Famous Footsteps

We’ve decided we now know why Italian towns are built on hills - it’s so you can walk off the 500 courses of lunch you eat on a daily basis.

Bagno Vignoni

Gubbio in Umbria is a stunning medieval town in Umbria and we turned up here today after a day in Cortona. First stop was lunch - menu of the day included bruschetta, pasta with truffle sauce, pork steak with fries and desert for 15 euros. Having just come for Tuscany where the course were pretty small (relatively speaking) we didn’t think twice about ordering the menu. Big mistake! Each course was a full meal in itself and it was with a  Monty Python-esque ‘just one more wafer’ that we squeezed the pan Acosta desert into our wilting mouths.

To walk off the calories we forced ourselves to climb the steep hills to tread the paths once walked by medieval princes and by one of my favourite authors, Herman Hesse. Yesterday we bathed in the thermal baths of Bagno Vignoni that my confirmation saint (Catherine of Siena) dunked her holy body in on her way to Rome. What joy!