Civita

Yesterday, I went to Civita di Bagnoregio. It’s a very old town on a plateau like Orvieto, but much smaller. There are no cars allowed in Civita because it’s slowly falling apart. Buildings have crumbled off the sides of the cliffs over the years and it’s nearly abandoned. I was surprised to see restaurants in business there, but it’s understandable cause tourists do have to eat. Very few people actually live there, and we arrived around 9:30am, so it was vacant. We practically had the place to ourselves.


View of Civita.

I travelled there by bus with four other girls from my group, and we walked from the neighboring town over a bridge into the old city. As I saw Civita from a distance, a mewithoutYou quote popped into my head and I became overly giddy. I even said it out loud to my friends: “I saw a mountain, I saw a city, steadily sinking but suspiciously calm. It wasn’t an end, it wasn’t a beginning, but a ceaseless stumbling on.”

In Civita, we weaved around buildings that looked like they were made from red clay, and we peaked inside old sheds full of rusty equipment from who knows how long ago. We rounded the city at least once and by the time we were ready for lunch, the sun was beating through the clouds, forcing us to take our coats off. Every Italian city has a main piazza, which are usually huge and laid out in the stone that characterizes its city. Civita’s piazza was very small and only made of dirt. The five of us found a wall to sit on or lean against, and we took about an hour long nap right in the piazza. It was beautiful. Afterward, we had lunch in a restaurant that served gnocchi (which I ordered, of course) and tiramisu. We ate under a canopy of grapevines and drank the local wine. It was beautiful.

Throughout our stay, it had been sunny and then raining very lightly on and off. On our way back to the bridge from Civita to the next town, we heard thunder. I ran and hugged Julia cause we had both been waiting for a thunderstorm... we love them. Over the bridge, half of the sky was dark with rain clouds, and the other half of the sky was bright blue and white. Within the next half hour, we saw a rainbow. Could our day trip get any better?


View from Civita.

We got back to Orvieto in time for dinner, where we ate with our new professors for the next month of class. There is a poetry teacher and a sculpting teacher with their spouses living in the monastery with us now. I’ll be taking the sculpting class starting tomorrow. Anyway, the professors are all in their late 50s and 60s and they were jet lagged, so they asked if they were allowed to have wine at the dinner table. Gordon’s policy is that we can’t have wine at La Locando del Lupo where we always eat, because some of the participating schools don’t allow drinking at all. We can drink elsewhere. But we told the professors that it would be okay for them to have wine if they bought it. They gladly agreed to that. By the end of the dinner (which went overtime) all four of our new floor mates were tipsy and having the time of their lives. It was hilarious. At one point, I asked the professor next to me to pass a pitcher of water, and I startled him. He said, “Wow, we’re so rude, we’re blocking the students out of our conversation! Sure, here’s the water.” And then they forgot about us again. So funny. All of them were so nice and personable. They seem like great people. I’m looking forward to getting to know them, especially my sculpting teacher. I can’t wait to work in 3D!

P.S.- More pictures from my stay in Italy can be found progressively here.