A Very Good Perugian Day

Today has been lovely so far. It was supposed to rain all day but I woke up to beautiful weather. This morning Chris and I walked into a lower part of town to visit San Pietro, and the Medieval Garden, two things that have been on the to do list for a very long time.

San Pietro is this extremely old church, very dark, very big, and absolutely covered in gigantic paintings done by local artists of the time period. There’s almost a Miss Haversham feel to it, a bit creepy but extremely impressive. We were taking pictures when a man came over and began to talk to Chris. Chris thought he was saying something about closing but found the man difficult to understand as he was talking rather quietly. I came over and heard the man was saying something about showing us a room that was usually closed, as he was the curator.

He brought us into another room off to the side and began to show us paintings by Carvaggio, Perugino, and started mentioning more that I wasn’t familiar with along with others that had been done by the School of Michaelangelo and School of Leonardo Da Vinci. The Carvaggio one was particularly beautiful. He asked if we were Spanish, which was an interesting choice, and I explained we were from the United States and studying here. He seemed a bit shy at first but he was friendly and seemed to like to show off the place. I asked if we could take pictures in that room of the famous paintings so I’ll try to post those later (I know, I know I’m so behind with the pictures but it takes forever to load here). He then took us back out into the main church and turned on all the lights using a remote. He told us we should take pictures on the altar so we did. He told us something like "this came before your country," which I thought was a funny way of trying to explain how old it is and then told us the date, which was sometime in the 10th century. He then asked if we had seen the garden yet and brought us to it. It was a really wonderful experience, something I feel like I often read about in books about traveling, and it will definitely be a nice memory.

The garden was really beautiful and interesting. When you first walk in there is a big olive tree at the center with a wide trunk that gave it a sort of Tree of Life feeling. From under the trunk water spouts carried out water on four sides, giving it a sort of magical feel. Around it there were bushes cut in the shape of all the astrological signs and labeled herbs around each of those. Throughout the garden there were more herbs, including ones that I recognized the name of from potions in Harry Potter, which I thought was pretty funny. There were also labs there which reminded us of Living with the Land, and there were occasionally little set ups, like an alchemist’s lab, with bottles over fake fires and such, that also made it seem like it was something from Disney. There were two small waterfalls and a really beautiful view of Assisi and some farms below. It was really fun to explore and take pictures of. It was so nice after being in the stones of Perugia for so long to see so much green. The garden was really beautiful.

From there we headed to a little park across the way where there was this big arch that we took many pictures in. I have some impressive ones of Chris doing various stunts from there so I’ll have to share those soon.

After lunch we went with Krista to get gelato and also ran into Jamie and some others for a bit. Later tonight I think Chris and I are going to Porta da Sole, a restaurant that has beautiful views of all of the hills. I’m hoping to get more pasta with wild boar sauce!