Perugia, 4 october 2019

We took the train from Lucca to Perugia on Thursday, a four-hour trip with a quick change in Florence. On our arrival at about 2:30, we quickly descended into confusion, made worse by hunger. No taxis were at the curb near the “TAXI” sign. None of the maps we had, including Google, helped us see that walking to our hotel would be a terrible idea, mostly because we couldn’t really find the train station relative to the rest of the city. Yes, that is hard to believe. Finally, after we wandered into a couple of dead ends, we returned to the train station, where we now found lots of taxis to solve the problem. During the five or ten-minute ride up the hill, turning back and forth in big serpentines, it was more than obvious that setting out on foot with Google directions would have resulted in divorce.

Once we found sandwiches and beer, life was much better. We spent the rest of the afternoon getting a sense of the historic center of Perugia, which is at the top of a large hill. From the aptly named Belvedere, we could see forever:

An interesting feature of Perugia is what remains of a fortress called the Rocca Paolina, built in the 16th century at the behest of the Pope, who had recently annexed the city to papal lands. Many existing buildings on twisty little medieval streets were demolished for the construction of the fortress. The citizens of Perugia were incensed, and their outrage lasted until they finally gained independence in the 1850s, when they demolished the fortress and created a lovely square at the top of the hill in its place. Today, everyone uses those twisty little medieval streets again . . . but they are still buried by the Rocca. There are a few stores, a number of city offices, and a lot of artworks in there, including this large horse:

This subterranean complex was on the direct path from our hotel to shopping, restaurants, the cathedral, and other tourist sites, so we walked this maze many times in our short stay. And because everything is uphill or downhill from everything else, a major thoroughfare is actually a series of escalators within the Rocca. This is the top of one:

Locals as well as tourists use this great civic amenity. I’m always looking for sights that would be in a 50’s travel movie, with the narrator saying “Perugia, truly a Land of Old and New,” and this escalator-within-fortress-over-medieval-streets is a good example.