After waking up, I headed over to Euro Car to pick up the car we'd rented through Auto Europe. Everything was flawless and ready to go. They were kind enough to allow me to leave the car parked in the garage while I picked up our friends arriving from Miami via Al Italia. With Mike and Liz in tow, we got the car packed up and headed over to the Hilton to pick up Valerie and the rest of our bags. Our rental car, a Fiat 500L Station Wagon managed all our bags and gave each of us plenty of leg room for the trip from Fiumicino to Orvieto.
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| 4 People - 24 days - Not bad |
The drive was easy and uneventful - Co-Pilot Live (Europe) got us directly to Hotel Duomo, our first night stop. It was fun to be driving in Italy again and traffic on Rome's outskirts and onto the Autostrada was an easy way to break yourself back in again. Orvieto is a beautiful hilltop town in Umbria, but so close to Tuscany that we consider it the gateway for any of our Tuscan visits when driving up A1 (as opposed to coming up the coast roads west of Rome).
Hotel Duomo was a nicely appointed 3 Star hotel directly adjacent to the Duomo (main church).
Hotel Duomo
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| Orvieto Duomo |
The room was clean, bed was nice, and bathroom properly laid out. Our 2nd floor room opened up onto an alley giving us the ability to look out and surveil passerby's like proper Italians. Our included breakfast the next morning was a good continental style affair with Italian brewed coffee of your choice. A key consideration to our stay at Hotel Duomo was that they offer parking (18 E/day) in a private garage. We had stayed in Orvieto back in 2008 at Hotel Piccolomini and we ended up parking our car at the base of the hill and walking up into town after dropping our bags. At Hotel Duomo, we parked our car right in front of the hotel, unloaded our bags and they whisked it away until the next morning - really convenient.
After getting settled, we ran up to the Duomo piazza for lunch. The first place we tried said they were closed so we went next door and sat down. Our first lunch in Italy was good, priced reasonably (except for the wine), and we got a great recommendation for dinner that night.
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| Our first meal in Italy |
After a tour through the town to walk our lunch off and take a few pictures, we started looking for mischief... That's when we found the Orvieto Underground tour - at 5 Euro's each, it was a great price and our guide both knowledgeable and well spoken. During our hour long tour, we saw a very small part (2 of more than 1,000 caves or subterranean rooms) of the catacombs under today's medieval city. Our guide noted that most every building in the city has a cave or subterranean room, generally used today for wine and/or cheese storage and dating back in many cases to Etruscan (pre-Roman empire) times. One of the "Oh Reallys..." on our tour were the pigeon holes throughout our first cave - a sign of the cave owner's wealth - since apparently, pigeons were a prized source of food back in the day. At the end of the tour, we were peeved to note that no one else in our tour group was kind enough to tip our guide - we ended up apologizing to our guide for our group's parsimony...
Orvieto Underground
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| Underground Grain Mill |
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| Underground Pigeon Holes |
After a late-afternoon nap, we were out on the prowl again, this time to eat dinner at La Palomba (The Dove) at an appropriately Italian time of 9:15pm. La Palomba is always busy and we were glad we'd had Hotel Duomo call down and get dinner reservations for us. The highlight of dinner was having truffles (Tartufo) grated over our pasta - oh how we miss our special Italian truffle places here in Italy. Back in the USA we've seen 3-figure prices for far less truffle than our waiter put on each of our plates. Wine was much more reasonable at La Palomba as evidenced by the fact our dinner bill (including three plates of truffled pasta) was less than our lunch bill. Yep, we're back in Italy - land of very reasonable food prices - unless they hit you with the "tourist" (sucker) "tax" which the guy at lunch had done.
La Palomba Restaurant
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| Add some more truffles please... |
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| 4 happy diners at La Palomba |
After a nice walk back to the hotel, it was lights out for a good night's sleep before heading into Tuscany (Toscana) on the morrow...
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