Tuesday, April 21th, 2009: Orvieto, Italy

Bob:

We were up and had breakfast quite early, so we used the spare time to wandered over to the outdoor market in the square directly in front of the Grand Hotel Fleming. We had seen the tarpaper roofs of the stalls from our window, so we were curious what was being sold. Monika found some nice melted-glass pendants from Bombay, India, on sale that were very unique and attractive. As she couldn't decide which of two she liked better, I ended up buying both of them for her, but bargained the combined price down from 16 to 14 Euros.

Promptly at 8:15 we boarded the bus for a two-hour drive to Orvieto, Italy, during which our guide harangued us about why we should be purchasing all the Cosmos optional tours and why they were such a good deal. His voice was amplified to the extent that I couldn't really tune him out, unfortunately. That, combined with the stream of complaints from one sister in the seat behind us punctuated by loud yawns from the other sister, made it rather difficult to concentrate on the scenery, which was really what I was there for.

The small city of Orvieto in the Umbria district of Italy is dramatically situated on top of a hill overlooking a river valley. Our bus dropped us off at the foot of the hill and we climbed stairs and took escalators and finally a funicular railway to get to the top of the hill.

Once on top of the hill, we split up into a group that walked into the middle of town, including Monika and myself, and a group including my sisters that took a shuttle bus to the main plaza where the city cathedral was located. Our guide told the walking group to take the main street through town until we ran into the cathedral and so we walked and walked until we arrived at a plaza with a little church on it. But it was nothing like a Gothic cathedral, so we all had to backtrack through the town and follow the signs to "Duomo", which turned out to be a couple of blocks off the main drag! There is nothing I like better than good directions when I'm trying to find my way in a strange city, and those were nothing like good directions! And people wonder why I travel around with a GPS in hand to help find my way!

The most striking thing about Orvieto Cathedral, as we approached it, was the fact that it was striped! That is, the cathedral was constructed of layers of black stone alternating with layers of whitish-gray stone almost like a gigantic layer cake. In addition pretty much on every square inch of the front facade was carved or embellished in some fanciful manner. To top it off, golden mosaics were in three of the front apexes and they sparkled brilliantly in the sun, so visually the whole effect was like jewels set in a frosted layer cake.

The inside of the church was, by comparison, relatively straightforward and subdued. The tall, thin columns supported the soaring vaults of the roof in a true Gothic fashion, creating a spacious and graceful effect. One tall stained glass window was in the narthex, and it had a counterpoint in the rear of the church in the form of an intricate, rose-shaped stained glass window. All together it was a very pretty church.

Once we were finished with the Cathedral, Monika and I joined an English-speaking tour of the tunnels underneath the city of Orvieto. The tour lasted from 11:15 to about noon, and we had hoped, of course, to see some Etruscan ruins as Orvieto was originally an Etruscan city. But the Romans had been quite thorough in destroying the old Etruscan city around 300 B.C. In fact, the Romans destroyed both the town and its critical water wells so thoroughly that no one lived there again until the Roman Empire had disintegrated and the Dark Ages had begun almost 700 years later. So everything you see in Orvieto today stems from the period of the middle ages up through the Renaissance.

Underneath the city, the only things left from the Etruscan period were one small hole in the wall of one chamber, and a typical Etruscan well which, although filled in by the Romans, had been later re-excavated by the medieval inhabitants. The curious part about that well was that it was a carefully created rectangular hole about 2 feet by 3 feet in dimension and a good 50+ meters deep. Our guide mentioned that all the filled-in Etruscan wells found in Orvieto, over 30 of them if I remember correctly, were of exactly the same dimensions. That consistency bespeaks some kind of fairly strict, centrally-controlled process of sinking those wells, and that in turn implies a fairly high order of government. It's a shame that we know so little about the Etruscans because based on the evidence from their tomb paintings they often seem to have had a more egalitarian, and possibly more humane, culture than the Romans or the Greeks. It just goes to show that the "Good Guys" don't always win.

After re-occupation during the Dark Ages, an extensive network of tunnels had been dug in the soft volcanic tuffa of the hill beneath the town. These underground chambers were used for olive oil presses, dovecotes, smuggling, and the mining of porcellana that was used to make cement for mortar. However, the hill became so honeycombed with subterranean chambers that a part of the hillside collapsed into the valley, taking houses and some inhabitants with it, and after that the Italian government forbade any further mining or excavation. I understand the safety reasons for that, but surely some of those old wells filled with the detritus from the Etruscan civilization could provide archaeologists with information about that long lost culture, so in that sense it's a shame.

After our tunnel tour it was time to amble back downhill to the funicular and return to the bus for the drive to Sienna.

Please click here to read and look at pictures about Sienna;