Volterra
Etruscan And Medieval Hill Town, One Of The Twelve Cities Of The Etruscan League, Holding The Guarnacci Etruscan Museum And A Continuing Alabaster Trade · Volterra, Tuscany
Volterra is the Tuscan hill town that was already old when the others were founded. It was one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan league, and what survives from that is not a ruin but a museum: several hundred carved funerary urns collected over two centuries, arranged in a building that has deliberately kept its nineteenth-century cases, and among them a bronze figure so elongated that it looks like something made in the 1930s and is in fact about two and a half thousand years old. Outside the walls a Roman theatre sits in a hollow and is best seen for free from the road above it. The town still carves alabaster, which is quarried nearby and worked in shops you can watch from the street, and on the western edge the hill is slowly collapsing into a ravine that has already taken a church and part of the Etruscan walls with it. It is an hour from anywhere and much emptier than San Gimignano.
Piazza dei Priori, Volterra, Tuscany, 56048, Italy
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: the Guarnacci museum and the other municipal museums open daily in season with shorter winter hours and a weekly closing day, with a last admission before closing. The cathedral opens daily and free with a long early-afternoon interval. The Roman theatre site is seasonal and can be shut entirely in winter, though the free view from the road above is always available. Piazza dei Priori, the Porta all'Arco and Le Balze never close. Confirm before travelling.