Gone Frescoing

To put Vermont behind me and spend the darkest New England months in Italy! To escape the unholy trinity of snow, sleet and freezing rain, to not fear for life and limb, and to walk anywhere without crampons on your shoes, that would be worth the money and even the discomfort of transatlantic air travel.

Visiting towns below the radar of international tourism is delightful. Although winter months in Umbria can be brisk and wet, the climate is still several orders of magnitude better than that of New England! It is sweater and windbreaker conditions but offers great walking of both city and country scapes. And , of course, it is Italy with real Italians and real Italian food!

Central Umbria is studded with hill towns characterized by steep passages and streets where old men and women struggle up and down, yoked with overstuffed plastic bags ..…a Via Dolorosa, at least once a day. Not shouldering the Cross, but laden with “pane, prosciutto and aqua minerale”.

Even the smallest hilltown has more than a few churches and they all harbour frescoes. Many worthy of sustained admiration, some less so, but all demand more than a fleeting glance from you. The motifs range from naive to profound and the execution is masterful. No wonder this richness of church art, we are, after all, in the epicenter of European civilization of the late middle ages and the renaissance . The best fresco masters of the period were courted by town fathers and clerics eager to make theirs the most beautiful church of the region.

The backdrop for the biblical themes always reflect, not the Holy Land, but the local verdant geography. As if the painter has merely glanced out the window or maybe climbed the campanile to get a better view of the stage behind the Holy Family.

Most of these churches have easy opening hours and no admission fee, but you may have to drop a couple of Euros in the box to turn on the light. Five minute limit to avoid undue fading of the pigment in the plaster protected for nearly a millennium. Thus flipping the light on and off evokes the sense of a peep show although there is nothing tawdry about the the object of your interest. The time restraint also adds a little urgency and gravitas to the moment, a committed concentration to fully take in the specter in front of you, before the light disappears. Wonderful things are everywhere when you widen your view and deepen your focus.