Central Italy - Tuscia - The land that time forgot

Italian shadows

The car falters, and stops.  We are in the middle of Tuscia, the ancient land of the Etruscans, in central Italy.  Sometimes also called Etruria, this area covers much of northern Lazio and southern Tuscany, and is littered with broken down relics - tombs, temples, towns, and, as here, modes of transport.....

It is a wild and unkempt area, cut by deep wooded valleys, and undulating with unpopulated hills.

Villages, like Blera, rise up on spurs, growing out of the living rock, carved like cheese,

Towns like these are still sleepy places, with shaded narrow streets where groups of elderly inhabitants wait for the time to pass.

Symbolically, the local butcher advertises snails for sale at €9 a kilo....

Nearby, the town of Barbarano Romano is in costume.  

A friend of mine, who used to run a simple trattoria here, carries the banner of the Confraternita della Morte.....

While young women dress as noblewomen:

Young men proudly beat the drum:

And the town band plays on:

In these valleys, overgrown and neglected, lie the empty tombs of Etruscans, who ranged across this area two thousand years ago, or more.  Typically they carved tombs out of the volcanic tufo (tuff) in necropolises across life-giving rivers from the towns of the living,

Though sometimes they constructed elaborate tombs from blocks and then mounded earth over them,

The vast majority of these were looted ages ago, or spoiled by being opened and trashed, though some, such as those at Tarquinia, at least kept their painted walls intact, and others revealed their secrets to archaeologists rather than grave-robbers.  The city of Vulci, with its walls and gates, remains an evocative place to visit, though much of what you see now dates from Roman times after the empire imposed defeat in 280 BC,

But what remains is preserved by grazing aurochs....

Today Vulci is a well-cured park with its own natural swimming pool, the Laghetto del Pellicone, surrounded by cliffs in the valley of the river Fiora....

But for centuries malaria crippled this area, and early visitors, such as George Dennis in the 1840s, chronicled the desolation: the wide, wide moor, a drear and melancholy waste, stretches around you, no human being seen on its expanse.... The Fiora frets in its rocky bed far beneath your feet, and its murmurs conveyed to you by the tall cliffs you stand on, are the sole disturbers of the solemn stillness.....

D H Lawrence, some eighty years later, also found the place dispiriting: the country was all empty and abandoned-seeming, yet with that peculiar, almost ominous, poignancy of places where life has once been intense.....

We make our way over the empty landscape, eventually to Tuscania, whose walls and churches indicate a rich past.  The magnificent Lombard-Romanesque church of San Pietro stands aloof outside the town, flanked by two imposing medieval military towers.  

Inside the church, beyond a line of Etruscan sarcophagi, steps rise up to the apse, or down to the crypt.  It is solemn, quiet, and bare.  Centuries could pass in moments here....

We move on, beyond Viterbo, to Bomarzo which  George Dennis described as, a village of considerable size situated on a wooded cliff-bound platform, with an old castle at the verge of the precipice.  It commands a glorious view of the vale of the Tiber, and the long chain of Umbrian and Sabine Apennines to the east; of the vast Etruscan plain to the north, with Monte Fiascone like a watch-tower in the midst, and the giant masses of Monte Cetona and Monte Amiata in the far horizon..... All is not so wonderful, however.  He goes on, like most villages in the Papal State, Bomarzo is squalid in the extreme.....

But we are not here to seek accommodation.  Bomarzo has an unusual claim to fame.  Below the town, in the Bosco Sacro, is the Parco dei Mostri, which was created in the second half of the sixteenth century by the slightly bonkers local nobleman, Vicino Orsini.....  Vast figures, grotesque masks, a temple, a most disconcerting sloping house, and giant sculpted creatures have been created out of the natural rocks, and surprise you amongst the woods....

Across the Tiber valley we spend a night at the Abbazia di Farfa, once one of the most powerful Benedictine Abbeys in Italy, with over five hundred monks and an adjoining village to support it.  Now, though it still houses an important library, it is served by five monks....

But we are well looked after by the Suore di Santa Brigida, aka the Hot Cross Nuns (due to the crosses on their headdresses).  There is something medieval about the experience, though maybe that's due to the wine?

In the morning we backtrack to Torrita Tiberina to pay our respects to another shade of the Italian past, Aldo Moro.

Though this distinguished politician was originally from Puglia, he and his family loved to spend time here in their villa.

After his kidnapping and murder in 1978, his private funeral (he left strict instructions that no politicians nor dignitaries should attend the service) was carried out here and he lies at rest in a simple tomb overlooking the river valley and the hills of central Italy.

Rolling back across Tuscia, we come across a strange, possibly sinister, coincidence.  In the village of Canale Monterano, my attention is caught by an ancient Fiat Cinquecento, the number plate of which bears a close resemblance to that  of the Red Renault 4 in which the cadaver of Aldo Moro had been left in 1978.....

The Renault that was left in Via Caetani in the capital was (falsely) plated Roma N5 7686 in a very similar configuration.....  Traces of sand and soil on the tyres of the car, and on Moro's shoes, were found to match the volcanic ground in neighbouring Manziana, where another Fiat, belonging to Mario Moretti, the head of the Brigate Rosse who kidnapped Moro, had been seen at a villa earlier in 1978.

But that's another story....

On the way, we pass through Vejano, dominated by a grim castle, also property of the Orsini family.  There is an imposing town hall, which bears the motto, Labor Omnia Vincit Improbus (1959), which was once a popular injunction, adapted from Virgil, and meaning Hard Work Overcomes Everything.....

Well, perhaps not everything, as a bas relief on a nearby wall witnesses, calling up other shades of this part of Italy:  In Memory of the Killling of Mariano and Orsio Nobili, Victims of Nazi Ferocity, 7 June 1944....

We return to Lake Bracciano, Lacus Sabatinus, and visit the Odescalchi (originally Orsini, again) castle that overlooks the lake, gazing back at Trevignano Romano, where we used to live, amongst the remains of Etruscan tombs and medieval towers....

And in the woods, after all the rain this year, the cyclamen are flourishing, nourished by all that history.....

While monsters relax in the shades of Tuscia.....

With fond memories of many great times at La Pacchiona, Barberano Romano....

Postcards from Italy

Shine On......

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.

Caro amico ti scrivo.....

Just a line or two from Italy.  We are staying more or less where we used to live, on the lip of a volcanic caldera, some fifty kilometres north of Rome.  The light is diamond cool, and only the chattering of magpies and baying of hounds disturbs the morning.

Occhiali da sole - reflecting the day

Later we may need sunglasses, though the weather is variable.  We may swim with the swans in Lake Bracciano......

Or drive over to the sea at Santa Severa, where plastic dolphins frolic close by the castle.....

We check out the latest in fringed bikinis....

We've been here a few days, mixing sun with wine, pasta with perch, peaches with figs..... One day we made a trip to some of the Etruscan sites near here (there are plenty of them!) At Tarquinia Hannah posed as the missing head on a sarcophagus (so immature!)

And we visited painted tombs.  This one portrays entertainment (juggling, music) for the deceased (who is seated) while over his head a lion and a panther face each other.  This chamber was discovered in 1961, and these pictures had not seen the light of day for almost 2,500 years - in fact, they have never seen the light of day, as they were painted by lamplight and are now illuminated on demand behind a thick glass door.  The red here is exaggerated to clarify the images - in reality it is a much subtler hue.

Tarquinia, Tomba dei Giocolieri (550 - 500 BC)

Then we went to Cerveteri, where the tombs are open, but generally empty (though in this one I found Sarah posing as an enchanted priestess, framed by the tufo door).....

In this area it is hard to avoid the Etruscans.  At Veio (only twenty kilometres from Rome, once the greatest of Etruscan cities) one of the tombs is now a hang out for the local youth......

Invited for a drink with friends, we are shown a piece of bucchero, pottery from five, six or even seven centuries BC, made when earthenware was fired in a closed kiln (which apparently caused carbon monoxide to blacken the red iron oxides in the clay). Artefacts like these were so common when the Prince of Canino, Lucien Bonaparte, who owned the land around Vulci, started excavating tombs in 1828, that when George Dennis was there some twenty years later, the labourers were under orders to destroy such pieces to maintain the value of finer ware.  Nowadays they are priceless, rather than worthless, and it is extraordinary to handle something thrown and fired by human hands so many centuries ago.....

When it is hot, it really is hot here, and you need to rest in the shade, like these two decorators in Tarquinia.....

But, as I said, the weather has been changeable, and on some days the clouds build up.....

And it goes dark, and the water seems to be beaten pewter as rain drops the size of broad beans pelt down.....

Monte Venere and Lago di Vico

Then it cools, and we visit Bracciano to shop, and to admire the castle as it towers above the houses of the humble clustering round its skirts.  This fifteenth century fortress was once the home of the Orsini family (and featured in Webster's play The White Devil) though now it belongs to the Odescalchi family (and featured in tragedies such as Tom Cruise's marriage to Katie Holmes).

And then it warms again, and we drive on round the lake to the village of Anguillara Sabazia, where the evening sun warms the roof tiles and exaggerates the auburn (and violet) tints of the beauty on the beach....

We meet up with old friends, novelist Simon Mawer and his wife Connie, and dine at Harvey's, a Pizzeria below the old town.  Amanda chooses pizza with apple and gorgonzola; mine is more robust with chunks of sausage and strands of cicoria (bitter wild greens).  Simon has the proofs of his new novel, Tightrope, sequel to The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, to deal with and is enthusiastic about next year's production of his Booker shortlisted The Glass Room (in Czech) in Brno, but he is also anxious about an operation he is about to undergo. So fingers are crossed, and glasses are raised.....

On another evening we meet up with an even older friend....  Truman Peebles, 102 today, joins us for a pre-prandial shot of Jack Daniel's at Ermete's Bar before we eat at La Grotta Azzurra, one of the oldest (and the best) restaurants in Trevignano Romano.  Truman has known Nazzareno, the proprietor (who grew up on the premises when he could fish from his bedroom window), for many years, and we are treated regally. At his age a lot of people are recumbent in their tombs, but Truman is no Etruscan, and he converses with diamond precision (though I wonder if Red Bull is sponsoring him for infinity?)

May I take your picture?
You can if you give me five bucks!

Evenings are wind-down time. The sun draws energy from the earth and quiet descends.

But then, sparkling with prosecco.....

The girls dance with their mother in an impromptu disco, with Cameron and me as sparring smart-phone DJs.....

Vedi caro amico cosa ti scrivo e ti dico,

And the time comes to take our leave (again).  There is too little time; the holiday begins to end.....  We slip into the village to salute our friends, though mancano alcuni (Loreta, Mimmo, Pietro, Vi saluto....)

Here is Alberto, my annual hairdresser.....

And here are Amanda and the girls with Sandro, whose ice creams contributed so much to what they are today (?)

e come sono contento

di essere qui in questo momento,

vedi, vedi, vedi, vedi,

vedi caro amico cosa si deve inventare

per poterci ridere sopra,

per continuare a sperare

And we drive to Fiumicino, my Ford C Max almost parched after 713 kilometres on one tank (thank you Avis, your deal of €89 if I brought the car back empty tempted me to risk it!) and wait for the flight, silhouetted against the window.....

And soon we are on our way home, gazing through the thick glass at a dreamworks fragment of our lives....

Pianosa - fictional base for Catch-22, and until 1998 maximum security prison for mafiosi

Shine on you crazy diamond.

L'anno che sta arrivando tra un anno passerà

io mi sto preparando è questa la novità