Tuesday 1 August 2017

A day trip on the Apennines.

Like I told you in my last post, this year we as a family opted to spend our holidays here at home rather than going away for a few days. It's probably been the best decision we could have possibly made this year - I was abroad for half of it, so I was more than pleased to stay home. My parents and brother had come to visit me in the Netherlands in June, and so we had already kind of had a holiday this year. There is so much to see in my region that we have never run out of things to do - in fact there still are more places I want to see, but they will have to wait for next year I think. 

Last week we visited a couple of villages about an hour's drive away from where we live. I had stumbled upon a photo of a gorgeous medieval chapel on Instagram a few weeks before, and discovered it was really close to us! 





The church is so tiny and in the middle of nowhere that it's not even open all the time - you have to call the keeper and she will come and open it for you. Luckily she was already inside with a group of other tourists and she had begun her tour five minutes before we arrived. The chapel was absolutely stunning and my photos definitely don't do it justice. The frescoes have been there for 800 years and have survived a terribly destructive earthquake 8 years ago... it's just crazy to think that something so extraordinary is so little known, even by locals like me. 






Despite the chapel being so tiny, there was so much to admire. Part of the group of tourists we met was a priest, who talked about art, saints and prophets. My brother, my mother and I spent a good twenty minutes trying to translate with him a sentence from Latin, which he was convinced was not by Isaiah like the guide told us, and turned out actually being by Isaiah after all.




We then got back on the car and made our way to Santo Stefano di Sessanio, a tiny village on the Apennines. Less than 100 people live there. It's a place straight out from a fairytale. I bought naturally dyed local yarn for a shawl, and my mother bought local lentils and spelt. It was just one of those perfect days from start to finish.





I start studying again tomorrow, and because of that for the past few days I have been feeling like Summer is coming to a close - which is absolutely untrue because there still is all of August ahead of us, but still. I just have this feeling. 

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