Or Don’t Mess With St Francis!
St Francis
You remember back in Padua, when I said St Anthony was my
favorite Saint? Well, that is about to
come back and bite me in the butt!
We looked at the map, and it seemed like there were several
ways to get to Assisi from Ravenna. We
checked with the owner of our B&B and he advised us to take E45, so off we
headed.
I knew there were 3 big parking lots in Assisi, so the plan
was to head for one of those, and then figure out where our hotel was
located. We got to the valley and could
see Assisi, sitting like a jewel on a hill.
We started following the Big Blue P signs for the parking lots. I still don’t know what we did wrong, but all
of a sudden we were winding through the streets of Assisi, no parking lots in
sight.
After a few tries, we gave up, parked illegally and went to
find things on foot.
The Blog Fodder kept feeling like we should walk up that
hill over there. While I don’t like to
argue with his logic, he was heading out of town, and I really thought we
should be heading into town.
We were standing under a tree, by a snack bar, looking at
our map. As we had no clue where we
were, it was kind of tough to decide where to go.
Just then, St Francis decided to take his revenge.
Wham! Out of the blue, I felt SOMETHING land on my shoulder. It was SOMETHING QUITE SUBSTANTIAL!
So I did what any normal woman would do, and screamed my
head off!
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a lizard running for his
life! I didn’t get a close look, but I
am pretty sure it was the rare Italian Attack Ninja Lizard….very dangerous!
Once my heart rate got to a normal level again, we started
walking. Just then SOMETHING ELSE hit my
shoulder. Now, it is possible it was
just a leaf, but at this point I was completely freaked out, and screamed
again.
Much to the amusement of the guy running the snack
stand! I indicated it was a lizard, with
the universal hand sign for creepy-crawly.
Snack guy laughed harder, but the lady customer gave me the appropriate
amount of feminine sympathy.
And The BF…he is a wise man and kept his hysterical laugher
to himself!
Later, when we went to fetch our luggage from the car, a
third lizard scurried up the wall next to me.
And yes, I screamed yet again. Then
I started proclaiming at the top of my lungs, to whoever was listening, that I
was wrong about St Anthony and St Francis is, was and always would be my
favorite Saint.
Heavens, is that a Lizard Gargoyle?
I even bought a larger St Francis medal than the St Anthony
one I had purchased earlier. It seems to
have worked, there were no more lizard attacks
Once, all the lizard hysteria died down, the Snack guy was
able to point us in the right direction, and we walked across town to our
hotel.
Just as a side note, we ran across more people in Assisi who
did not speak English than in other parts of Italy. And since we were in Italy, we can’t fault
them for that. We speak a few basic
words of Italian, understand a few more, and are more than willing to make an
effort. I want to point out that the
only person who corrected my truly horrible Italian pronunciation was BF!
We parked the car at the Porta San Giacomo. When we reached our hotel, the lovely
gentleman who checked us in, was shocked we parked so far away. He pulled out a town map and gave us
directions to how to get from there to the hotel parking lot. He assured us it would only take us 15
minutes. This entire conversation was in
Italian on his part, and English on ours.
It was the prettiest parking lot of our trip. The hotel was great also. Our room, while up 2 flights of circular
stairs, was open and airy. We had a nice
balcony that overlooked the Assisi Valley.
After relaxing and recovering from our adventures, we went
out to find dinner. The BF found a place
that sounded interesting in the Rick Steves guide, but when we arrived, it was
closed on Mondays. We found another
place and had a lovely meal with our first glasses of Sagratino, the local
wine.
At the next table was our second Ugly American sighting. The two ladies weren’t completely hopeless,
but were pretty amusing. They went
through and discussed the nationality of all the other clients. They asked for special treatment. They snapped
their fingers and demanded Parmesan cheese (by pointing to and holding up MY
Parmesan cheese) Honestly, I would have
given them mine, if they hadn’t been such pains! Dennis and I were tempted to talk in accents
to throw off their Nationality Assessment.
“Let’s go ooooot and abooooot!”
“Crickey Mate, that’s a ripping idea!”
But we had a good laugh and they eventually left.
From our adventures of the day, we realized that everything in Assisi is uphill…both ways! So we knew we’d be in for a strenuous day, and decided to head back to the hotel to have a restful evening and come up with a plan of attack for the next
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