Daydreams Of Civita

Civita di Bagnoregio is actually two villages connected by a long and steep pedestrian bridge battered by the wind.  On a sunny afternoon, after escaping Rome for the Umbrian countryside, Emily, Hannes and I traversed this bridge in search of history, bruschetta and breathtaking vistas.  Both medieval Civita and the bridge - the town's one and only link to the outside world - can be seen in this picture.  No cars drive here.  No roads lead in.  It's a pedestrian's paradise.  In fact, so few people actually live here that it's known commonly as "The Dead City." 

There's a story I love of a local Civita townswoman who used to walk her donkey across this bridge forty times a day to sell her fruit and vegetables in the Bagnoregio market.  Home now from my Italian journey with my Camino Love, I am wistful for a life I never lived.  Waking up every morning, tending my garden, bringing out milk for the local cats (which outnumber the human residents of Civita by about 10 to 1), making my husband breakfast bruschetta with sausage and tomatoes grilled over an open flame, sipping espresso in the sun as I gossiped with the lady next door, wrapping up a slice of ciambella for later, before loading up my donkey, walking under the 2,500 year old Estruscan stone arc and making the first of many of the day's treks across the great bridge. 

Now, I know this is a foreigner's romantic vision of truly hard, grueling work.  This in reality is a city slowly crumbling away to the valley floor below, and to walk forty times down the same path is tedious, I'm sure, not to mention dangerous in harsh winter storms.  Yet, to a screenwriter who sees a movie down every alleyway and wine cellar step, the Civita life seems intoxicating and rich.  It's a life I'll never lead but in my daydreams (I did a donkey ride once down the Grand Canyon, and hell will freeze over before I get on one of those cliff-hugging daredevils again), but I can at least sip an espresso in my sunny San Franciscan apartment, pour some milk into a saucer for my cat Jade, walk back and forth to the record player forty times to flip the vinyl, and text my roommate a bruschetta grocery list for tonight's dinner. 

Emily endures the long bruschetta wait. Looking the essence of Italian cool, I might add.

The view from my imaginary Civita home.

A door and window that lead to nowhere - the rest of the palace now a part of the valley floor.