A day trip to Assisi

Today we jumped in the cars and ventured out to Assisi for a day trip - roughly 120km from where we are staying.

Assisi is the home of many Saints, but probably most prominent was Saint Francis, the founder of the Franciscan order and was named as one of the two patron Saints of Italy (along with Saint Catherine of Siena).

We decided to head out early to try and avoid as much of the heat of the day as we could. The drive to Assisi was reasonably straightforward - at least compared to some of our recent outings and the routes selected by our TomTom.

There was one oddity to the TomTom’s route selection however. After getting us all the way to the outskirts of Assisi via major roads, the TomTom decided it was time to mix things up a little and took us up one of its goat tracks. We were fooled by this one however as at first it looked like a reasonable road, but quickly narrowed to just wider than the 9 seater with no areas to turn around… so we were committed. Thankfully we didn’t meet any traffic coming in the other direction.

The goat track wound us slowly around and up the side of the hill leading to Assisi. We eventually popped out on the side of the main road where we more comfortably continued heading to the top of the hill found a carpark in Piazza Matteotti.

We left the cars and started walking down the hill through the beautiful (but very hot) streets of Assisi. We wandered our way down to the bottom of the hill and ended up at the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi.

After touring the Basilica we headed further down the hilly streets of Assisi and found a nice place for lunch - and to escape the head of the day for a while. After lunch we walked through some of the shops at the bottom of the hill (including one that was selling fresh truffles) and grabbed a gelato to help cool off before catching the bus back to the top of the hill and to our cars.

The drive home was fairly uneventful - thankfully and the TomTom got us home on main roads for a change.