Volterra

Volterra sits higher and more exposed than most of its Tuscan neighbors, on a wind-scoured plateau overlooking the Val di Cecina, and the difference is immediate the moment you step out of the car. Siena and Cortona feel warm even in the shade; Volterra has an edge to it, a starkness that comes partly from the altitude and partly, I suspect, from three thousand years of continuous habitation pressing down on the same stones. This was one of the most powerful of the twelve Etruscan lucumonies, and the Porta all’Arco — a gate whose massive basalt arch dates in part to Etruscan construction — still stands at the edge of the old town, its three weathered heads (worn almost featureless now) staring out at travelers the way they have for over two thousand years. The Allied army left the gate alone in 1944 at the townspeople’s insistence, dismantling the barricade rather than letting German demolition charges take it down, which tells you something about how much weight this stone carries locally.

Alabaster and the Etruscans

Volterra has been an alabaster town since Etruscan times — the soft, translucent gypsum stone quarried from the surrounding hills and carved into everything from cinerary urns to lamps you can still watch being worked in small artisan studios along Via Guarnacci today. The Museo Etrusco Guarnacci houses one of the finest Etruscan collections outside Rome, room after room of these carved alabaster urns, their lids topped with reclining figures of the dead, faces caught somewhere between serenity and boredom. But the single object that stayed with me was the “Ombra della Sera” — the Shadow of the Evening — an elongated bronze votive figurine, impossibly modern-looking, that a farmer apparently used as a fire poker for years before anyone realized what it was. Modigliani supposedly saw it and it changed how he thought about the human form. I stood in front of that little bronze longer than I stood in front of anything else in the museum.

The Roman Theatre and the Edge of Town

Walk to the northern edge of the old town and the ground simply falls away into the Balze, dramatic erosion cliffs where the soft clay hillside has been collapsing for centuries, swallowing an Etruscan necropolis and a Camaldolese monastery along the way — a slow-motion landslide that has been eating Volterra from the edges since at least the Middle Ages. It’s a strange, slightly vertiginous thing to see a town so ancient still visibly losing ground to erosion. Down below, tucked outside the walls near Porta Fiorentina, sits the excavated Roman theatre, built under Augustus and remarkably intact given its age, the tiered seating still legible against the hillside, half-swallowed by grass. I had it almost entirely to myself on the October afternoon I visited, which is more than I can say for the Colosseum.

Yes, Volterra found new fame as a setting in the Twilight saga, and the gift shops near the main piazza have not let anyone forget it. Ignore them. The real Volterra is older, colder, and considerably more interesting than any of that.

When to go: September and October, when the wind has some bite to it and the alabaster workshops are back from the summer lull; avoid January if you dislike genuine cold, since Volterra sits high enough to feel a proper Tuscan winter.