A 98% factual piece of fiction

I visited a monastery across the valley from Orvieto. This is my account of that, but one I'm planning on using for a story I'm writing.

The walk to Cappuccini Monastery wasn’t far. After stopping for a coffee and a cornetto at around seven, I walked across town and took the elevator to the base of the cliff. I still find it strange to see Orvieto from below. When I’m surrounded by the familiar buildings and streets, it seems to be on ground level. From the bottom, I can see how tall the walls really are. The town thrusts itself toward the sky, dug out of tufa and stacked up like a tree building itself from the soil.
After cutting through a vineyard on a questionably public path and crossing the main road, I took a right under a brown sign—CONVENTO DEI CAPPUCCINI—past a gas station, a cheap clothing store and a grocery store.
I was glad I decided to bring my scarf. It was a cold, damp morning. The clouds turned over on themselves again last night, just like they did when this month began. I went to bed around midnight with no shirt on. The weather had warmed up considerably two weeks or so after the storm, and even though the rest of San Paolo was a good ten degrees cooler than the temperature outside, the rooms were warm a night if we kept the doors closed. I woke up shivering at 4 AM to what I was sure must be some sort of air raid. The same feeling used to come over me when I’d wake up to the noise of the highway across the baseball field at our house on Adams Street. Thunder shook the 800-year-old walls and wind rattled the shudders. It’s frightening to experience a thunderstorm from inside a cloud.
When the rain died down again, I put on a long-sleeved shirt and fell back asleep. When I woke up, the late fall weather from earlier in the month had overtaken the Indian summer. The path to Cappuccini curls up an adjacent hillside through recently harvested olive groves and fields of empty branches and fallen grape leaves. Looking back toward the city, the Cathedral façade peeks up from the other side of the plateau. Its three peaks sparkle golden and wet with the mist of last night’s storm as the sun dispels the fog, now seeking shelter in the valley. Within an hour, I reached the gates. I took a few photographs for her. She is the reason why cameras exist—rather, her absence calls them into existence.
The road curved up through another grove, into a cloud. When I set out, I planned to spend my morning watching Orvieto from far away. The monastery was a place where I could see where I have been living for the past three months; I could take it all in with a glance. As I climbed the hill, however, it struck me that I couldn’t see a thing.
Cappuccini is a simple, quiet place. At the entrance to the central piazza, a statue of St. Francis stands in a dry fountain off to the left. His face is indiscernible—part exasperated, part apologetic, part comical, but each affect is rendered in a way that would exclude any other. The main path is made of gravel, generously dispersed over large areas of grass (or else, grass crowding into large areas of gravel), much like the driveway of the farm in Merrimac where we used to go apple picking.
I wandered up toward what must be the dormitory, passing a simple wooden sign: “Il Signore Ti Dia Pace” painted in black. Walking around to the back of the building, I found an overlook that faces Orvieto. The world beyond the monastery was still shrouded in grey, though. Save for the distant hum of engines and the whispers of tires on the highway below, it could all have disappeared when I climbed into the cloud. I thought of sitting down for a while in one of the green metal benches, but decided to look around a bit more.
The church flickered soft red light, cast from a single candle burning by the tabernacle. I dipped my finger in the holy water and crossed myself earnestly. It’s a ritual that I’ve no problem carrying over from my Catholic upbringing. I knelt in a pew and murmured some prayers—confessions, an Our Father, requests for strength and wisdom—and then sat in the dimly lit church for another half-hour.
After exploring the grounds a little further, I found my way back to the green benches with the vague notion of waiting for the fog to clear. At this point, though, I don’t need it to anymore.