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Showing posts with label Umbria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Umbria. Show all posts

Thursday, November 21, 2024

Italian Restaurant With Home Made Pasta - Vasco & Piero

 Vasco & Piero's Pavilion Italian Restaurant has been our family's favourite in Central London for a long time. It's always a delightful surprise because the menu changes twice daily.

The restaurant is clean, white bright and fresh with white linen table cloths.

We went there again in November 2024. You can sit at small square tables for two, oblong tables for four, large round tables, bar stools, or in a private room behind glass walls at the back. My companions chose a glass of red chianti to match the colour and intensity of their red meat dishes. I opted for Prosecco, sparkling white as a starter and to go with my white meat main course, chicken. Good enough. My husband, who is a wine educator, approved of the label credentials, the region and grape variety, and the taste.

The restaurant has Umbrian items. 

A member of our family from overseas wanted soup, which was not on the menu. They immediately offered to make one specially for her, a 'simple' mixed vegetable soup. She was very happy.

Portions were sufficiently ample for us to save a little to take home. It was wrapped up quickly with no fuss. No carrier bag but I had my own.



Prosecco

Ladies toilet washbasin, with two cubicles.

Calm and restful. Not the noisy sort of Italian with filed floors and echo.

The pigeon ravioli starter was a change and ok but the starter which impressed me was the spinach souffle which had both texture and taste.

My main course was chicken Milanese, scallopini, which was in breadcrumbs, surprisingly good as I don't normally go for breadcrumbs. I would have liked potato which went with one of the meat choices, next time I shall ask for potato as I now know they cook to order and are happy to adapt the menu to suit you..

Desserts included seasonal panettone. Like bread and butter pudding. Perfect texture.

Everyone was very satisfied.

Getting There

It is a short walk from Oxford Circus station. About 7-10 minutes, depending on which of the parallel turnings you take, passing Liberty's department store and famous Carnaby street.

 If you want to know the origin of Vasco and Piero, who started the restaurant, and the Pavilion, their first individually decorated restaurant, you can buy a book, or read the whole story online on their website. 

The man we have known for years Paul in English, or Paulo in Italian, has only one restaurant. So he can give it his full attention.

Top Tips For Tourists

There's a set price Sunday lunch.

tel 02074378774


Thursday, May 28, 2020

From Rome to Assisi via Perugia and its Etruscan Cliffside Gateway


Blogger (where I write) and blogspot (where you read) are strange. My archived posts disappear and I can't find them. So I go and ask uncle Google and he finds me my old post on Perugia from 2017 with my wonderful photos. Here is a nostalgic look at the Etruscans and wonderful Perugia.

Wednesday, November 8, 2017


Etruscans in Paris, Perugia and Rome - and Christmas via Etruscan Perugia and Francis's Assisi


Rome and Exciting Etruscans
As I said in my previous post, I just discovered that Rome has Etruscan ruins. I'd never understood who the Etruscans were, nor cared about them, until I went to Perugia and saw the giant cliffside gateway which is the entrance to the city.

The gateway looks like tunnelling into the cliffside, but huge! In addition to the impressive gateway, in Perugia there's an atmospheric underground city. The underground tunnels were filled with rubble for many years, only in recent times restored and now you can walk around the area, which has an escalator down to the lower level, and shops in the nooks and crannies, with high arched ceilings overhead.


The Etruscans are the natives who fought the encroaching Romans. Either the Romans were more ruthless or better organized or both. Anyway, modern Rome also has underground catacombs, like Paris, as well as Etruscan remains.

But what did the Etruscans look like? A long time ago I wondered what the Philistines looked like. You read so much about the Philistines in the Bible, called the Old Testament by Christians after they introduced the New Testament. I looked up the Philistines and found that they had receding chins, which would not be considered beautiful today. Ideas of beauty are different in each era and to each group. Titian painted buxom women who were considered cuddly and voluptuous, whilst thin models are favoured on the catwalk in the late 20th century and early 21st century.

Let's go back to the Etruscans. What did they look like?

Etruscan mother and child. From Wikipedia article on the Etruscans.

Etruscan couple. From Wikipedia article on the Etruscans.

If these are typical Etruscans, they had square or oval jaws, heavy faces with large lips, noses and eyes, with large eyebrows, and were well-built or well-fed. I shall look out for the Etruscans in statues and paintings on trips to the Louvre in Paris, to Rome and Perugia. 

In Perugia, one of the guides told me that her ancestors were Etruscan. I thought that was very exciting, as I had assumed the Etruscans had been wiped out massacred by the Romans, completely disappeared with no descendants.

 Alas, she did not look particularly Etruscan, more like typically Italian. She explained that she resembled the other side of her family, the Italian, Roman side. 

The Etruscans were the link between the Greeks and the Romans. The Etruscans gave Rome its name. 

The Etruscan legacy to the Romans, what the Romans kept or copied, included polytheism, slavery, human sacrifice of prisoners of war, reading omens from scarified animals' body parts, and gladiator fights of the captured. (I am beginning to go off the Etruscans. Not that our era with terrorism is going to look much more civilised to people in future eras. Let's just look at the Etruscan art and sculpture.)

Umbria and its Capital City Perugia
Just a reminder about Umbria and one of my favourite cities, Perugia. The links are
 @UmbriaTourism and #loveUmbriastianity to their battles to overcome the Etruscans.
Etruscan gateway in Perugia. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Websites and links:
 @UmbriaTourism and #loveUmbria
See my other travel website:
www.luxurytravelforless.co.uk

Author
Angela Lansbury
Please share your favourite posts.


2 comments:

Xristos Zikos said...
Great shots! wonderful place, i love Rome, i went with my bf last year and we had an excellent experience!so many lights, history, tourism. you do have to know someone to guide you around- i booked with this https://daytrip4u.com/destination/Italy/Rome and they were awesome. i ll be back again!
Unknown said...
amazing city - amazing city break
we have manage to see everythnig in Paris
with well organised day trips
https://daytrip4u.com/suggestions/france/paris/eiffel-louvre
and we will go again
thank you guys
Update 2020 May 28

Useful website

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.

Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian.  We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.

I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
Or quicker, tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
In Singapore we are on the same time zone as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Beijing and Shanghai).


Please share links to your favourite posts.








Jews Saved in Assissi in WW2 and Catholic Resistance To euthanasia



When I went to Umbria, the part of Italy associated with Francis of Assisi, I could see interesting stories about Francis of Assisi everywhere. We saw paintings, murals, stained glass windows. statues of Francis with birds. And the stone bed where he slept. 


This was all in a trip around Perugia, the capital of Umbria, to show us the less well known parts of Umbria.

Assisi was already well known, with its giant basilica.
Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Assisi. Wiki.

Yes Umbria has a few surprises. Perugia, the capital, at least the capital for students learning the Italian language at the university, is a classic hilltop city. The cathedral is at the top. Seen from afar.
but come closer. Enter the city.



Etruscan Entrance
Even more striking and unusual is the giant Etruscan gateway, the entrance to the city, built into the sheer cliffside. 

You can see how large it is compared to the people. The angle of this photo shows the sky above. However, when you are near it, you can see the sheer cliff face behind it on the left.

Underground City
Plus the underground tunnels of the old underground Etruscan city, now an underground market place.



 There the delights of modern Italy cannot erase the awe you feel at going underground to the hidden city of people who lived so long ago that we have only little statues to tell us who they were and what they did. 

(Along came the Romans. As we all know, the Romans were the winners, with straight roads, efficiency and ruthlessness later associated with Germans.) The association of Rome with Romance came later.

Meanwhile, what of the kindly caring ascetic Francis who talked to the birds and lived simply and founded the order of Franciscans, Yes, it is easy to find plenty online and in person about St Francis the birthplace and burial place of St Francis of Assisi in the main centre of Assisi.

What I didn't know was the Assisi's secret stories, that Assisi also had a Jewish connection in WWII. Hiding Jews in far off monasteries and convents to save them.

Useful website
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisi_Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_resistance_to_Nazi_Germany
http://www.visit-assisi.it/en/
umbriatourism.it
http://www.montesubasio.it/en/assisi-christmas-nativity/
http://www.italia.it/en/home.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi

Author
Angela Lansbury, Travel Writer and Photographer, author and speaker. Please save and share links to your favourite posts.
About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a travel writer and photographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.

Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a language evaluator or grammarian.  We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.

I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other Wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
Or quicker, tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
In Singapore we are on the same time zone as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Beijing and Shanghai).
Please share links to your favourite posts.