Ian and Jane have a number of books on “things to do” in Le Marche, naturally enough, but the one that caught our attention was The Marche, a “Touring Club of Italy Heritage Guide”, which suggests and describes lots of short tours in the region.
Jane had already suggested we take a look at the Frasassi Caves, which are about a quarter of an hour to the south-west from Il Vecchio Cantinone, down the SS76 road. The Marche included a little tour of the villages and country round the caves, taking in the ruined abbey di Val di Castro via a 20 kilometre detour. It was a cloudy and damp morning, so we spent it doing conscience-stricken blogging (we got as far as Metz—our second and third blog entries!), then went down to the car and drove off.
We eventually found out that you can park just outside the caves; but as we neared Frasassi, we allowed ourselves to be led by the signs which said (in Italian), “Park down this way and a bus’ll take you to the caves”. So we did.
Which was okay; the signposted road took us to a mountain-encircled world
of souvenir stalls and food stalls. The next bus was an hour away, so we wandered round the stalls after we’d bought the tickets, sussing out the fossils, fridge magnets, and souvenir books. We sat at one of the food stalls and had excellent spiced pork panini (good tucker, as it turned out) with “due Coka light, per favore”. And then the downpour started.
Somehow, when the bus arrived, we
found ourselves on it all alone, and we were rather apprehensive as it pulled out: had we misunderstood something? The bus wound its way up a rain-soaked Apennine mountain road, where the rocky, shrub-studded hillsides were closing in to form the Genga Gorge, and, to our dismay, went straight past the entrance to the Caves, on the other side of the road. But a couple of hundred metres further up, it used a parking area to turn, headed back downhill, and dropped us off.
The Grotte di Frasassi are the largest cave complex in Italy, possibly in Europe. Like the Waitomo Caves back home in New Zealand, they were formed when water trickled down through limestone, gathered itself into underground streams, and gradually cut down further and further towards sea-level. They were discovered in 1975, when some local speleologists, climbing up to another cave, noticed some vegetation fluttering on a windless day. They found a breeze emerging from a hole, and when they dropped a stone into it, it was a l-o-n-g t-i-m-e before a faint echo came back …
Like Waitomo, the Grotte have huge galleries, intricate passages, and a mixture of massive and
delicate stalactites and stalagmites (“the mites go up and the tights come down”). Unlike Waitomo, they don’t (as far as we know) have glow-worms. But like Waitomo, you’re not allowed to take photos (other people did; we were more conscientious), so you’ll have to be content with this picture of a natural “bridge” through the mountain opposite, taken from the waiting area, and use the Interweb Thingy to see the caves themselves. They truly are amazing.
A return bus took us down to Cheap Tat City, where we bought a rather disappointing book about the caves (the good ones were only in Italian) and an excellent magneto, before getting in the car to continue the tour.
Following the map in the Touring Club’s book, we drove up past the caves, up the Genga Gorge, to Genga itself.
Genga is the name of the comune (local government area, or “town”), which covers about 30 square miles of countryside, and includes the Frasassi Caves (and many others) and twenty-four frazioni (hamlets), with a population totalling around 2,000. The road up the gorge takes you to the administrative centre, Genga town, which lies at the tip of a spur of the Apennines. The town is tiny: it consists of essentially a square of houses built onto the massive city walls (with the
usual vertiginous drops to the valley below), with two rectangles of houses inside, and a single point of entry and exit at one corner. One road in and out, three roads inside. We loved the idea that people who live in Genga have addresses like “Number 15 Genga”. We also loved the fabulous view from the tranquil little park beside the town car park.
The circuit took us by little mountain roads with many amazing mountain views, past the hilltop town of Sassoferrato (where we lingered to see the Monastery of San Francesco and its “mural wall”), and down through the “paper town” of Fabriano, after which we rather lost our way trying to find l'Abbazia di Val di Castro.
In the end we didn’t find it, and headed for home and home-made pizzas; but we got back to Il Vecchio Cantinone a little later than we’d expected, to find that Ian had fired up the pizza oven (in the photo) some time earlier, and it was now cooling down.
Still, it was capable (just) of cooking our home-made pizzas, which we enjoyed along with more of the wine we’d bought. Tony and Leslie were there, and we all sat and watched motor racing for a while, before we bade them goodnight and went down to the flat.
Jane had already suggested we take a look at the Frasassi Caves, which are about a quarter of an hour to the south-west from Il Vecchio Cantinone, down the SS76 road. The Marche included a little tour of the villages and country round the caves, taking in the ruined abbey di Val di Castro via a 20 kilometre detour. It was a cloudy and damp morning, so we spent it doing conscience-stricken blogging (we got as far as Metz—our second and third blog entries!), then went down to the car and drove off.We eventually found out that you can park just outside the caves; but as we neared Frasassi, we allowed ourselves to be led by the signs which said (in Italian), “Park down this way and a bus’ll take you to the caves”. So we did.
Which was okay; the signposted road took us to a mountain-encircled world
of souvenir stalls and food stalls. The next bus was an hour away, so we wandered round the stalls after we’d bought the tickets, sussing out the fossils, fridge magnets, and souvenir books. We sat at one of the food stalls and had excellent spiced pork panini (good tucker, as it turned out) with “due Coka light, per favore”. And then the downpour started.Somehow, when the bus arrived, we
found ourselves on it all alone, and we were rather apprehensive as it pulled out: had we misunderstood something? The bus wound its way up a rain-soaked Apennine mountain road, where the rocky, shrub-studded hillsides were closing in to form the Genga Gorge, and, to our dismay, went straight past the entrance to the Caves, on the other side of the road. But a couple of hundred metres further up, it used a parking area to turn, headed back downhill, and dropped us off.The Grotte di Frasassi are the largest cave complex in Italy, possibly in Europe. Like the Waitomo Caves back home in New Zealand, they were formed when water trickled down through limestone, gathered itself into underground streams, and gradually cut down further and further towards sea-level. They were discovered in 1975, when some local speleologists, climbing up to another cave, noticed some vegetation fluttering on a windless day. They found a breeze emerging from a hole, and when they dropped a stone into it, it was a l-o-n-g t-i-m-e before a faint echo came back …
Like Waitomo, the Grotte have huge galleries, intricate passages, and a mixture of massive and
delicate stalactites and stalagmites (“the mites go up and the tights come down”). Unlike Waitomo, they don’t (as far as we know) have glow-worms. But like Waitomo, you’re not allowed to take photos (other people did; we were more conscientious), so you’ll have to be content with this picture of a natural “bridge” through the mountain opposite, taken from the waiting area, and use the Interweb Thingy to see the caves themselves. They truly are amazing.A return bus took us down to Cheap Tat City, where we bought a rather disappointing book about the caves (the good ones were only in Italian) and an excellent magneto, before getting in the car to continue the tour.
Following the map in the Touring Club’s book, we drove up past the caves, up the Genga Gorge, to Genga itself.
Genga is the name of the comune (local government area, or “town”), which covers about 30 square miles of countryside, and includes the Frasassi Caves (and many others) and twenty-four frazioni (hamlets), with a population totalling around 2,000. The road up the gorge takes you to the administrative centre, Genga town, which lies at the tip of a spur of the Apennines. The town is tiny: it consists of essentially a square of houses built onto the massive city walls (with the
usual vertiginous drops to the valley below), with two rectangles of houses inside, and a single point of entry and exit at one corner. One road in and out, three roads inside. We loved the idea that people who live in Genga have addresses like “Number 15 Genga”. We also loved the fabulous view from the tranquil little park beside the town car park.
The circuit took us by little mountain roads with many amazing mountain views, past the hilltop town of Sassoferrato (where we lingered to see the Monastery of San Francesco and its “mural wall”), and down through the “paper town” of Fabriano, after which we rather lost our way trying to find l'Abbazia di Val di Castro.
In the end we didn’t find it, and headed for home and home-made pizzas; but we got back to Il Vecchio Cantinone a little later than we’d expected, to find that Ian had fired up the pizza oven (in the photo) some time earlier, and it was now cooling down.Still, it was capable (just) of cooking our home-made pizzas, which we enjoyed along with more of the wine we’d bought. Tony and Leslie were there, and we all sat and watched motor racing for a while, before we bade them goodnight and went down to the flat.
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