6/26 -- Badia Valley and Novacella Abbey

Most of today we got out of the horrible 99+ heat here by heading up to the mountains, where it was only in the 80s. We also had a bus with good air conditioning, unlike yesterday's where nobody past the first row got any cooling. We had wonderful view of the Dolomites and interacted with people in the Ladin culture. Rhyming with 'latin', these folks had their own language that was heavily influenced by Latin. The language is used by about 30,000 people in the Dolomite valleys and is similar to the Swiss Romansch language. When shown a newspaper in Ladino, however, there was no sense of the Latin roots at all.

The road up was picturesque, but very curvy, so I tried to sleep while Jim tried to take photos out the bus window. We met our guide, Daniel, in a little town about 6800 feet up, where the temperature was  much more tolerable.  He told us that this place started providing skiing in the late 1940s -- the first lift up the mountain was a sled that was pulled by horses on the other side of a pulley, who walked down. It got its first real  lifts in the 50s and has expanded since then. Prior to skiing, this was a farming community and people started renting out spare rooms to the early skiers. This grew into guest houses and hotels and now tourism and skiing are the primary economic drivers. There is still farming because Italy thinks it will keep the land more pristine, but it is subsidized because farming here is no longer economically feasible otherwise.

 

The helicopter is taking summer supplies to the camping
huts and retrieving left-over winter supplies

In the upper right, there is a para-sailor.

Modern looking hotel and overpass (below)

This was in a park, and someone in our
group saw the same one along a trail. The
top language is Ladino.

We visited a lovely local church which is famous for an image of it being made into a puzzle that Jim says is familiar to him.

The Puzzle Church

Then we drove a bit to another Ladin family who has a restaurant in their home. By law, everything, except the wine, must be something they made. The food was good, and focused a lot on spinach with a beef stew and sausages for the main course. They also had an adorable little boy -- recently walking -- who everyone cooed over.

Back on the bus, most of us decided to visit an abbey that Davide spoke highly about. It is quite large, has a restaurant and conference center as well as a store to sell their products -- wine, jam, candy, and other foods. Dario showed us around. The highlights were the church and the library. The church was built in 1142 and modified and added on to over the years. The front of the church was added and is now a large altar section. The decorations were done by Bavarians during their Baroque period and are the over-the-top Rococo that they preferred. There is a lot that looks like stone, but the stone-like panels on the pillars were actually painted. The feeling they wanted to present was one of joy and happiness.

The round building is apparently a chapel. Some of
the windows near the bottom were waist high and deeply
indented. When I reached toward the  narrow opening
there was wonderful icy air.

Cloister hallway with burial chambers on the wall.

The apparent stone columns here are the
painted ones.

Dario pointed out how the leg of this man breaks the
frame of the painting, something I sometimes do with
stained glass.

The barrel-vaulted chamber held one of their three-piece
folding artworks, celebrating the Legend of St. Catherine,
who was apparently tortured and executed for becoming
Christian. There were also paintings on the back.

I didn't quite capture all of this art piece. There
was a triangle at the top of the middle ladder,
representing the assent to heaven for believers.
The bent staircase on left shows that sinners
won't make it, and neither will  non-believers,
represented by the short rightmost ladder.

This had initially been the hall of scribes, and was converted
into a library after the printing press obsoleted them. It could
take 4 years to copy one book, and it involved many people
to help prepare the vellum, make the ink, etc. The books here
have been bought or donated and rebound to look like a set.

The two cases in the middle held Gregorian chant books.
They have words and notes alternating on the page and
are made huge so that all the choir members could read
from the same book, since multiple copies were so time-
consuming to do.

 We caught a public bus back to the hotel, and finished most of our packing for our trip home, and to try to cool off. The thick walls of the hotel kept the interior to only 81, and I am hoping that our two bottles of sparkling wine to bring home didn't already cook and will survive the long layover in Paris where the temperatures are just as bad as here.