-->I came to appreciate how few tourists there are in Todi when I went elsewhere in the afternoon*. In Todi, you hear nothing but Italian on the streets and in the restaurants. In the morning, the women and men congregate for their shot of espresso or cappuccino at the cafés and you can tell they are regulars – they get their drinks and pastries without having to put in a request. The shop-keepers speak only Italian. And they do you favors – in the way that people do favors in small towns that haven’t yet been worn out by the incessant demands made by visitors (like me!). The person in my favorite breakfast pastry place gave me some of their Illy coffee because I could not find any in town and I have a thing for it. And as I leave, they wont just say politely “buon giorno,” they’ll say “buon giorno, arivederci, ciao!” And (grazie!!) they’ll let me use their phone so that I can make my local call and collect to the Internet.

* Orvieto has perhaps the finest XV c. cathedral in Italy and so it deserved an afternoon visit. It also has perhaps the largest number of shops per square foot in any of the hill towns. And, not a small number of tourists. The most interesting were the religious groups – nuns staring at the ceiling frescoes of the chapel with such reverence that it almost made me jealous. To me, the figures depicted in stone and on the walls were a reminder of how grotesque and graphic the Biblical stories became for artists of previous centuries. Consider the scene from a detail of the church pillar (below). Apparently it served as a warning that hell, brimming with snakes and reptiles, was ready and waiting for the immoral townspeople.