Perugia

My driver, Minelli, is always getting lost. This morning he got stumped trying to get us out of Perugia. And he lives here. This is how you normally get out of Perugia: You precariously make your way down the hill going back and forth on a dozen switchbacks so narrow that if a large vehicle is coming uphill you either pull off to the side of the road or you die. Because there’s not room for both of you.

The view down the hill in Perugia. Photos by David Lansing.

Once you get down the hill, you glide into this dark tunnel—like dropping into the hole in “Alice in Wonderland.” You don’t know what’s going to happen or where you’re going to end up but you have no choice. So you go. Before your eyes have even had time to adjust to the darkness, there are these tiny pale blue signs with arrows pointing every which way—Roma, Firenze, Assisi, Gubbio. You’ve got exactly two seconds to make your choice and scoot your way through another hole that is so narrow that if Hannibal came back this way (he kicked some serious Roman butt in this neighborhood back in 216 B.C.), his elephants wouldn’t make it.

And, mind you, everyone is flying about in here like excited bats in a cave—except Minelli. Because our exit, the road to Gubbio, is blocked and has a sign across it: Chiuso. So Minelli just stops his beautiful black Lexus in front of the closed exit, takes off his very nice limo driver hat, and scratches his bald head.

“Clos-ed,” he says.

I don’t like being in a stopped car in a tunnel. It makes me anxious. It gives me visions of rear-end collisions, exploding gas tanks, searing heat from flames.

“Minelli, vada, si?”

We’re on the move again. To Firenze. Which I’d love to visit, really, but, at the moment, Maura is waiting for me at the funicular in Gubbio, which is in the opposite direction. But, listen, Minelli is a professional. He can handle this. He calls his mother on his cell phone and politely asks her how to get to Gubbio. Two minutes later, we’ve doubled back, taken a different exit, and are now whizzing down a country road lined with celery fields and dense forests.

“Cinghiale,” Minelli says, pointing towards the wood with his hand which he pretends is a gun. His finger fires off a dozen rounds into the woods. “Hare es crazy boar.”

“You mean wild boar.”

“Yes, wild. Very nice. You like?”

“Very nice.”

Half an hour later, we’re in Gubbio. Once we get to the central plaza, Minelli stops the car in the middle of the road and utters his favorite English word: “Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where you go?”

“Funnicular.”

He shrugs. Like this isn’t his problem.

Minelli has no idea how to get to the funicular. Instead, he pulls up to a newsstand where two teenage boys are standing around reading the soccer scores and asks directions. One points left, the other points right. They argue. Minelli says something quickly in Italian that I assume is something along the lines of “Come on, I haven’t got all day, where the hell is it?”

So one of the boys climbs into the back seat of the Lexus and, putting one hand on Minelli’s shoulder and the other on mine, gives us directions. Go left, go straight, down this vicolo—oops, no, there’s construction and it’s closed; carefully back up. Let’s try this street. Deadend.

The end of the road in Gubbio.

Minelli and the kid argue. I get out of the car. I can see the funicular cable towers maybe a block away. I try to interrupt the escalating argument to point this out to the boys, but they’re in their own little world at the moment and not the least interested in the Americano. So I grab my backpack and walk up the hill. Wondering when Minelli will notice he’s lost his client.

I’m sure Maura can give me a ride back to Perugia. But I’ll feel bad about it. Because, unless he calls his mother, Minelli will never find his way home without me.  

Seeing religion in a fresh light, sort of speak, has opened me up to a new way of looking at this little medieval town. Maybe Roberto Benigni was right, religion can be sexy; at least, someone else must have thought so as well since next door to the National Gallery, a desanctified medieval church has been converted into a lingerie store.

In the display window, directly beneath a sculpted stone cross, two headless mannequins sport La Perla bras and see-through panties.

Photo by David Lansing

Next door is a jewelry shop. When I go inside, two English women are examining a stunning antique diamond ring. “If my husband gave that to me,” says one of the women, “I’d know immediately that he’d been very, very bad.”

“Yes, but would you forgive him?” asks the other woman.

“Of course.” Long pause. “After making him do a little penance.”

The two women giggle at their naughtiness. 

So how is this different from the religious medieval art I looked at yesterday, most of which was commissioned hundreds of years ago by very, very bad men? Back then, bad boys paid Pintoricchio or Perugina to paint a portrait of the Madonna and Child for the church to buy a little forgiveness; today they would buy an antique diamond ring.

Sin, sex, god; in Italy it’s an age-old trinity pre-dating Christianity.

The other morning, in a break from my usual tradition of ordering cornetto con crema and a cappuccino at Caffé di Perugia, I took my breakfast at Sandri, a revered pastry shop (here since 1860), staffed by waiters in scarlet red waistcoats and matching bow-ties.

The long narrow room, as elegant-looking as a wise-cracking Cary Grant, has carved wooden display shelves, full of chocolates and confections, and a domed, painted ceiling, like a church vestibule. The Two Amandas have relentlessly encouraged me to come here. They refer to it as Perugia’s Holy Loving Church of Sweets.

The place is jammed, the tables full. There’s only a single spot available at the bar and I have to wedge myself in, clearing my throat so that the woman beside me, standing over an espresso and a small white plate with four little chocolates on it, will move her coat—her faux-fur coat—off the bar. A coat, I realize too late, that belongs to the pretentious Italian guide who evicted me from her sex-in-religious-art tour at the National Gallery a couple of days ago.

I apologize for bothering her and she snaps, “You’re the rude man who interrupted my tour.”

“I wasn’t rude,” I tell her. “I was just curious as to what you had to say about the prostitutes.” The pasticceri, who greeted me in English, looks up from washing cappuccino cups and raises his eyebrows in alarm.

“Well, normally people pay for my services,” she says the woman icily.

“I’d be happy to pay for your services,” I tell her. The pasticceri puts down his towel and shakes his head before moving away. “As a guide, I mean.”

“Well, I’m very busy.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“I am.”

“Of course.”

She downs her espresso in a single gulp and dabs at her melon-colored lips with a linen napkin, leaving a red stain.

“When would you like to hire me?”

“What?”

“You said you wanted to hire me.”

“I said no such thing.”

She shrugs and reaches for her purse. “You did.”

“Actually, I was planning on visiting Assisi tomorrow,” I tell her, hoping that will be the end of it.

“Fine,” she says as she opens a compact and applies another layer of pink lipstick. “I’ll meet you in front of the Basilica at ten. Don’t be late.”

And so before I’ve even had a chance to order breakfast, I’ve accidentally gone and hired this snooty little woman from the museum, Signorina Maura Baldoni, as my guide to Assisi tomorrow.

Perhaps I’ll get lucky and she won’t show up.  

It’s annoying as hell walking around Perugia with Miss Baldoni. Everyone, it seems, knows her. Waiters at the sidewalk cafes across from the duomo leave their tables to rush over and give her a kiss on the cheek; a young woman selling daffodils in the piazza offers her a free bouquet. Even a capuchin monk, on his way to Assisi, stops his journey to give her a hug and then prattles on for 10 or 15 minutes about god only knows what.

Finally the bearded monk in his pointy little hood hurries off and we are able to continue on, heading down a narrow street until Maura suddenly stops and looks all around her, as if for the first time. “I love this street,” she says. “Via Maesta delle Volte. It’s one of the most sensual streets in Perugia. Do you see what I mean?”

My guide, Maura Baldoni. Photos by David Lansing.

Frankly, no. To me, it’s dark, dank, narrow. A bit claustrophobic.

“You are blind, aren’t you?” She sighs. “Look,” she says, pointing back up the street. “Focus. Pay attention. This street is like a woman, full of arches and curves. It is vuoto and pieno—empty and full. You see?”

Slowly, I do see. The gorgeous arches above the vicolos, the inviting openings that entice you onwards. The play of shadow and light, the different textures and colors.  She’s right. It’s incredibly sensual. Why could I not see this before?

We continue down the hill as Miss Baldoni explains to me that Perugia has always had the lines of a woman. “It was founded on two hills,” she says, “with the flat space—Corso Vannucci—between them.” She stops and faces me. “You see,” she says, directing my attention to the mounds of her chest with both her hands, “this is what Perugia looks like.”

Point well taken.

We end up on the edge of town where a round church sits on a nob in a tranquil setting of rose gardens and cypress trees. She has brought me to San Michele Arcangelo, one of the oldest Christian churches in Umbria, dating to the late 5^th century. It is intimate, simple, peaceful and quite beautiful. There is no one inside. I walk around its circular walls, touching the well-worn stone.

The feminine curves of San Michele Arcangelo in Perugia, Italy.

“It’s something special for us, this church,” Miss Baldoni tells me as we sit on a wooden bench. “A very popular place for Perugians to get married. Do you understand why?”

I do. This time she does not need to explain the romantic nature of the architecture to me. There is something sweetly feminine about this little church. Something that invites you into its intimate space, something that makes you feel tranquil and happy. A post-coital emotion that even I can sense. 

(baldonimaura@libero.it)

Whenever I ask the concierge at the Locanda Della Posta how to get somewhere, he tells me it is next to or very near someplace else. Someplace I’ve never been and have no idea how to get to. He tells me, for instance, that the Osteria il Gufo, where I planned to have dinner Saturday night, is across from the old cinema on Via della Viola (a street that’s not on any map). The truffle shop, he tells me, is on the same street as the gelaterie. But since there are about a thousand gelati shops in Perugia, I ask him which one and am told, “The best, naturalmente.”

Rather timidly, I ask him if the best gelati shop in Perugia has a name? No, he says. “But everyone knows it.” And he dismisses me as the idiot I am with a wave of his hand.

Saturday afternoon, after asking the concierge for directions to a shop nearby selling cheese, I ended up walking down a narrow, dark vicolo, completely lost, where I stumbled upon Cacioteka Formagi Salumi (although, somewhat confusingly, it says GIULIANO’S in big blue letters on the front).

Leonardo Spulcia in Cacioteka. Photos by David Lansing.

Cacioteka is owned by Leonardo Spulcia and when I ask him why the store sign says GIULIANO’S, he shrugs and says the name has always been on the front of the shop and why ruin a perfectly good sign just because the original owner,  Giuliano, may have died of cholera in the 15^th century? Well, who can argue with such logic?

I tell Leonardo I’d like some local gorgonzola and he instructs his assistant to cut me off a chunk from a lovely wedge in the display case. While I’m waiting, Leonardo gives me an assaggio from a big, fat, round sausage in a cloth bag labeled coglioni di mulo. I don’t know a lot of Italian but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that mulo is mule and coglioni sounds very similar to the Spanish cojones—balls. Mule’s balls sausage.

Would you prefer the mule’s balls or grandpa’s testicles sausage?

Italians, who have an endless number of food items named after male and female sexual parts,  seem to find this sort of thing hilarious.

When I compliment him on his mule’s balls, he cuts up a crinkly-looking sausage, palle del nonno, made from local wild boar. The name translates into something like “grandpa’s testicles.” It’s even tastier. Not as fatty as the mule’s balls but with a better mouth-feel. I take a quarter kilo of each and happily munch on them, and my gorgonzola, out on the balcony of my hotel room while watching the swallows dive bomb for insects above a very busy Corso Vannucci.

Here in Umbria, it’s starting to feel a little bit like spring.