Day 10 - Mar 14, 2013 Last updated: 4/6/13 3:00pm PT
Today we went to the ancient hill town of Orvieto, about an hour fifteen train ride from Rome. Populated since at least the time of the Etruscans, the town’s claim to fame is a deep well dug when a Pope fled to Orvieto in 1527 to escape the sacking of Rome. It took ten years to dig the 175 foot deep and 45 foot wide well. You can pay €5 to climb down 248 steps to the bottom, but then you’d have to climb the same number of steps back up. I don’t think so.
You take a funicular to the top of the hill, about 1000 ft. in elevation.
It was cold and windy.
The zebra church.
The old well. When we were planning this trip, we thought we might go down the stairs to the bottom of the well. With the colds we were fighting, and some acceptance of our getting on in years, we decided just to look at the well from the outside. That’s a human size door on the well’s building.
