travelswithalice

Our trusted guidebook’s recommendation for Assisi’s “finest restaurant” is sadly inaccurate. The restaurant is in an underground cavern with a beautiful vaulted ceiling but that’s about the only thing it has going for it. Pity. Everything we ate had at least five times the expected amount of salt in it. Added to which, the lights were too bright, the music too loud, and the room too stuffy. One of the new owners of the restaurant actually grumbled as he turned up the air conditioning when asked to.

The Hotel Subasio is a medieval structure decorated along the lines of a “Room with a View”-type grand hotel.


Located at the edge of the central square of the Cathedral of San Francesco, the hotel commands an unequaled panoramic view of the surrounding plains.



Question: “What’s on in the cathedral tonight?”
Answer: A shoulder shrug, indicating a total lack of interest, then, “Maybe a concert . . . maybe a conference . . . I don’t know. You have to organize yourselves; we don’t know what goes on there.”

Excuse me? It’s hard to believe that hotel staff of any importance or insignificance, in this case probably the night manager, could possibly be so uncaring and inhospitable!

At midnight, fireworks lit up the sky in Assisi. Something did go on that night but we never found out what it was. Too bad.