Day 23 – June 25th, Monday

Day 23 – June 25^th, Monday

Today was a surprise trip. I kind of ruined the surprise because I had hunch and asked, and was apparently close. I said Perugia which is where they lived for language learning for a while. We didn't go to Perugia but we did go to that region and to some beautiful places. We went to the region of Umbria, which is the region where the city of Assisi is. We went to Assisi and Spello. Asissi has tons of history, as with St. Francis of Assisi was from there, and he is the Patron Saint of all of Italy. It was beautiful, the Basilica was interesting, there were catholics prayer to Mary, and praying to St. Francis. It was like going back in time; there were monks and friars in their traditional garbs. It was kind of eery how much Mary is venerated, at one point there was a shrine with Jesus on the cross behind a sculpture of Mary that was much bigger than the Jesus Crucifixion sculpture. She was overshadowing Jesus, which seems to be a good physical metaphor for Catholicism. We were in a bit of a hurry it seemed, I was really hoping to read up on the history, but most everything was in Italian anyway. Oh, and Francis’ Tomb was below the church, who knows if he really was down there but, they say he was, along with some other saints. After that we went to Spello for a long hike. It was a beautiful sleepy little city on a hill, a very big hill.