#6: Venzone, Italy

The smooth paved cycling road from Tarvisio through the Italian Alps seemed too good to be true. And it was. Because just as we neared the town of Venzone...

Why is it that even the most pedestrian of Italian words, like "detour", sound beautiful enough to be belted out by a portly Italian tenor?

Say "day-vee-ah-zee-OH-nay" a few times. The word rolls off your tongue with emotional resonance and rhythmic flair.

But I deviate....

We didn't know why the cycling route was closed off. Except for the detour sign, there were no follow-up signs indicating how to get to Venzone.

So we used guesswork, intuition, and trial-and-error to patch together an alternate route on rough gravel roads--which were actually old Roman roads. (During the Roman empire, Venzone was  a key market/transit stop on the road to Rome).

When you cycle for hours and hours each day, your mind tends to get stuck in various random thoughts and jingles. After reading the sign, I became afflicted by a grand operatic earworm. For umpteen miles, I could hear nothing but a barrel-chested tenor lamenting: "Why the detour?" in Italian.

Despite my earworm, we eventually found our way to Venzone, a charming old medieval walled village, recently voted "the most beautiful village in Italy."

Venzone has an interesting and inspiring history. In 1976, it was near the epicenter of a powerful earthquake in the Friuli region. Virtually the entire village was completely leveled. Here's what the town's cathedral looked like afterwards:

Faced with this devastation, many would have simply left to start life anew somewhere else. But the villagers of Venzone decided they wouldn't give up their beautiful village so easily. Stone by stone, they began the arduous task of piecing the entire village back together, like a giant, 3D jigsaw puzzle.

A little over a decade later, the cathedral looked like this again:

If you go inside the cathedral, you'll see a very moving wooden sculpture, carved from a gigantic trunk of a single maple tree. The sculpture shows villagers, from tiny toddlers to the old and venerable, circled together in harmony, on the tips of their toes, stretching to reach the stars. It's an emotional testament to the power of the human spirit to persevere.

These pics don't give you the full sense of the depth and richness of the sculpture.

Finding a place to crash... 

Venzone is a tiny town. We didn't see any hotels or pensiones inside the stone walls of the historic old village. So to find a place to stay that night, we stopped at the local tourist office. The sign on the door said that the office was closed from noon to 2 (nothing like a 2-hour lunch break!).

While waiting for it to reopen, we noticed the shutters on the shutters of nearby houses...

By 2:20 pm no one had yet shown up to reopen the office. Markus ducked into the cheese shop next door and asked the woman working there if she knew if the office would reopen. She was very nice, and went briskly walking off to find whoever was supposed to be working there.

When she came back, she told Markus the guy was in a geletaria with his daughter, and would be back to reopen the office after they finished eating their ice cream. About 15 minutes later, a gruff looking man ambled to the tourist office rattling his keys. He looked a bit irritated, as if we had rudely interrupted him. His teenage daughter followed behind him, also looking peeved.

We stepped into the office. It was a complete mess, with leaning towers of books, pamphlets, and papers piled carelessly all over the floor and desk. The man looked at us and mumbled something to the effect of "So what do you want?"

Markus asked him about places to stay in Venzone. He got out a town map, marked an X on about 3 different spots, and handed the map to us. Usually in a tourist office, if they're not busy, they'll call places for you to see if there are any available rooms, to save you the time and trouble of walking/biking all over to check each place. Not this guy. After giving us the map, he ushered us out, and promptly locked up the office again. (So much for the 2-5 pm open hours on the sign. Guess he had urgent business to finish back at the ice cream shop.)

We didn't have time to feel insulted. A strong thunderstorm was brewing, so we quickly hopped on our bikes to find lodging. Just a quarter mile away, we arrived at a private house outside the walls of the historic city, in a new-ish neighborhood. The owner was very nice, though she couldn't speak any English. She showed us a room with a private entrance and its own bathroom, and we took it.

The mummies...

That evening, as we strolled around the historic old village, we noticed a round short stone structure next to the cathedral. Turns out this was the crypt that housed the infamous "mummies" of Venzone. Apparently, many people buried there in the 1600s or so never got around to decaying, as they should have.

Here's a picture from Life magazine, which looks to have been taken in the early 60s. 

Must have been "Take your mummy out for lunch day".

The mummies have been famous for a long time--purportedly Napoleon's soldiers lopped of pieces of them on their way by, as souvenirs. (Personally, I think I'd prefer a t-shirt.)

Modern researchers have speculated as to what has preserved the corpses for centuries. No one knows for sure, but theories range from the limestone floor in the crypt to a rare parasitic fungi.

If you buy a token from a local shop for one euro, you can go down to the crypt and see the mummies. There used to be over 40 of them, but the earthquake of '76 destroyed all but a handful. I guess they didn't get pieced back together like the rest of the town.