Perugia: The Ups and Downs: Perugia May 2007

You do get an impressive sense of what Umbria looks like from the descent into Perugia airport. You fly in over vineyard covered hills and over the wide expanse of Lago Trasimeno. It all looks green, lush and casually beautiful. It doesn’t prepare you for the shock that is touching down at Perugia though. It only receives fourteen flights a week and it’s not really geared up for the international traveller. To be honest, it might struggle to deal with a couple crop-sprayers at the same time and it’s probably the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a family-run airport. There’s one building which looks like a drab out of town warehouse and it's carefully divided into very small sections. There's a departure lounge, an arrivals hall (and hall is putting it grandly to say the least) and a strip of small booths, a bar and a couple of check-in desks. There’s absolutely no space to spare. People waiting for the arriving passengers had to do it outside, standing behind a wire fence and looking like well dressed refugees in a camp.

Positioning is very important at Perugia airport. The hall contains the world’s smallest luggage carousel and a few chairs, and now it had to cater for 150 people. There were only two toilet cubicles and so a queue formed (well we all seemed to be British on the flight) when there was really no space to have one. As the hall filled up it began to look like a huge a large conga line and if you were stuck at the back of it, it must have felt like one too. There is no mystery about the place. It’s very clear how the luggage reaches the carousel as you see the baggage handlers put the bags on the trolleys at the plane and see them transported across the tarmac to space behind the arrivals hall. It might have been easier just to arrange the bags on the tarmac and spare us the sardine moment. If anything, the carousel is a hindrance. You do have to be quick at picking up your bag as you have exactly 15 seconds from it appearing on the carousel to disappearing again, and then you have to fight your way through the assembled masses of people. A passport is shown to an official standing in a doorway and before you know it you’re outside blinking into the sunlight. Luxurious and exciting it isn’t.

Positioning had served me well, I was one of the first out of the airport, having left a string of casualties in my wake as I fought my way out. There are no buses to town and there were very few taxis, but I didn't care because I'd managed to get into 50% of them. I was  assured by my driver that I was going to have a good stay and that he knew where every hotel in Perugia was. He did too, well except one which meant a couple of circuits of the town's one way system before it came into view. I paid my 35 Euros for the journey which struck me as being a bit on the harsh side considering it was only a 12km journey plus the urban faffing about. In situations like these I think of those lines from the Bible, “I was a stranger and you took me in". I'm sure taxi drivers on the make were not what St. Matthew was talking about but it certainly applied here. It was either that though, or a bloody long walk.

I had chosen my hotel on the internet. The big selling factor was that it had a large terrace and I could easily see myself sitting there with a huge glass of wine in my hand, watching the sun go down. I walked up the steps and stood on the terrace for a few seconds before heading off to the reception. There was a wonderful sense of faded glamour to it. “This will do me,” I thought but I did wonder where all the tables and chairs were. It was incredibly bare. I soon discovered that there were other things missing from the hotel, namely guests. 

“We don’t have any water”, said the receptionist, “and we don’t know when we are going to get any. We have rebooked you into another hotel which is not too far away.” 

As it turned out, the Hotel San Ercolano was about five minutes away and situated in a narrow cobbled street. I had been robbed of my terrace but I found myself staying in a small quiet place that was marginally nearer the city centre and very lovingly Italian. Well, it would have been if it wasn’t dangerously near “The Loch Ness” Scottish pub.

Perugia was once described to me as being the most beautiful city in Italy. I don’t think it is but it really comes close. The thing that stops it short of being truly stunning is that it incorporates so many buildings from different eras that it doesn’t really looked homogenised enough. It’s situated on a hill and the old part of it stretches out, star-like from the centre with the newer parts found lower down the slopes.  To get into the middle I had to climb up the broad sweeping steps to the side of San Ercolano church. As I was to discover very quickly, there are a lot of steps in Perugia and it’s difficult to go more than one hundred metres in any direction without going severely up or down a hill.

It’s also very easy to get lost in the city’s narrow streets and alleyways. Roads may be next to each other on my map but there can be a massive height differences between them. The most evil street is the Via Appia, a road of curved elegance if you’re walking down it, but  two hundred plus  steps of seemingly endless agony if you’re going the other way. The downward option allows you to take   a detour along the old Roman aqueduct. This is a narrow path, about two paces wide which crosses a narrow valley running through the centre of Perugia. It looks like a stone bobsleigh run and is quite possibly the most exciting skateboard journey you can ever hope to undertake though sadly nobody seemed interested in giving it a try.

The Romans were preceded here by the Etruscans and they left their mark too. Not too far from here is a tall imposing gateway of grey stone which has two great buttresses attached to it. There’s no decoration here at all. Sombre and intimidating, there’s nothing even slightly ceremonial about it. This was clearly built for defence purposes and if structures could talk this one would say “bugger off” and mean it. With the help of some Roman modifications, it has stood here for 2,300 years. It’s an impressive bit of building by anyone’s standards, though slightly spoiled by the addition of a fifteenth century loggia to one of the supports. It's like somebody's tried to build a summer house on it. One thing about walking around the city is very clear, whether it's gates or stairs or churches, grey can be incredibly beautiful.