theater in Spoleto. This year he was not directing a show, but instead, supervising eight student shows, five of which are part of an international competition. So Wednesday he drove out in the festival’s fine engine-red Fiat to Civitella and Marina had made a beautiful pasta capresi with rigatoni, mozzarela, tomatoes and basil as the primo, then a tuna and zucchini carpaccio with tomatoes. Dessert was vanilla ice cream, a peeled pear and rasberry sauce over all. Delightful. After the threat of rain, we ended up eating outside on the patio at the base of the bell tower- nothing more beautiful!

Friday, after securing the walnuts, we headed off to explore Deruta and Perugio, where we also visited the Umbrian museum. We saw altars from 1330 to 1647 and quizzed ourselves on the saints, our favorite being, of course, St. Paul and St. Peter. That particular day, I was introduced to St. Antony of Abata, who seemed always to have a boar at his feet, and at the base of the panels that featured him, along with a long gray beard parted down the center into two strands. According to my hosts, whom I consider to be quite expert in the saints, St. Antony of Abata had a fierce death attached by devils which I could at that moment relate to after my nightly seige by the silent Scoppietan mosquitoes which have co-inhabited my bed, leaving me itching all week. A small price to pay for being in Paradise.

6/25/26

Thursday night, after our shopping trip/visit to Deruta and Perugia, we had another beautiful dinner with their friends Charles and Gaynor, Bob, Sally, Marina and Carlo, with drinks at the base of the campanile and dinner on the balcony. Marina had made a gorgeous pesto pasta – penne with arugula pesto (no garlic), and roasted pine nuts both in the pesto and loose in the pasta, along with chopped, roasted green olives and some arugula sprinkled on top. The secondi was pieces of white fish with chickpeas and tomatoes served cold. Another side was green beans and some more zucchini carpaccio, this time with lemon and mint. So light and refreshing. Marina served a lemon cheesecake for dessert – but very light – more so than any American cheesecake, with a lovely graham cracker crust. We had a wonderful evening talking about various peoples’ charitable activities; Charles had underwritten a concert last year in Florence followed by a dinner with the musicians and friends. He wants to make it an annual event. His friend Gaynor works with unhoused youth in Leichester. The evening was very special, and a great way to cap my visit to Civitella.

Have I mentioned how hot it has been since I got here? You can count on me to bring the heat! There had been a heat dome over all of Europe but we were careful to do our touring especially including air conditioned museums like the one in Perugia during the day before noon and resting in the afternoons.

6/26/26

Friday, Bob and Sally and I took the train from Orvieto to Orte, where we changed trains to catch the fast train to Roma. Sally had organized a lovely hotel quite close to the Roma Termini station, the Oceania Hotel on Via Firenze. The trip was hot, compounded by our short bus trip from the Termini to the base of the Via Firenze, where we walked to the hotel. Got there in time for a nice shower, followed by a walk to the nearby Chiesa Santa Maria della Vitorria which is the home to the beautiful altar piece by Gian Lorenzo Bernini of St. Therese in Ecstasy. You art historians know the one. On every Baroque Italian art class exam.

After the visit to the chiesa, we had a late lunch at an air-conditioned Georgian/Italian restaurant right down the street from the hotel, which was quite good. A short respite before we donned our dress clothes to walk down to the nearby St. Paul’s Within The Walls Episcopal Church for the 150th re-consecration of the church, of which Bob is a board member. The church is quite beautiful, red and white striped (similar to the Cathedral at Orvieto) but filled with pre-Raphaelite mosaics on the arches and in the apse, which were designed by the British artist Edward Burne-Jones, between 1885-1907. Other mosaics adorn the walls above the bronze doors, both inside and outside, designed by the American muralist George Breck (1863-1920). Breck had been a director of the American Academy in Rome for five years and a parishioner of St. Paul’s Within the Walls according to the very helpful pamphlet they had printed in honor of the 150th reconsecration. The Choral Evensong service was filled with praise for the recognition of the importance of this church within Rome’s more papally-oriented environment. From the many Americans I met there, you could see that this was a vibrant community. After the service, there was a festive reception outside in the garden. We headed back to the hotel to collapse before our next day of exploring many wonderful things around Rome.

6/27/26

Saturday we started the day with the included breakfast at the hotel, nothing piccolo about that colazione. Fruit, chocolate or jam croissants, two cappucinos and as much other bread and butter and jam and fruit as you could eat. I also had some pear juice and the whole thing was very filling. One of the hotel employees asked what our plan for the day was. When Bob said we would most likely be visiting the Doria Pompilj, this helpful employee suggested instead the Palazzo Colonna, one of the oldest and largest private palaces of Rome, built in the 14th Century and renovated over the next five centuries, newly reopened to the public. It was a family fortress, first owned by Oddone Colonna, who became Pope Martin V in 1417 and remained so fom 1420-1431 when he died. The family has retained the palace as it’s home for eight centuries! There had until 1511 been a hostility between the Colonna and Orsini families, but the marriage between MarcAntonio Colonna and Felice Orsini provided the bridge when Pope Sixtus IV (an Orsini family member) came into power. During the sack of Rome in 1527, due to the close alliance between the family and the papacy, the Palazzo Colonna was spared and became a safe haven for 3000 Romans. The daughter of Marc Antonio and Felice was Costanza, who befriended Caravaggio and there are works of his displayed in one of the many halls in the palazzo. The palazzo also features extensive gardens above on the hill with spectacular views of surrounding Rome which we toured before the sun got too strong. They also provide umbrellas for shade in the gardens.

The Palazzo’s distinctive single column with a crown atop was featured fetchingly on the hats and polos of all its friendly and well-informed multi-lingual docents. Another thing I love about traveling with the Edgars is their honestly insatiable curiosity about whatever we’re seeing at that moment. The palazzo provided each guest with a fancy booklet in whatever your language was to identify each painting and sculpture in the approximately 20 rooms, the walls all covered with stunning works from the 15th through 20th centuries. Beginning in the great hall, on the staircase leading into the room, there is a canonball embedded in the staircase. It had been shot through a window in 1849 during the period of the Roman Republic, left there by the Colonna family. Lived in originally by Pope Martin V, the walls of the papal apartments just off the gardens were covered in Gobelin tapestries depicting wartime victories. There were also old photographs of Princess Isabelle, whose apartments we later viewed.

If you do go, buy the 25 euro ticket which allows entry to all three areas. You won’t be disappointed.

The other suggestion made by Marco at the hotel was to visit a temporary exhibition of paintings from the Hapsburg Collection at Palazzo Cipolla on the Museo del Corso. This was one of the happiest accidents of the trip. Only there until the fifth of July, this exhibit of fifty

The exhibition — curated by Cäcilia Bischoff, art historian at the Kunsthistorisches Museum — brings together works collected or commissioned by the House of Habsburg, restoring the image of a multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious empire that made art a tool for cultural representation, the dissemination of knowledge, and dialogue among civilizations. The exhibition features works by the masters Rubens, Velázquez, Brueghel the Elder, Van Dyck, and Cranach, alongside great Italian artists such as Caravaggio, Arcimboldo, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.

from the website for Museo del Corso

I don’t think I took any pictures of the Hapsburg exhibit and I’m thinking that that was because I had to lock up my camera. Because I would have been shooting non-stop. There were so many “old friends” from studying Art History.

Giuseppe Arcimbaldo’s “Winter”

You get the idea. It was a spectacular array of paintings. we were completely sated by the time we got back to the hotel. A lovely dinner that night across the street from the Rome Opera House, and the next day we made our way back to the train station, where Bob and Sally returned to Orvieto, and I ventured onto Venice to meet my friends Caro and Alberto. Stay tuned!