Vini Nel Mondo Spoleto

The Spoleto Wine Festival was on over the weekend.  It began on Friday and ended Sunday night.  This mostly quiet town really rocked - especially on Saturday night when La Notte Bianca del Vino (Night of the White Wine) kicked off.  We paid 25 euros each for a 3 day pass which gave us a wine glass in a pocket to hang around our necks and entry to the many wine tastings around the town.  Things were pretty quiet on Friday but by 4pm Saturday there were plenty of people around.  Corso Garibaldi was packed and we didn't venture into the Piazza in the evening.  The weather was great - 25-27C and bright sunshine, so it was good to participate in the wine tastings which were held both inside and outside.  Some of the local shops also held their own tastings.  The shops got into the spirit of things and decorated their windows in a wine theme - balloons hung to look like bunches of grapes, barrels and vine leaves abounded.  Most of the restaurants were booked out for lunches and dinners from Friday night onwards.


It was good to see the retailers and restaurants cashing in on the festival as they are generally doing it tough in the current economic climate here.

 Saturday night was a real event.  The shops were open most of the night - at least until 2am - and the music boomed away until 5am.  At midnight we had marching bands on the corso outside our apartment.

In the evening we took advantage of the escalators operating late (they usually close about 8pm) and went for a walk through the top of the city at 10pm.  The Rocca and the Ponte della Torres are both lit up at night and looked great. We discovered that there had been a 6 Hour Ultra Marathon Race around the Rocca, which accounted for the runners riding the escalators down the hill.  Some participants had medals and prizes.

As well as wine tastings, there were some food stalls.  We partook of chocolate tasting - dark, milk, white with nuts, orange, berries, displayed like large chocolate pizzas - and cheese tastings - various types of local Umbrian cheeses -  and tried some local takeaways, Umbrian mortadella panini and Siciliano Arancia (Sicilian orange) which is hard to describe but includes tasty meat and vegetables encased in a bean/semolina mix rolled in breadcrumbs and deep-fried, about the size and shape of an orange.  There was a great array of wines, with hundreds of wines on offer - red, white, rose, still and sparkling, sweet and dry from all over Italy.  We tried quite a few over the weekend.

On our travels between wine tastings we called into the Open Art Gallery where sculptor and painter Giampiero Panella lives and has his works on display.  Spoleto born and bred, he spent a number of years living in Australia and we spent some time talking to him and looking at his sculptures.  Nearby we passed a part of the ancient city wall which was built before Roman settlement in 241BC.  Legend has it that this wall was built by the mythical Cyclopes.


Today Spoleto is back to normal.  Being Monday, many shops are closed, and the weather is cool and cloudy.