On holiday in Umbria’s idyllic undulating hills, Matt Rudd is keen to broaden his kids’ horizons with art and culture. But can it compete when the villa’s got a cool pool and a great big telly?
It’s Wednesday afternoon in Montone, a hilltop village so beautiful it would have an open-top tourist train circling it 16 times a day if this were Tuscany. But it isn’t. It’s Umbria, Tuscany’s quieter, sleepier, gentler neighbour.
And so it’s just us on the terrace, having lunch, enjoying our own 1800 views of the valley below and the Apennines in the distance. And because it’s just us, we’re invited into L’Antica Osteria’s family-run kitchen. The chef is busy making eggs with truffle, the first of four dishes on an outrageously decadent truffle-themed menu. Next, his grandmother comes in with a tray full of ravioli. The second course. She spends five hours every morning making the pasta, but she’s still smiling. Even more amazingly, my children are smiling, too. It’s taken nine years of pain, misery and leaking in-flight nappies to get here, but, for a moment at least, we are at Stage Two. Stage One is simply being able to travel with kids, have them come back alive and, on balance, for us all to have enjoyed more of the trip than we hated.
Stage Two involves the Broadening of Horizons. Because it’s all very well sitting by the pool trying not to think about the horrific flight home, but the whole point of travel is to see different places and meet other people, right? So this time, the plan was Umbria rather than the Algarve. Queue-free, horizon-broadening culture in the morning. Proper nosh (no menù turistico) at lunch. Then (I’m not completely mad) swimming pool for the rest of the day. We would go out with three children who like watching TV, playing Minecraft and eating pizza, and come back with three children versed in cradles of civilisation, children who would know their Giotto from their Cimabue, children who would order cappelletti fatti in casa al tartufo nero over spag bol. Ideally, they would be the same children. And it started well. With all the wisdom gained through bitter experience in Stage One, I’d booked a mid-morning flight. We’d got through security without any tears or embarrassing pram-folding failures. And we’d made it all the way to the furthest gate in the airport, down all those corridors and past the point where you’re thinking maybe it would be easier just to walk to Umbria, and boarded successfully.
Then, on the plane, I started explaining to the children why we were going to Umbria and how, on our last (child-free) visit, we’d spent a whole day at the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi. And I began reading bits of guidebook to them, too. ‘Gubbio is famous for its Eugubine Tables, which date from 300BC to 100BC,’ I trilled with pure Jackanory enthusiasm. ‘Boring,’ said the nine-year-old, who is losing his battle with early-onset teenager. The six-year-old and two-year-old were even less polite – but it was only when we reached the villa that I realised the full scale of my mistake. It was simply too beautiful. An eleventh-century converted church with a pool. A terrace overlooking vineyards and distant hills. Big tellies.
Why, I could hear the children thinking, would you want to leave all this to look around some hill towns? The breakfast conversation went like this: ‘Right, we’re going to Spello.’ ‘Please can we stay here, dad?’ times three. ‘No. We are in Italy. We owe the last 600 years of European art and culture to this country. We’re not going to sit by the beautiful, heated pool.’ Eventually, I herded them into the car and we set off. The moaning stopped after 15 minutes as we drove down towards Perugia and then left past Assisi. We parked at the bottom of Spello and walked to the top of it. This is a useful thing about hill-town culture. The culture is on hills. So you get the moaning hill climb out of the way early. You look at the frescoes. You glide back down. And Spello’s frescoes are world-famous,
I explained to deaf ears as we arrived at the Baglioni Chapel. They were painted in 1501 by Pinturicchio, a midget who also did some of the Sistine Chapel. For at least 30 seconds they stared at the frescoes. You might spend longer. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Beyond the stunning frescoes, Spello is a charming place to waste a morning. Its Fiat Uno-wide streets lead, maze-like, through a series of small squares with enough ice-cream vendors and cafes to render the zigzag climb painless. I’d spent many internet hours tracking down Spello’s ‘local’ restaurant. I wanted
Truffles. Guaranteed to transform the fussiest child into a gastronome
somewhere off the beaten track where no-one spoke English or ate spaghetti bolognese. The answer was a place by a roundabout on the less picturesque outskirts of town.
Taking our seat among the chattering families of Spello, I asked for the house speciality. The waitress looked blank and, more importantly, actually quite offended that some tourists had found her establishment. Perfect.
She returned some time later with five plates of sliced beef in onion sauce. It was the only disappointing food we ate all week. More importantly, our brave climb to the frescoes and our brave decline to the pork meant we’d earned an afternoon by the pool.
Day two. Secret weapon: truffles. The most delicious food in the world. Guaranteed to transform the fussiest child into a gastronome. Our villa manager knew a guy who knew a guy who went trufflehunting.
He was an electrician called Andrea and he arrived early one morning with his excitable trainee truffle dog. To the kids, it was a giant treasure hunt. To me, it was a potential retirement plan.
Move to Umbria, buy dog, train dog, find one-kilo truffle. By the end of the morning, it had become clear that the retirement plan was unviable. The best dogs cost thousands and thousands of euros. They take years to train and, even then, they may never make a good snuffler. The jury was still out on Andrea’s dog. While he was excellent at finding the truffles, he proved persistently unwilling to hand them over. Who can blame him? He operated on a ‘one for you, one for me’ basis, which he thought reasonable. For Andrea, like most truffle-hunters, it was more of a hobby than a career.
We left the electrician and his greedy dog and drove up to Montone for a truffle feast. No iPads, no complaining about foreign food. I could almost feel the horizons broadening as we ate. But my plan to visit Montone’s museum – ‘It has silverwork and vestments and paintings!’ – proved a step too far, with the nine-year-old upset because a thin cat with no tail was looking famished and I refused to feed it truffles. We went back to the villa for a swim.
Fiat Uno-wide streets lead, maze-like, through a series of small squares
Day three. New resolve. ‘Today, children, we are going to Gubbio. Remember the Eugubine Tables?’ By now, it would be reasonable to expect some progress. Child A caught flicking through the coffee-table book on Perugino, for example. Child B asking, politely, for more fennel in the risotto. But no. The Eugubine Tables were a disaster. First, we couldn’t find them.
Then, when we did, the children were unimpressed. ‘These stone tablets are by far the most important documents of any of the Osco-Umbrian group of languages,’ I said. ‘Please stop climbing on them or I’ll put you in this iron cage that was once used to humiliate robbers.’ Secret weapon number two: market day. I gave the children some euros and released them into Gubbio’s street market.
They came back with prawns on sticks, 50 lollipops and a toy gun. So I released them again, this time with firmer guidance, and they returned with cured meat in buns, tomato bread and bananas for a picnic under the trees.
After that, there was no nagging for a premature return to the villa. We spent the afternoon exploring Gubbio’s Old Town, clambering up and down its wide stone staircases, catching rays on the stunning terraced square of the fourteenth-century Palazzo dei Consoli, arguing about which view of the valley below was the best. I had saved Assisi – the best, the most Stage Two-ish, the most fraught with risk – until last, hoping that a week of gentle assimilation would give us a chance of enjoying the place, up to its neck in medieval churches and those Giotto frescoes. By the time we reached the basilica, we were having a family-wide argument about whether I could reasonably expect silence in the car while trying to negotiate a one-way system. Wife pointed out the depiction of St Francis’s stigmata in her best Horrible Histories manner. A monk shouted ‘Silenzio’. Everyone needed the loo. We left.
Assisi is the most touristy town in Umbria. It has the coach parties, tourists following umbrellas and endless trinket shops. But you need only to step a couple of streets off the main drag and it’s back to being its peaceful, sleepy self. That’s where we found lunch. Two alleys off the main drag. It was just us, two old men and the waitress. Children B and C had pizza. Child A joined us with a shared rustic chicken stew. I still think daily about just how good the stew was.
I would like to finish with a little conversation that took place on the return flight home. ‘That was a great trip, Dad.’ ‘What was your favourite bit?’ ‘It’s a close call between the church in Spello and the restaurant in Montone, although I’ve been reading more about those Eugubine Tables and I can now see why they’re so important.’ That conversation never happened. They were too busy playing Minecraft. I was too busy ordering a drink. A failure, then. But I’m looking forward to trying again next year, even if they’re not.
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