My First Weekend Staying in Perugia

After traveling so much I finally had a weekend of relaxation! I stayed in Perugia because I had a field trip on Saturday with my religion class to a small town called Spoleto. Saturday was supposed to be the rainiest day of the whole month; I was not too excited about that. But I had also heard Spoleto was a cute little town.

Spoleto was originally an important Roman city. It lies in the path of one of Rome's oldest roads, Via Flaminia, which made it a major economic center (compared to Perugia which was not directly connected to the capital). We went to the archaeological museum and sat in a real Roman amphitheater. The museum also had exhibits of stone and bronze pieces that have been found in or near Spoleto. The most important of which were two stone tablets found on the top of a nearby mountain. The tablets have been dated to pre-Roman times, somewhere around 5th or 6th century BC. They warned everyone who came to the mountain to never take anything from its forests because the was a sacred place belonging to their equivalent to Jupiter (Zeus).

We also saw a few old churches in while in Spoleto. The largest and most grand was the Duomo (the Duomo of any city is its largest church, it doesn't have to have a dome). It is considered to this day the pinnacle of Romanesque architecture and was finished in the 11th Century. However this was not the church that struck me the most. Our very first stop of the day was at a very small and old church, La Basilica di San Salvatore, built in the 4th Century AD. It was finished sometime in the late 300's which is less that a century after Constantine legalized Christianity. This must be one of the oldest surviving churches in Italy, definitely the oldest church I have been in. The original Christians who prayed here probably had relatives or knew someone who was persecuted and killed for being a Christian. Walking into the space was very humbling. It was plain, grey, it was easy to tell they borrow stones from everywhere they could. Even the columns were miss matched; they must have taken columns from different nearby buildings. Everything looked thrown together and cheap, as if the people who built it were poor and were looking for anything to build a structure to pray in. The entire grey scene within the church is broken by one fragment of a surviving fresco behind the alter. It is the only dash of color so your eyes are immediately drawn to it. It was simple, and therefore fit the space perfectly. The whole building was a perfect example of early Christianity, before the church was heavily concerned with money and land; when Christians just needed a space to get together and be in the presence of the Lord.

I thought it was going to be raining the entire time so I didn't bring my camera! But my other classmates did so maybe they can send me some photos.

The rest of the weekend was spent in doors, mostly watching the thunderstorms outside from the safety of my bedroom window. But God forbid I relax any more! I have tons of work to do.