We left Rome via train yesterday and arrived in the Umbrian hill town of Orvieto – where we picked up our rental car and spent a few hours wandering the streets of the old city, situated on top of a butte with amazing views, beautiful little streets and a maze of underground Etruscan tunnels. We then drove to Bagnoregio, parked the car and made our way across a narrow bridge to the medieval town of Civita, known in the area as “The Dead City”, since in addition to being the victim of slow erosion, it has a full-time population of around a dozen (and falling). We spent the night here, enjoyed the quiet, the view and the stars, and this morning made our way northwards to Siena – with a few stops along the way (including Bolsena, where we saw a cooking show being taped along the shores of a lake, and Radicofani, where we walked around a 1,000-year-old hill-top castle). We’re in Siena for the next 4 days – more on that later this week!

Ah, Rome, the Eternal city… We arrived mid-day on Tuesday, and it’s been non-stop pretty much since then! To keep things brief, here are the highlights of our visit, in rough chronological order: Campo de’Fiori, Piazza Navona, Pantheon (at night), Trevi Fountain, Colosseum, Palatine Hill, Roman Forum, Capitoline Hill, Vittorio Emanuele II Monument, Pantheon (by day), Trastevere, Piazza del Popolo, Via del Corso, Ponte and Castel San Angelo, the Vatican Museum (incl. Sistine Chapel!), St Peter’s Basilica, the Spanish Steps, Museo Nationale, Santa Maria Della Vittoria (for Bernini’s St Theresa in Ecstasy), and the Borghese Gardens. Whew! It’s quite warm, and we come home with tired feet every day, but we’ve been eating well and drinking well, and sampling some very fine gelato across the city. And tomorrow, we begin our adventures in Tuscany! So for now, ciao e buona sera!

My posts have been getting longer, so I’m going to try and keep this one short. Last Thursday we made our way, via trains and buses, to the Italian Riviera. We stayed in La Serra, a tiny village perched on a mountainside above Lerici, in the Goelfo dei Poeti (Gulf of Poets). This is an area, though only 30 km south of the Cinque Terre, that does not see a lot of American tourists – which was great for us (and made for some heavy use of our phrase book). La Serra was celebrating the “Sagre du Lumaga” – a food festival celebrating the lumaga (snails). We ate dinner every night with the locals in the village square. We even tried some snail (albeit in a pasta dish…)! We’ve been swimming everyday on tucked away beaches, hiked 6.5 hours along the mountainside and coast, and took a day trip (via boat) to the Cinque Terre – where we heard more (‘merican) English spoken in one hour than we’ve heard in the past 4 days. The villages are beautiful, but it made us very happy to have found La Serra. We’re sorry to be leaving, but we’re excited for our next stop – Rome!

Now that we have The Sound of Music stuck in your heads… Remember when we said the village we’re staying in can only be reached by two-hour hike or cable car? Well, the tiny konsum (store) in Gspon is closed until the end of October, so we rode the cable car down to Staldenreid to take advantage of the supermarket…and then hiked back up to Gspon. For 2+ hours. At probably a 45-60% grade the entire time, with groceries. Calling it “tough” is putting it lightly. On the bright side, (besides getting our exercise in for the day month) we found a huge patch of wild raspberries that Josh and I returned to on Tuesday; Dorothee and Stephan had gone on a walk in the opposite direction, and, unbeknownst to us, had gathered a whole bag of wild blueberries, so we combined our fruitful (ha!) efforts into a completely hand-made galette (aka pie) for dessert. YUM. Today we took a less strenuous hike via the “Gspon Panoramaweg” (“weg” is like “path”; you figure out the rest), a trail that leads out from the village and then doubles back up to the very top of the mountain for unbelievable views of Gspon and the surrounding Alps, all while being surrounded by nothing but rocks, moss, heather, and the occasional pine tree. We concluded our Alpine tour with traditional Swiss fare in one of the two town restaurants, where the owner joined us for a beer after dinner. For now we say goodbye to la Suisse…but for those of you in the know, I’ll see you in Zurich. ;)

We said goodbye to Provence on Friday – after spending much too short of a time perusing Lourmarin’s Friday market – and spent another long day on the road, driving to the Swiss Alps. We’re staying with Josh’s step-father’s aunt at her chalet in the mountaintop village of Gspon. The village can only be reached by two-hour hike or a tiny cable car! It’s an absolutely amazing place – people have been living up here for hundreds of years, tending their cattle and sheep as they graze for the summer, but it’s still very isolated (thankfully, they do now have Internet…). We’ve been lucky with the weather, blue skies and warm temperatures for the past two days. The area here is indescribably beautiful. Hopefully our photos will do some justice to what we’ve seen. We set a record yesterday, filling an entire 8 GB memory card with photos in only 5 hours- on a hike up and across the mountain, following the ‘waterways’ that provide the mountaintop villages and grazing fields with fresh glacier water. We passed a very remote grazing field where a farmer was tending his cows, all of which have big bells around their necks so they can be found when the inevitable thick fog sets in – what a sound! Today we hiked 6 hours in the other direction, ending above the treeline on a peak overlooking an Alpine lake with views of the Matterhorn. We’ve got rain in the forecast for the next two days, but it might be just as well – I think we’re both pretty overloaded with what we’ve seen over the past few days!

A lot of photos this time!