We have a wonderful villa just outside of Bagnoregio and the weather has been great: sunny and crisp, the smells sweet and air fresh, the wine cheap, good, and local, and the day trip options perfect.  We've been having fresh berries, yogurt, and coffee at home then heading to the hill town del giorno for lunch and the afternoon and perhaps appetizers and dinner.  Our back porch (above) looks down over plowed but currently unpopulated fields and over Lake Bolsena.  

When we first arrived by train from Rome to Orvieto, a medium-sized hill town with a beautiful Duomo from 1290 (-1590 with construction delays), ample porchetta, an underground Etruscan network, and La Rupe, a 3-mile circumferential path hugging the up-and-down base of the tufa escarpment.  Note the axillary perspiration of a sunny outing.  We picked olives, dunked our heads under public water spouts, and appreciated poppies, caves, and lizards.  

Next we drove through Bagnoregio to the base of the bridge to Civita (de Bagnoregio).  The two towns used to be attached by a volcanic rock natural bridge which has since eroded into a deep saddle necessitating the newest incarnation of the bridge you see here.   When Elliott was six he lived here with his family for a few weeks during a year in Italy and had a brief re-visit five years later.  It was really fun to (re)discover the alleys and passages and haunts of massive pigs (R.I.P., Stony Martin) that had been drawn into pictures in his brain and shared as stories to me over that past year and a half.  

We paid a lawn-chair-seated centenarian (in a house dress that looked uncannily like something my grandmother Fay used to wear) with rheumatically angled extremities one Euro a piece to check out a cliffside garden complete with rusted garden tools mounted on tufa shed walls.  (Sonal, how's this for an engagement photo, eh?)

A tunnel under the town!  

A wine cellar outside Tony and Astra's garden which Elliott and Aran helped excavate in 1982, finding an old Etruscan coin in the process.  

  

 A view from near the stairs to the old Ryan house.  

We wandered down the back of town, site of 6-year-old Elliott's hunt for dinner snails with his friend, Francesco, and a quiet and multi-caved trail away from tourists.  Aran, we have some pics of possible pig caves for you to vote on.  

On the way back up to town on our second visit up to town.  

We stopped in a bruschetteria which houses an old olive press which was, until the 1960's, powered by blindfolded donkeys who would walk the circle followed by a human with a wooden spatula scooping the mushed stuff from the sides back under the path of the grindstone for further pressing.  

While toasting our bruschetta, Fabrizio, just four years older than Elliott and still a local in Civita, told us that yes, he in fact did know both Georgio and Francesco (the two remembered boyhood friends), that Tony was still alive and sometimes lived right above the shop, and that the big old pig down in the cave was probably his own family's animal.  

We've been three times, now, to Orvieto.  Today we explored the Olmo quarter and found some beautiful residential areas.  Elliott and I went down into the Etruscan excavations and saw fun wine cellars, wells, garbage chutes, and pottery remnants before walking the "Romantic Ramparts" on the West end of town.  

Looking out to the North.  

And now, on our final night in Italy (bonus lay-over night in Frankfurt tomorrow, though!!), we are heading to a recommended pizzeria in Bolsena, just short of the lake of the same name (above).  

What a time we've had these five weeks of exploring, rising (most of the time) to unexpected challenges, appreciating water pressure, vegetable matter, and toilet paper like rarely before, loving and knowing each other in new ways, and preparing for huge and wonderful changes coming up in our lives at home.  

We'll see you all on the home front, lovies!  

xo, Wild Hteb and Uncle Elephant