This summer, we discovered Oropa, Italy. Our neighbors, Franco and Lorella, invited us to spend the day there with them and their friends, Luciano and Rita. Franco and Luciano were nice enough to ask me to cycle there with them from Luciano's house - about a three-hour ride. Overconfident of my strength, I agreed. I lasted the first 2 hours, during which we flew over flat countryside, but the third was an unremitting vertical incline of about 90 degrees! Luciano and Franco cycled ahead while I gasped, sweated, stopped every five minutes to catch my breath, pray for succor and dunk my head in the various fountain shrines carved into the hills.
Finally, we arrived. Rita, Lorella, Alan, Lauren and the kids were there waiting with all of our clothes and a gigantic plastic jug of water. While Lorella and Star held towels up to shield me, Rita stood on a stone fence and poured the water over my head. I think that may have been one of the happiest, silliest, most girlish moment I've had since high school.
I toweled off and got dressed in a linen dress I'd bought earlier at Sheila's store in Borgomanero. Then, together, we walked through the enormous area before the Sanctuary.
I think there may be no more breathtaking place on earth. It simply radiates holiness.
The huge, open area before the cathedral reminded me of Paris or Washington, D.C. It was a large, rectangular lawn laid out - carved out - of the mountainside with an enormous fountain in the middle. The effect, with the Alps towering overhead, was other-worldly.
These pictures just don't do any justice to the experience at all. The lawn to which I'm referring is actually behind the structure in this picture. And, unbeknownst to us, there were smaller chapels all around which one could visit - I found pictures on the net:
Anyway, next, we all had lunch outdoors at this wonderful restaurant which served polenta, the region's specialty. Woe betide you if you were on a diet - it was swimming in butter.
Here is the restaurant.
In this picture, from left to right, are: Lorella, Stella, Rita, Luciano, Franco, Alan (telling me something), Lauren, and John.
Here was dessert:
Next, we did the most utterly fantastic thing. There is a gondola that leads to the top of the mountain behind the sanctuary. We took it far, far up the mountainside. When we arrived at what we thought was the top, there was another "chair lift": this time, a sort of cage into which you stepped through a gate in the side. A smaller wire "cage" on the side must have been to hold skis in the winter.
I really can't believe we did this. We just all grabbed a lift as they swung toward us - Stella and Lorella in one, and Lauren, John and I in another!
My heart was just bursting with happiness.
At last we reached the top:
The children gazed down at the scene 10,000 feet below (that's a lake that you see in the center of the picture - the kids are peering over a precipice. I'm not sure what kind of mother lets her young ones do this... I made them drop to their knees and then crawl on their bellies so they could look down.):
My favorite picture of Lorella and John - and how beautiful of Lorella and Lauren, below (both of whom, BTW, are afraid of heights!)
"The hills are alive!"
Needless to say, if you are visiting Orta... you must take a day to see Oropa!!
