Volterra
21 March 2008
Saturday I took a trip with an instructor from school and a few other students, nationalities including Dutch, English, Japanese, Korean, and American, which made for a very fun trip.First a little background info on Volterra. It is a historic hilltop town that has been in existence since before the birth of Christ. It was originally an Etruscan town. Not just any Etruscan town, but what is believed to be the the largest of all 9 or 14 (I forgot how many....) that have been discovered. There are still a fair amount of ruins, mostly walls leftover from their civilization.
In some of the countryside surrounding Volterra there is a fair amount of underground heat and water activity, which turns into thermal baths, geysers and steam pouring out of the earth. I would like to return to explore these areas a bit if I can manage it. So, the actual earth/soil
around Volterra is clay. Many of the hills look white/gray because they are almost entirely clay. This also limits the number of crops that can be grown here. Before arriving in the historic center of Volterra, our bus took us to a lookout point for a natural phenomenon. There are amazing cliffs of clay. I'd like to mention that I didn't see any other tourists in Volterra. It made me feel a bit less like a tourist because our instructor Samuele spoke entirely in Italian. I think he even asked a local how we could get to the cliffs so we could have a look.
Above the cliffs on one side there is a very old monastery. I was mostly impressed by the sheer drop off of the earth. Of course, the landscape on the other side of the cliffs is breathtaking, so it was a bit of beautiful sensory overload. One of my favorite parts of this trip was that 2 of my new friends from class came! Eiran (left) who is Korean but has been living in Japan for the past 10 or so years, and Satoko (right), who is from Japan. I took a lot of pictures of those two.The town of Volterra is actually quite simple. There is a church in the center, that has a very simple facade, and much of is made in the same style as Pisa because at the time it was made, Pisa was in fashion. My favorite thing from the inside is a carving of the last supper, which has the devil under the table nibbling at Judases toes. Another one shows the devil holding the head of a man, as a warning that he can capture the minds of men. There is a pretty unique piece of
artwork inside this church. I'm not sure what it is made of, but it is portraying Jesus being taken down from the cross. I'm pretty sure..... I was trying to understand the whole story in Italian, so I could be wrong. There is also a little chapel attached to the church dedicated to the "brothers" and "sisters" of the church, from the monastery I assume, and there were beautiful hand written lists of their names.One of the main things that Volterra is known for is alabaster! I think you can probably find anything you want made of alabaster in Volterra, it's amazing. Especially the lamps because alabaster is actually a fairly transparent stone so they are beautiful! You can get alabaster items in almost any color you want, but in its natural form it only comes in 4 colors. Naturally I got my souvenir showing this. I now have a wine bottle cork with an alabaster top that is divided into quarters, one made of each natural color.
There are the remains of an old Roman Theater in Volterra. Much of it is covered by earth today, but a lot is still visible. We didn't go down to see it up close (which was fine with me) because I have pictures from the top. Being that Volterra was originally an Etruscan town, based on findings there is a beautiful store that makes authentic replicas of Etruscan jewelry.
The lats 2 pictures you will see in my album are of a very uneven cobblestone street. I have never seen any street like this before. It happened to be very close to the restaurant that we ate lunch at. Eiran, Sasha and I ate lunch together at a nice little restaurant. There were only 2 other people in there besides us. It is quite amazing spending time with Eiran and Satoko because our common language is Italian. Talk about motivation! The 3 of us had some great conversation during out meal, pulling out Eiran's amazing electronic dictionary to look something up when we didn't know the word. The food that this area is known for is cinghiale (wild boar) and papardelle (a wide noodle pasta). Eiran and I both got the papardelle with a cinghiale sauce and sasha got stewed chinghale with vegetables. Both were amazing! The interesting about the wild boar meat, is that since they are wild boars (even though you can still raise them) the meat has virtually no fat!After our lunch, we couldn't help but order desert! We all wanted panna cotta, which translates to "cooked cream". The man who was also there, (who we figured out was the chef), told us we should get the cheese cake (all in Italian of course) and that it is very good and different than what we would find at home. As it turned out, they only had 2 servings of panna cotta, so we decided to try the cheesecake. By this point we had made friends with the waitress and chef and they asked us if we minded sharing with eachother. Naturally we said no. A few minutes later they brought us out our caffe lattes and a platter of deserts! It had a panna cotta with chocolate, panna cotta with caramel, a slice of Italian cheese cake, and a slice of the apple torte. I just have to say WOW. The panna cotta was pretty good, but the cheese cake was AMAZING! Nothing like American cheese cake. It was light and fluffy and didn't have a crust! I think we will try to make one soon.
By the time we had finished our desert and coffee it was time to go back to the bus and drive to the other hilltop town of San Gimignano, which is where my next posting begins. **Comment about a photo album. The one with the photo of the dog I just had to share. Last time I was here, Meghan and I spotted the largest dog we had ever seen in our lives walking around Florence with it's owner. It really looked like 1/2 dog, 1/2 bear, and I think this one must be one of it's puppies.
Click here to see my photos from Volterra!
