Day #85 in Orvieto

The whole group

On the way to Castiglione del Lago!

Gnocchi with crab meat and scallops... I think. It was so good even though it looks strange and green here!

View of Castiglione del Lago from the hilltop

Photoshoot under the tree with Sara

With Jenna in the fortress 

Me and Karen :)

Sara being her sunny Californian self

The lake!

May 18, 2013 - Saturday

On Saturday morning, we woke up at 9 to catch the funiculare at 10. From there, we took train to Montepulciano from 10:15 to 11ish (apparently, the second Twilight movie was filmed here? Or at least a part of it). So we got off the train but we couldn't figure out how to get up to the town! Some people told us that a bus would come in an hour to bring us to the real town so we waited, but then the bus never came. We would've walked there but they told us that it was a 12 kilometer walk, so we didn't do that. So we made our way back to the train station to go back to the train station we stitched at, Chiusi. In Chiusi we decided that we would just go to Castiglione del Lago (we’ve always seen it through the train window since it's on the way back to Orvieto but never knew what it was!). We walked to the town and the shopkeepers were so friendly and wanted to know where we were from. They didn’t seem to get a lot of tourists there and gave us lots of free samples of cheese, meat, honey, etc. We were super hungry by that time so we went to a place for lunch but it was 3pm, so we were worried that they would be closed. We walked into the restaurant and saw that they were closed but the owner said that he would ask his wife if they could serve us and then he told us to come on in! We were the only ones in the restaurant and we all got a different seafood pasta dish. Karen is using shells for her tempera painting so she tentatively asked them if she could have some shells. They brought her a huge bag and brought us ten huge scallop shells to keep. So pretty much they were extremely nice there because they opened the restaurant for us and they gave her a ton of shells for painting!

After lunch, we made our way in and out of the different shops where saw a bunch of cinghiale (wild boar) souvenirs and considered buying some (only to find out later that Christabel got to play with a BABY CINGHIALE in Cortona today). 

This is a picture from Google of a baby cinghiale

We also went to the castle/fortress and there was a little coffee stand in the middle of the fortress! We hung out in the castle and then walked to the lake (stopped to get gelato along the way, of course). Laura and Sara swam in the lake but I just put my feet in – it was really warm and the rocks at the bottom were pretty slimy but the water was clear. There was a beautiful sunset as we sat in the grass.

After spending about an hour or so at the lake, we walked back to the train station at 8, took a train to Orvieto at 9, then arrived back to the monastery at 10!

Tomorrow is Pentacost and apparently there is some strange tradition that involved a dove in a little shuttle that flies down to the duomo – sounds weird and scary for the dove. Actually I don’t even know if it’s a real dove or not but I’ll check it out tomorrow.