Our morning in Volterra started with a walking tour of the town by an American ex-pat who was married to a local.
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| Guelph or Ghibelline? |
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| One of the Medicis got thrown out a window |
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| I've read that one way to tell if you are in the US is by noting the yellow school busses. Evidently Italy has them too. |
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| During WWII the locals tore up the road to this city gate to keep the withdrawing Nazis from destroying the gate |
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| Bapistry |
After seeing the main piazza and learning the history of the town, we saw the Roman ruins in daylight.
One product of the area is Alabaster, a soft translucent marble. We visited a workshop and watched this gentleman make a bowl.
The final part of our tour was at the Etruscan Museum where we learned that the Etruscans had been the dominant culture in Italy before the Romans and that some of the early "Romans" we know of were actually Etruscans.
Once the tour guide had finished with us in the museum, we were given passes to the major attractions in town and turned loose to explore. Step one was lunch at a streetside cafe:
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| The town, looking down from the restaurant |
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Here is the local prison; no they weren't on our tour card
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We wandered the town, visited the art museum where we got to see a restorer at work, and then met the group for a wine tasting. I prefer white wine to red and most of what we tasted was red. I ended up preferring the least expensive variety.
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| Yes, we are church nerds |
For dinner we wandered the streets until something caught our eye and ended up on the main piazza of town. Shortly after we started another American couple was seated next to us (barely room to walk between the tables). They had a vacation home in the area and had spent some time in Louisiana, which is where we lived. They ordered a bottle of wine and shared it with us, and I think they shared some appetizers too (I'm writing this in January and my memory has faded). It made for a nice little extra to the trip. I can't remember what we ate but the meal was good, and evidently folks who regularly spent time in the area liked this place too.
After dinner we headed to the parking lot/overlook to watch the sun set.
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| Love it! |
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| Made of Alabaster |
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| Doesn't this look like Diagon Alley? |
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| Our hotel |
Our time in Volterra ended the next morning. Before we boarded the bus I took a walk outside the walled city and found the more modern part of town. I almost wish I had wandered there the day before and gotten a chance to see how today's people live in Volterra. I mean I live in the New Orleans area but not in the French Quarter. Most people I know live in suburbia, we drive cars and we eat at McDonalds and Applebees, not Arnauds and Brennans (at least not very often). If you based your image of people in this area by what you saw in the French Quarter, your image would be very wrong.
