This is the final post in a series of blog posts describing a trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy this past July. At the end of my last post, we were leaving Elba for Volterra, in Tuscany.
Tuscany was hot, hotter than Virginia, hot like Hawaii—and seemed dryer than either. Coming past Riparbella we saw a marker for the Fonte di Lepre and almost simultaneously, a good-sized hare, a big stringy one. This sort of thing happens when you travel.
Tuscany was hot, hotter than Virginia, hot like Hawaii—and seemed dryer than either. Coming past Riparbella we saw a marker for the Fonte di Lepre and almost simultaneously, a good-sized hare, a big stringy one. This sort of thing happens when you travel.
Smouldering Tuscan Landscape Outside Volterra
It was just the same several years ago in Japan, hiking downhill toward the Kumano Hongū Taisha, where Yatagarasu led the boar hunter when the Kumano Deities appeared. To all purposes the same ravens were there today. And here at the Fonte di Lepre was a lepre.
When the boars, eagles, stags, griffins, dragons, buzzards and other animals that form the heraldry of North Italy get tired of blundering into each other and require intelligent advice and a moment of sense, they come round and ask the lepre. We don’t have to wonder about that.
Volterra is not very large. As soon as we arrived we ran around the wall three times like so many Hectors, not so much pursued by Achilles or acting out the Iliad as pursuing our hotel, cleverly secreted away in the narrow winding lanes.
When the boars, eagles, stags, griffins, dragons, buzzards and other animals that form the heraldry of North Italy get tired of blundering into each other and require intelligent advice and a moment of sense, they come round and ask the lepre. We don’t have to wonder about that.
Volterra is not very large. As soon as we arrived we ran around the wall three times like so many Hectors, not so much pursued by Achilles or acting out the Iliad as pursuing our hotel, cleverly secreted away in the narrow winding lanes.
The walls of Volterra
The town remains fortified. It is very much a fortress town.
Long climb up to the middle gate… Alex barely visible… and there is another flight of stairs below this one.
The ancientness of Volterra is right on the surface. The Etruscan acropolis at the summit of the town is a public park as well as an archeological site today—the orange fencing in the photo below marks the dig.
View of the Etruscan acropolis of Volterra from a nearby cathedral tower: the Renaissance Medici fortress is just visible on the left.
The Etruscan gate of Volterra—said to be the only Etruscan arch still standing.
Most of the facing stones of the Etruscan gate are more recent, some of them much more recent, but the core stones of the gate are almost megalithic.
Huge Etruscan wall blocks in this gate.
The upper hallway outside the door of our hotel room had once been part of the Etruscan city wall, so we had a good chance to look at the older stonework quite closely. The oldest stonework generally seemed to be the largest. This may only be a sampling error. The largest stonework should rationally last the longest. But the “oldest is biggest” bias is so persistent that one wonders if there could be potent but unclear cultural reasons why early civilizations found megalithic or near-megalithic stonework reasonable, if not actually convenient, while later civilizations scaled down the blocks in their structures even when the structures were enormous. No answer here.
Newer walls.
We hadn’t really considered what Roman ruins we might find in Volterra, but the Romanized city of the Volterrans was an important place. The old Roman theater and athletic training grounds are outside the walls.
Roman amphitheater and athletic facilities, still in community theater use.
The Etruscan necropolis of ancient Volterra, outside the walls, went largely unmolested for all the long years of Rome and the baronial ages that followed. Just as the Romans built over or through the Etruscan city, the Italians built over and through the Roman city. The Medici fortress dominating the acropolis marked the end of both independence and growth, and Volterra rusticated in situ. The Etruscan necropolis remained irrelevant to all this and not locally interesting until the eve of the modern age, when extraordinarily well timed efforts were made to salvage and preserve the items in the surviving tombs, including the alabaster sarcophagi or box urns in the tumuli.
Etruscan tomb (Wikimedia Commons).
I’m not a big fan of museums but the Etruscan museum in Volterra is worth going to Italy to see. I should warn fellow prospective tourists that the Etruscans are in fact dead. They are bone dead, stone dead, dead as stock and stone. But Volterra is also built out of them, and we noticed in living faces the mirrors of the faces on the sarcophagi—sarcophagi often themselves decorated with mirrors. The Etruscans at Volterra left much, it seems. But there are not many Volterrans—there never had been very many. Modernity has found this town, the moderns being the vastest besieging army ever to tackle the place, overwhelming it in one generation.
We scarcely tried to photograph the sarcophagi. Somehow I felt as if they perhaps warned off photography. Reducing the alabaster or terra cotta cabinets to a 2-D image would fail even more than usual; the carving and molding is deep and tactile. There seemed to be two main stylistic urges, a volumetric style of representing the human form and its draperies that seems at first glance a little crude or disproportioned, and a Graeco-Etruscan style, sometimes carried off with extreme finesse. The boxes may have feet, and the side panels are carved, sometimes in deep relief. The lid forms the bed or couch for a figure of the person whose ashes and bones are inside. Women’s sarcophagi are often decorated with mirrors, men’s sarcophagi with drinking cups. The puffier style of human representation, seen up close, makes considerable tactile sense. The somewhat conflated forms of the ancient Etruscans on their sarcophagi are meant for handling. The faces, all too fleshy, become subtly more real the longer one gazes into them. This bulkier modeling was a fashionable style for many centuries.
We scarcely tried to photograph the sarcophagi. Somehow I felt as if they perhaps warned off photography. Reducing the alabaster or terra cotta cabinets to a 2-D image would fail even more than usual; the carving and molding is deep and tactile. There seemed to be two main stylistic urges, a volumetric style of representing the human form and its draperies that seems at first glance a little crude or disproportioned, and a Graeco-Etruscan style, sometimes carried off with extreme finesse. The boxes may have feet, and the side panels are carved, sometimes in deep relief. The lid forms the bed or couch for a figure of the person whose ashes and bones are inside. Women’s sarcophagi are often decorated with mirrors, men’s sarcophagi with drinking cups. The puffier style of human representation, seen up close, makes considerable tactile sense. The somewhat conflated forms of the ancient Etruscans on their sarcophagi are meant for handling. The faces, all too fleshy, become subtly more real the longer one gazes into them. This bulkier modeling was a fashionable style for many centuries.
In the more Grecian style, the human figures are executed in classical proportions, often with extreme fineness of detail. Both styles frequently reference the Iliad. Having the abduction of Helen carved on women’s sarcophagi was fashionable almost to ordinariness. How the scene was represented varied enormously though, from stately embarkations with no hint of violence to more overt abduction scenes or even scenes with a touch of frenzy. Hand to hand combat between the heroes of the Iliad was equally common as a decoration for men. As Alex said, it would be hard to find a better indication of a pre-Homeric pan-Mediterranean civilization that knew and valued its Iliad reaching all the way to the Outer Sea.
Etruscan sarcophagus in painted terra cotta (Wikimedia Commons).
The archaic Volterrans were doing more than just including literary references on their tombstones. They were claiming kin with the Trojans in their grave imagery. It wasn’t fashion alone that caused this; they had themselves entombed with Trojan motifs because it was the most true thing they wanted said about themselves.
Vergil made the Roman claim to be descended from Trojan refugees famous forever, but long before Rome’s Golden Age the Volterrans also took this idea with literally mortal seriousness. Perhaps it’s likely enough. We know roughly when and where Homer sang the Iliad in its climactic form. But we don’t know when or where the Iliad was first sung. The famous “catalogue of ships” looks suspiciously like the original beginning, buried behind a long and complex explanatory narrative that includes multiple side stories. Homer’s version is explicitly told more from the Greek side but there are Trojan passages. Vergil’s Aeneid is a reprised Iliad told from the Trojan perspective, but there could have been even earlier shadow-Iliads. Can we be sure what version of the Iliad the archaic Volterrans valued so much? Do we even know why the Romans, at the dawn of the Republic, did such a thorough job of forgetting the alphabets of the Etruscan Umbrians and Tuscans? Was this indifference or were there conflicting genealogical narratives that needed to be lost?
We can be fairly sure, though, that Greek refugees bringing an artistic style with them reached Volterra, and their Iliad was surely Homer’s. Somehow they obviously fitted right in.
Though the Etruscan treasures are the glory of Volterra’s museum, their collection of Renaissance painting includes some rare examples. They haven’t wandered far from where they were painted, and retain some of the hauntedness I cannot explain.
Vergil made the Roman claim to be descended from Trojan refugees famous forever, but long before Rome’s Golden Age the Volterrans also took this idea with literally mortal seriousness. Perhaps it’s likely enough. We know roughly when and where Homer sang the Iliad in its climactic form. But we don’t know when or where the Iliad was first sung. The famous “catalogue of ships” looks suspiciously like the original beginning, buried behind a long and complex explanatory narrative that includes multiple side stories. Homer’s version is explicitly told more from the Greek side but there are Trojan passages. Vergil’s Aeneid is a reprised Iliad told from the Trojan perspective, but there could have been even earlier shadow-Iliads. Can we be sure what version of the Iliad the archaic Volterrans valued so much? Do we even know why the Romans, at the dawn of the Republic, did such a thorough job of forgetting the alphabets of the Etruscan Umbrians and Tuscans? Was this indifference or were there conflicting genealogical narratives that needed to be lost?
We can be fairly sure, though, that Greek refugees bringing an artistic style with them reached Volterra, and their Iliad was surely Homer’s. Somehow they obviously fitted right in.
Though the Etruscan treasures are the glory of Volterra’s museum, their collection of Renaissance painting includes some rare examples. They haven’t wandered far from where they were painted, and retain some of the hauntedness I cannot explain.
Beautiful angels.
Saint Having Beatitudes.
In Arcadia Ego.
Fresco in Volterra.
We left Volterra the next day, after a long morning walk. We were off to San Gmignano, noted for its wine, cheese, and surviving defensive towers.
The Tuscan countryside.
Some of the many towers of San Gmignano.
We were still indefatigably in the land of the tartufo, or truffle. San Gmignano was immensely charming and literally blitzed with fellow tourists.
The local ‘Boar and Truffle’ in San Gmignano.
In due course we reached Siena.
Siena’s city walls as seen from our hotel’s outdoor bar.
And the truth of Siena is that we were stopping there for the night and would do no justice to the place. We would see two of the stupendous things in Siena: the incredible cathedral, and the town square. But mainly we would just wander around reflecting that our Italian idyll was at an end.
Siena: the cathedral.
Portico.
Not the work of a moment.
Town Square: a night view.
Eureka!
It was our last night in Italy. We owed ourselves something to eat. We wandered until we saw a restaurant with a star.
Coucous tossed with lemon juice, parsley and cheese was the perfect opener. Then came the smoked duck breast carpaccio, and our mood changed. Our mood had to change. We were taking this meal much too lightly. We had a good enough table next to the local lawyers who appeared to still be arguing a case, had settled into a fine red, had done the coucous salad with a clear conscience, and had then been presented with an apparent miracle. We were going to have to eat this dish with bite-by-bite mindfulness. The smoked duck breast carpaccio was metaphysical.
I could speak of the rest of this meal, or not. Outside, the dark medieval streets were deserted. Only the hoot of a distant owl broke the crystalline silence as the sommelier, one of the last few people left in the building, unwrapped a cold bottle of grappa from its white linen coif and explained that this bottle was from Udine, was rare, was not the usual thing, was a kind of arcane mad nectar within the known spectrum of the grappa world. I guess we had probably asked, “What is it?” or “Is there anything else you can do to us?” I don’t remember.
The Udine grappa turned out to be everything claimed for it. They say you can’t explain the taste of chocolate or hashish, because chocolate and hashish have no kindred analogous flavors. I would add a third thing to the list: whatever was in that bottle.
But we did get back to our hotel. And then out of Italy altogether. Our mistake, I guess. I had not had the slightest desire whatsoever to leave Elba. But if we had stayed on Elba forever, there’d have been no smoked duck breast carpaccio for us. That’s how things are. You have to keep hopping along if you want to meet the next duck, but you’ll inevitably regret all the things you left behind. And that’s the end of this blog series on our 2017 visit to Italy.
Coucous tossed with lemon juice, parsley and cheese was the perfect opener. Then came the smoked duck breast carpaccio, and our mood changed. Our mood had to change. We were taking this meal much too lightly. We had a good enough table next to the local lawyers who appeared to still be arguing a case, had settled into a fine red, had done the coucous salad with a clear conscience, and had then been presented with an apparent miracle. We were going to have to eat this dish with bite-by-bite mindfulness. The smoked duck breast carpaccio was metaphysical.
I could speak of the rest of this meal, or not. Outside, the dark medieval streets were deserted. Only the hoot of a distant owl broke the crystalline silence as the sommelier, one of the last few people left in the building, unwrapped a cold bottle of grappa from its white linen coif and explained that this bottle was from Udine, was rare, was not the usual thing, was a kind of arcane mad nectar within the known spectrum of the grappa world. I guess we had probably asked, “What is it?” or “Is there anything else you can do to us?” I don’t remember.
The Udine grappa turned out to be everything claimed for it. They say you can’t explain the taste of chocolate or hashish, because chocolate and hashish have no kindred analogous flavors. I would add a third thing to the list: whatever was in that bottle.
But we did get back to our hotel. And then out of Italy altogether. Our mistake, I guess. I had not had the slightest desire whatsoever to leave Elba. But if we had stayed on Elba forever, there’d have been no smoked duck breast carpaccio for us. That’s how things are. You have to keep hopping along if you want to meet the next duck, but you’ll inevitably regret all the things you left behind. And that’s the end of this blog series on our 2017 visit to Italy.
Not in Italy anymore!
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