Ducal delights

So I've been struggling with blogging motivation for some time, as is probably evident from the lack of posts. One reason is I'm not sure what I do on my travels is really interesting any more. It's interesting to me, but now I'm not striking out on my own, staying in hostels, penny pinching etc. it just seems like one big comfortable bourgeois self-indulgence. However, if self-indulgence is the watchword, I do miss the idea of having my posts to look back on. I'm really conscious of how fast my memories fade, especially of those little quirky moments that do still sometimes happen when travelling. Even when I was blogging regularly, I could feel how they slipped away in the days or weeks before posting, so I know if I don't make an effort, I'll probably end up forgetting the mere fact that I even visited Dusseldorf or Delft (two quick trips from the last year or two that I don't think made it on to the blog).

Since the Italy honeymoon, I've been lucky enough to be in New Zealand and South Korea, as well as a few more weekends away - notably Lisbon and Manchester. So I'm going to try to forge ahead and at least wrap up the last two stops of the honeymoon.

So, last time out, I left you in Urbino, eating delicious crescia. So let's pick things up there again. I think the two main things Urbino is known for is its lavish ducal court, particularly under Federico da Montefeltro, the duke from the famous Piero della Francesca portrait, and as the birthplace of Raphael. We ticked both of these star attractions off the list in our visit.

The ducal palace is up on the hill, so you can get some pretty cool photos from vantage points around the city. Here we are walking a little on the city wall above the gate into the hill town (there is also a newer part down below, as we found in many of these hill towns, where we left the car - no thanks to driving on the steep, narrow, cobble-stoned streets of the city).

Much of the interior of the palace was a bit more sparse and forbidding than I had anticipated. I think this is quite a common thing with very old royal residences where the interior decoration of the time has not necessarily survived. Often they would travel together with their furniture between different residences, although I imagine that is a lot less likely in the case of the ruler of a city state. Most of the static decoration was on elaborately carved doors and decorated ceilings, but happily the palace is also home to the National Gallery of the Marche region, so there is still plenty to look at. 

A fresco that is a (very) idealised portrait of the Duke and Duchess

A more realistic image of the pair. The Duke lost an eye and the bridge of his nose in a jousting accident

 Although the famous Piero della Francesca portrait mentioned above is now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the collection does include his Flagellation and Madonna of Senigallia.

Detail from the Flagellation

It's really quite small

Piero's Madonna

La Muta, by Raphael

By far my favourite bit of the palace was the Duke's studiolo, a tiny room decorated with intarsia woodwork (similar to marquetry) and portraits of famous thinkers and writers. I'm not sure how well it comes across in photographs, but the detail and realism of the trompe l'oeil effects in the woodwork is stunning. I must have spent at least 20 minutes in this little 3.6 x 3.35 metre study, looking at every detail. 

General view - note the fake open cupboard door on the lower left

Trompe l'oeil shelves with musical instruments

Squirrel friend

More fake cupboards

Last up, we visited the house where Raphael was born and grew up. Things I didn't know about Raphael: his father was himself a painter (court painter to the Duke in fact), and I believe his mother was from a noble family (this is what I remember from our visit, but all I can find on the internet is that she died when he was 8. This meant that his childhood home was a lot more substantial than one might imagine from the "starving artist" stereotype (see also Rubens' house, which I happened to visit this weekend - dude must have been loaded). 

The Great Hall of Raphael's house

A work by his father, Giovanni Santi

Fresco in the room where Raphael was born. It is debated whether it is an early work by Raphael himself, or by his fathe

This is here just because of the teeny tiny boar

 After Raphael's house, we had lunch at the Antica Osteria da la Stella, which has archival records of bills to such famous painters as Piero della Francesca, Ucello, and Raphael himself. Kind of a neat experience although I don't remember what the food was like. Good but not exceptional, I think.

In our "antique" hotel room and in the Ducal Palace, we had spotted these cool star-shaped lights which seemed to be characteristic of the region. We texted the landlady to ask where she got hers from, and she told us to go to this tiny workshop where an elderly lady makes them by hand. Pretty badass, as the kids say.

 It survived the trip home as a unique souvenir of the honeymoon, although I wish we had thought to clean all the glass panels before hanging it up!

Urbane Urbino

After the Riviera, we started to head north again, to Urbino, another walled hilltop city, still in the Marche region. It's probably chiefly known for its Renaissance dukedom, and as the birthplace of Raphael. We parked at the foot of the hill, and it took quite some time to figure out how to get up into the city. I found a staircase where you can walk up inside the fortifications, but the promised elevator remained elusive. As it was a while before we could check in to our hotel, we left our bags in the car and set out to see a bit of the city before lunch. (We eventually did find the elevator to bring our bags up, you have to go inside the tourist office and pay a euro to use it, then it pops out on top of the city wall next to a cafe.)

 We were staying in an "antique room" dating from 1544, which was pretty fun. I've never been in a hotel room with a "feature well" before!

We ended up buying a light fixture similar to the star-shaped one on the ceiling here. They seem to be traditional in the area, also appearing in the Ducal Palace

The well

On the city walls with the Ducal Palace to the right

View of the surrounding countryside from the walls

Before lunch, we went to the Oratorio of St John the Baptist, a small 14th century chapel covered with frescoes by the Salimbeni brothers. It's so pretty. It's kind of unbelievable you can have these tiny little buildings filled with such treasures that no-one has ever heard of. Imagine the big deal this would be most places in the world.

This photo gives a sense of the monumental scale of the frescoes

Panorama of the crucifixion scene and the right-hand wall, with scenes from the life of John the Baptist

Expressive lamentations at the Crucifixion. And... is that kid kicking the other kid in the face?

Detail of the crucifixion scene with a naughty dog

St John the Baptist at work, with bonus dog curled up on a pile of clothes. Haven't quite mastered the "standing on top of a river" thing though

Nice naturalistic detail of someone disrobing to be baptised

Hey, it's the KKK getup from the Perugia paintings. This seems to have been how members of the confraternity dressed

The Oratorio also offered great views of the Ducal Palace rising over the rooftops

As you can see, it was a beautiful, warm day and lunch was a local speciality, crescia. Kind of like a stuffed flatbread, but much flakier. With the addition of lard in the dough, it's really more like a pastry than a bread, and 100% delicious. We went to a little hole in the wall place and queued for ages, but it was so worth it.

Photo doesn't do justice to the deliciousness, but I promise you it was cheesy meaty flakey pastry goodness. We went there twice in our time in Urbino

Tomb raiding and sunbathing

On the way out of Perugia, we stopped at the Tomb of the Volumni in the city's suburbs. It is an Etruscan tomb complex, dating back to the 2nd century BC, which was rediscovered by chance on 5 February 1840 (the day before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed!) You go in to find a staircase surrounded by gravestones, where you descend to the tomb of the Velimna (Volumni) family. This consists of a number of small chambers carved out of the rock, and still holds the family's tombs in their original positions.

The Etruscans seem particularly mysterious and shadowy to me, almost as if their history has been erased by the Roman dominance, so it was very interesting to see some of their ancient sites on this trip. The artefacts in this tomb seem pretty similar to what you think of as Roman style, but I don't know which way the influence ran. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that there was a period of Etruscan dominance over Rome, particularly in religious matters, although there is some debate about the extent of the influence, and both the Etruscans and the Romans were heavily influenced by the Greeks.

Funerary stele in the entrance hall

In front of the family tombs

The tomb of Aurente Volumio, the patriarch of the family

After seeing the Volumni tomb, the largest in the complex, you go outside, where there are around 200 more tombs, a few of which are open to visit. Beware, I got absolutely savaged by mosquitoes at this stage. The largest of these was the Bella tomb, which I don't think had much in it, but afforded me the opportunity to do my best impression of a creature of the undead.

In the underground chamber of the Bella tomb

Finally, there is a small museum which holds more funerary stele, with translations and explanations of their carvings, and a few other artefacts. It was fun to see the Etruscan language, which uses an alphabet derived from Greek and which is still not entirely understood.

From there, we drove to the Riviera del Conero on the Adriatic coast, to Portonovo, near Ancona, for a bit of beach time. It was already October by this time, so it was a bit of gamble, but it mostly paid off. There was a big storm one afternoon, which howled particularly around our hotel as it was built on a sort of stepped design so that every room had a corner balcony. But other than that, and a bit of overcast weather on our last day there, it was pretty good.

We went first to Portonovo Beach, but out of season it seems we turned up a bit early and none of the beach loungers were out. Since it was a bit rocky, we didn't fancy lying on the beach there, so just walked around a bit and then headed to Sirolo.

Portonovo Bay

We stopped just next to the road after Sirolo, where it seemed nice, and settled down for a swim and sunbathe. After I'd been in the water for a bit, I realised that it was absolutely PACKED with tiny jellyfish. I found an article from last year that said these were "teeming nurseries of self-cloning moon jellyfish", which some researchers claimed is linked to the increase in gas platforms in the sea, which give the baby jellyfish a nice flat surface to stick on to while they clone. It was a bit terrifying when I first looked down and saw them all over the place, but by that stage I figured I'd already been in the water for quite a while and there were so many of them that if they were going to sting me, they would probably have done it already. I still yelped every time I touched them though.

View of the coast from our hotel

We also went to a delicious tiny restaurant, the Osteria del Poggio. On our food tour in Perugia, the guide told us about the fantastic reputation of deli meats from Norcia. In this part of Italy, delicatessens are often known as "Norcerias". Basically, in the north the meats from around Bologna and Parma are famed, and in the Umbria and Marche regions, this honour is given to the Norcia meats. Only one of them seems to have broken through on to the international stage, but I can confirm that Norcia deli meats are just as good. Anyway, our meal at the Osteria started with a superlative meat and cheese platter followed by rabbit gnocchi with local red wine. Definitely a culinary highlight of the trip, especially those melt in the mouth hams.

It was nice to have a bit of time to relax, read and recharge our batteries, as although we were having a lot of fun, it was also getting pretty tiring moving around all the time!