The Bruner Family Journey: Leaving Italy

The Cathedral in Orvieto

This post covers three dramatically disparate places - Orvieto, Mantova, and Vipiteno - whose only things in common are that (a) they are located in Italy and (b) we visited them in two frenetic days of travel from Rome to Austria (June 29-30, 2011). We left Rome on the evening of June 29 and we had firm plans to meet friends in Austria on July 1. This meant we had to get to Innsbruck by nighttime on the 30th. That's a lot of ground to cover in a short period of time. And we didn't really make it that far on the first night, when we stopped at a hotel in Orvieto, which is only an hour-and-a-half north of Rome.

Our visit to Orvieto was brief, but we stayed long enough to walk through the old part of town to the cathedral, a stunning masterpiece of the late Middle Ages with a brilliantly colored golden façade that is sure to wow even the most jaded juvenile world travelers. Construction of the cathedral commenced in 1290 and by some accounts took 300 years to complete. It's a dazzling mix of Romanesque and Gothic influences and is reminiscent of the cathedral in Siena.

There's more to Orvieto than its colorful Cathedral

My life is complete now that I've made it to Mantova

The next morning, we drove to Mantova for lunch, a mere 365 kilometers to the north of Orvieto. Mantova (which is known as Mantua in English) thrived during the Renaissance as a center of art, culture and music. Ever since our last trip to Italy in 1999, I'd desperately wanted to come here. Why? Because after a month of traveling extensively across the country from Milan to Naples, an Italian woman pointed out a fatal flaw in our itinerary: "But did you go to Mantova? It's the most beautiful place in Italy. If you didn't go there, your trip wasn't complete." Well, I showed her! (I wish I had her email address.)

If you are a fan of Shakespeare, Mantova is the town to which Romeo was banished in Romeo and Juliet (although I don't remember the town being featured in the recent child-friendly adaptation, Gnomeo and Juliet). Mantova is surrounded on three sides by artificial lakes built in the 12th century and it boasts a large collection of medieval and Renaissance buildings. It's a relaxed, elegant and truly beautiful place, but we didn't stay long because we had to hit the road.

Mantova by night (photo taken from the internet)

This is the part of Italy that looks like Austria

It was another 250 kilometers north to dinner in Vipiteno, a small town near the border with Austria that has the look and feel of being in, well, Austria. The food and the architecture exhibit a strong Germanic influence and many people speak German as a first language. At dinner, one of the waiters explained that the area is mostly Germanic and was part of the Austrio-Hungarian empire until Italy took control after World War I. Amusingly, the other waiter didn't even speak Italian, which created some confusion for our kids, who posed the logical question: "But aren't we still in Italy?" It was a cute place to stop and the journey to get there, through the mountains of the South Tyrol (known in Italian as the Alto Adige), was extremely scenic. We were amazed that only a few days earlier we had been in the dry, hot countryside of the deep Italian south - the green, wet and cool landscape of the far north was quite a contrast.

The countryside of the Alto Adige
(this is from the internet - we saw many views like this from the highway
but my wife instructed me that it wasn't safe to pull over to take a picture)

By the time dinner ended, it was starting to get a bit late. Thankfully, Innsbruck was only 60 kilometers away.