City of Wind and Rock

Steve this week is down on the island of Sicily, (in Palermo where he served his mission) working on one of his organized crime cases. When we arrived at the city of Volterra, an ancient Etruscan city (where Tuscany comes from) established 5th century BC, we found this Medici Fortress, which is a maximum security prison currently holding 60 Sicilian mobsters. These special prisoners are kept far away from other organized crime family members in Sicily. This fortress was built in 1472 by the powerful banking Medici family in Florence when they conquered the city of Volterra.

We thought this Porta a Selci with its prison was pretty amazing until we found the ancient arched gate Porta all'Arco. This gate built out of massive volcanic stones 2,000 years ago was incredible. We walked down the steep slope of this very untouristy town to get a closer look and the ancient arch.

On the way, we watched people hanging their daily laundry out the window to dry. (Ray called this his National Geographic shot)

You can see just how massive the gate is with Steve and Pete dwarfed underneath

I had the twins pose under the mythological twins Castor and Pollox. The wind has completely worn their faces down and there are no features left on Zeus's children. The Etruscans believed in Greek Deities and these two Gods were renowned for being excellent hunters, especially of boar....which is Volterra's specialty along with Alabaster carvings. (Alabaster looks like marble but it is translucent. Medieval cities mined it and cut thin slices to make windows. All over the city were gorgeous lamps and vases carved of Alabaster. I would have liked to buy one but the prices were a bit high, like the arch)

One really interesting fact about this gate is during WWII, the Nazi's were going to blow up this ancient entryway to slow the Allied advance. The citizens of Voleterra on June 30, 1944 decided to save their beloved landmark and pulled up all the cobblestones lining the road and amazingly plugged up the gate and convinced the Nazi commander that there was no need to blow up the arch. A plaque here commemorates this ingenuity.

It would have been a great loss to destroy this ancient artifact. The Etruscans were master craftsmen. They mined metal and taught the Romans, who later conquered them, how to make swords and drain and irrigate large tracts of land. They crafted some of the finest jewelry in the known world.

Everyone was starving but before I let them try wild boar we popped into the Duomo Cathedral

Despite it simple facade, this is a sister church to the one we saw in Pisa. Like Pisa the church faces the octagonal baptistry and the hospital faces the cemetery. One faces spiritual death and the other physical death. So if you couldn't enter the church unless you were baptized does that mean you couldn't leave the hospital until you were dead?

My troops barely glanced at this nicely painted life size terra cotta Virgin and child at the Epiphany, (where the wise men come on January 6th to bring gifts to baby Jesus)as they complained the had "been mostly dead all day."

This 12th century church not only was covered in the Medici coat of arms with brightly covered pills, as the families first trade was as doctors, but it had this famous painting of Fra Bartolomeo's Annunciation from 1497 (where the angel Gabriel tells Mary she will bear the Son of God) It warranted a pause but they were out the door, when they heard the Gregorian chants, before you could say Via Matteotti, named after the socialist leader killed by the fascists in 1924.

Ok, so no one ate boar, but had calzones stuffed with tons of cheese. But with full tummies, the kids were willing to humor Pete to stop at a surrealist Alabaster showroom of Paolo Sabatini and relent and go with me to find the Roman theater from 10 BC that wasn't uncovered until the 1950's (After the sack of Rome, the citizens carried off the rock and then used this as the town dump, so this theater and bathhouse were buried under centuries of garbage.)

There used to be three levels of stages here for actors: one for humans, one for hero's and one for Gods. Parts of two stage levels are still visible. Here the Volterrans and Romans would have performed Ovid's Greek play Pygmalion (My Fair Lady is an adaption). Pygmalion, a sculptor, carved a beautiful woman, not of alabaster but of ivory. Everyday as her worked on her, he grew more and more in love with her. He named her Galatea. The Greek God Venus/Aphrodite took pity on poor Pygmalion as he sat and toiled lovingly with his statue. So Venus blew breath into the statue and Galatea came to life and she and Pygmalion had a wonderful life together, even had a son. (I saw this play in New York years ago and loved it, but it would have been incredible to have seen it performed here in Volterra centuries ago.)

We headed back through town and were amazed that in only one hour's time, the fruit and clothing markets were all gone, the street swept clean and almost not a soul in sight. Everyone was taking reposo, lunch and a nap, except for us 7 tourists. Hence our cue to exit stage right....