A Place To Read A Book And Write A Letter: Orvieto

For just the day, I took a train an hour north of Rome to the town of Orvieto. I have been to a lot of towns on hills, and on cliffs, but this is the first town I have ever been to where an elevator is needed to reach it. Seriously. You exit the train station and step onto a gondola/elevator combination that speeds you to the top like a dyslexic man taking the bar exam, which is to say, at a slow pace.

Orvieto is a medieval town centered around its duomo, which is just a fancy word for big church. This church is colored like a zebra; stripes cut it into horizontal strips, and alternate from black stone to white stone and back again. The interior is empty, minus the collection of columns. It is layman beautiful, beautiful in the way baroque forgot.

I spent most of the day at the Porta Rocca, which is the fortress turned garden. It takes up a position on the edge of the cliff, looking out over the hills of Umbria, which is not the same thing as Umbra, a character in the video game Morrowind. If you too had trouble making that distinction, I sympathize with you. Like I said, I spent most of my time there. I had some editing to do, so I sat on a bench and watched the sun pull its weight from east to west.

And this would have been an idyllic end of my journey, had it not been for my notebook. I had planned to take the 5:30 train out of town. Indeed, I even boarded. As the bell went off, signaling the train's departure from the station, I checked my bag and found that my notebook had escaped when I wasn't looking. Without any time to spare, I ran to the front of the car, and exited in a dramatic fashion. You know those movies where men jump from moving vehicles, only to crash and somersault on the pavement? Yeah, that happened.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is not the fifty five euro notebook that cause Cass to jump from the moving train. He risked his live, nay, his very soul, for a notebook purchased at Wal-Mart for ten cents, American.

So I had to wait two more hours for the next train. I rode the elevator a few more times. I finally settled in a cafe which had an entire wall devoted to the many chocolates of the world. Can you imagine? I don't have to; I was there, silly. I bought a bar made in Genova. It was delicious, as well as positively expensive. I made my notebook pay for it. It was his fault, anyway.