The Etruscans

This morning we packed up another carton of purchases to post home and walked all the way down the main street, past the main piazza only to find that the post office was closed.  So a little walk around the corner to the tourist information office to find out at what time the post office would open, to find that the tourist office was also closed.  We stopped for coffee at a table in the main street before returning to the cottage where a quick check of the internet showed that November 1st happens to be a national holiday in Italy - All Saints day!

No wonder it's so busy in town today - Italian families with lots of children and dogs everywhere.  We realised that we should probably book a restaurant for dinner pretty quickly and headed off again, walking around a few of the little streets we'd not been on before, booked a nice looking restaurant and then visited the Museo dell'Accademia Etrusca.  The museum is in an ancient building in one of the piazzas and doesn't look all that big from the outside - but of course Cortona is built on the side of a steep hill, and while the museum only goes up a couple of storeys from the piazza, it goes down at least another 4 or 5!

What a fabulous museum - and such an amazing collection.  Some excavations have been done in the walls of the museum itself, exposing the etruscan walls that once encircled the original piazza.  The Romans just built the current piazza on top of it.  The etruscans were in Cortona from at least the 7th century BC and several of their buildings and burial tombs have been uncovered over the last couple of hundred years, and archaeological digs are still being done.  Unfortunately the museum is just too big to be able to do justice to the collection in one visit, but we absolutely loved it.

By the time we left it was after 3 and we headed into a little cafe/restaurant on the terrace of the old theatre for lunch, overlooking one of the crowded piazzas.  Then a walk part way down the hill, with fabulous (though quite misty) views over the valley to Lake Trasimeno in Umbria, and an easy climb back up the hill on a couple of escalators.

And tonight we walked back through an absolutely packed town - exactly as it was last Saturday night soon after we arrived.  Today we have observed the Italian culture of people meeting family and friends in the town piazza and main street, and standing, talking to each other, with children running around playing and well-behaved dogs on leashes everywhere - and groups of people sitting at bars and cafes talking animatedly with lots of laughter, and not a mobile phone or iPad in sight!  It is so wonderful - and so different from the halloween atmosphere of last night!


Before heading out for dinner, we lay on the bed and read - something we've been able to do a fair bit of this week.  Brian's finished a Stephen Fry book (from our cottage bookshelf) and I've just about finished rereading Under the Tuscan Sun.




Our restaurant tonight was great and every table taken (just as well we booked).  We both started with pumpkin soup, then Brian had beef straccetti with porcini mushrooms and I had porcini mushroom rsotto, we shared a salad of thinly sliced fennel and orange and a half bottle of Chianti Classico.  Then a gorgeous walk home through the town that is still full of people and more cars are still arriving.