Amitrice

As Carol and Roger returned from their days watching the Giro d'Italia, their route took them right through the heart of earthquake country.

We imagined things couldn't be much worse than what we had seen in Norcia (see "Terremoto" from May 14, 2018).

The hamlet of Spelonga disabused us of that assumption.  Of the half-dozen buildings in town, not one was undamaged.

In the small village of Grisciano, things were even worse.  The entire village had been leveled...save one building.

There was a small cafe housed in a prefabricated modular building, where a number of other people stopped...along with us...for a cup of coffee and a jaw-dropping peek at how a whole community just disappeared.

Across from the cafe was a large banner that said, "We will rebuild and return to the place of our hearts."

As we got closer to Amitrice, we saw a road sign for the town...and the road wasn't closed.  So we took it.



Amitrice is nestled in a valley below the snow-capped peaks of the Appenine mountains.  The natural setting is very pretty.

Courtesy: Wikipedia

Remember this photo from our previous blog post?



This is what the main street of Amitrice looked like before the earthquake.

This is what that same main street looks like 22 months after the earthquake.

Before the disaster, the town of Amitrice was half-again as big as Pienza...still pretty small by current standards.

Most of the town is a "red zone," too  dangerous to allow people in.  The Italian military constantly patrols to keep rubberneckers (like us) from getting themselves into trouble.

Almost two years later, the amount of rubble that remains to be cleared away is staggering.

Only a geologist...or perhaps an architect...could understand why one house would collapse into a heap while the one next to it remained standing.

There are a handful of buildings scattered around that engineers believed can be saved...with proper reinforcement.


Meanwhile, the buildings will wait, wrapped in their scaffolding, until reconstruction of the town can begin.

Just beyond the far end of town... outside the red zone...the government has erected two small villages of prefabricated buildings.

This one is home to the six restaurants that existed in town before the earthquake.

A similar village houses the grocery, bank, and other businesses that used to line the main street.

It brings a few jobs to town.  But with most homes destroyed and people living elsewhere, the community is on economic life support.

 Amitrice is famous for one dish, served in all six of the restaurants... pasta all'Amitriciana.

We, of course, stopped for lunch and ordered their signature dish.  Carol describes it a slightly spicy with white wine, olive oil, pepper, and pancetta.

As we were leaving town to return to Pienza, we saw a sign for where the restaurant and hotel used to be before the earthquake.  We turned into the parking lot and saw...

Pienza's Ancient History

Carol and Roger have passed this sign on the outskirts of Pienza innumerable times.

We had always assumed it was one of the hundreds...perhaps thousands...of archeological sites in Italy that would someday be excavated, once the backlog of excavation sites was whittled down to a manageable number.

As is usual with assumptions, we were wrong.

All it took was a trip to the Museo Etrusco (Etruscan Museum) in Chiusi to straighten us out.





Who were the Etruscans?

courtesy: Wikipedia

Roman legend says that Aeneas, a hero of the Trojan side of the Trojan War...pictured here carrying his father out of Troy just ahead of Greek looters, abandoned Troy with a handful of followers and settled in what today is central Italy.

His descendants became known as the Etruscans and established a string of settlements in Italy well before the founding of Rome.

(See our blog post from April 2014, "Before the Romans...")



The Etruscans chose Chiusi for settlement because it was the place where the Val di Chiana and the Val d' Orcia came together.

The Etruscan presence around Chiusi was never a city, but rather several dozen small hamlets.


The map at the left shows all the excavated Etruscan sites within about 5 km of the present city.

The oldest artifacts from Pienza (or excavations close by) are these bronze spear heads, which date to roughly the year 1,000 BCE.

That's about as far back as anybody has been able to place Etruscan settlements in this part of Italy.

Some of the other Bronze Age utensils include these kitchen tools.



Note the cheese grater in the lower left corner.  Not that much has changed in the past 3,000 years.

The museum is loaded with ancient ceramics.





This piece at the right came from Pienza (or nearby).  It's estimated to be 2,600 years old.




The ceramics in the museum tell a fascinating story of economic development.

In the 7th Century BCE, Etruscan trade with the then-known world exploded.  The map at the left shows where artifacts in the museum came from...not only Greece and its settlements in Sicily, but also Carthage in North Africa, Massalia (present-day Marseilles), and the Greek colonies on the Black Sea.

The best example of a distant product is this funerary piece carved out of ivory.  There were no elephants native to the Italian peninsula at this time, so the ivory likely came from North Africa.


Most of the goods from overseas came to Chiusi through the port of Vulci...100 km to the west.


(See our blog post on Vulci, "Three Times Abandoned," from September 2017)

Enough digression!  Back to the story of the ceramics.





With the expansion of trade, the Etruscans brought in ceramics from Greece (this pot shows Odysseus' son about to leave home to search for his father, now missing almost 20 years).

Soon, Etruscan craftsmen began copying Greek designs but putting their own legends and myths on the ceramics.

And finally, some Etruscan "modernists" asked why they should copy Greek styles, and came up with designs of their own.















P.S.:  Not all the items in the museum were utilitarian.  Many were pieces found in Etruscan tombs and stood out for their beauty.

Abandoned...Three Times

The Maremma sits on Italy's west coast.  It's very rural...the home of these long-horned cows, locales for many of the Clint Eastwood "Spaghetti Westerns" shot in the 1970's, and some of the richest archeological sites on the Italian peninsula.

Vulci, in the heart of the Maremma, was first settled by the Etruscans in the 9th Century BC...a century before the founding of Rome.  Legend  says the Etruscans were the descendants of Aeneas, who was driven out of Troy at the end of the Trojan War.  They are famous for their trade in pottery and bronze work, relics of which have been found as far away as Denmark.

Vulci was huge by ancient standards, stretching several miles from north to south.

Vulci was a prosperous city because of its commerce.  Vulci was only seven miles from the sea.  The Etruscans could easily float down the River Fiore and trade their agricultural and metal goods with other ancient cities on the Mediterranean.

Remains of an urn like this one, with designs distinctive to Vulci, have been found as far away as the south coast of France.

The Etruscans did not build a lot of stone structures, so not many of their buildings have survived.


There are exceptions however...

Here, Carol stands at what was once the West Gate to the city.

Archeologists believe the West Gate once looked something like this.

At the opposite side of the city, close to the river, are the remains of what was once a furnace, used to manufacture the bronze goods for which Vulci was noted.


Then...early in the 3rd Century BC, after almost 600 years of habitation...the Etruscans abandoned Vulci.

Historians know why.

The Romans were in a period of aggressive expansion across the Italian Peninsula.  As their army approached Vulci, the Etruscans fled.

The Romans moved in and built their city right on top of what had been the heart of Vulci, the forum.



Because the Romans build their city out of stone and concrete, much of what they erected survives in some form today.

Archeologists have named this the "Grand Temple," because of its size.

They believe the temple was dedicated to Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and...appropriately...trade.

The richest ruin at the site had once been the home of a wealthy Roman family.

The excavation is being led by a team of archeologists from Duke University.

The detail on the stone carvings provide an indication of the family's prosperity.

The house was expansive...

...containing both public quarters where the owner would conduct business...

....and private quarters where the family lived.  This is what remains of the hortus, or enclosed private garden with a shrine to the family's household gods.

The real surprises came underground.

Below the house there was an extensive network of rooms....

...for grain storage...


...a central heating system...

...a sophisticated system of catch basins to store water for domestic use....

...and constant reminders how much shorter than us the ancient Romans were.

The Romans were also expert road builders.


They built 140,000 miles of roads across their empire.


This one has lasted two thousand years and is still used today by the trucks that maintain the archeological park.

The artist's rendering of how the roads were built explains why they have been so durable.

Appearances are certainly deceiving.



We, the uninitiated, thought this structure was a bakery where the arched recesses served as ovens.



Instead, it turned out to be something very different.

The archeologists say this was the shrine for a small religious sect that worshipped the Persian goddess Mitra.

The statue of Mitra stabbing a lion, the object of worship, is one of the very few pieces of art that remain outside a museum.

After about 600 years, the Roman city of Vulci was also abandoned.



The Roman Empire was collapsing.  The government pulled its troops back to defend the capital.  Like the Etruscans before them, when faced with an advancing enemy and nobody to defend them, the Roman citizens of Vulci just left.

Even after the fall of the Roman Empire, the area around Vulci remained an important crossroads for trade.  People needed a way to cross the River Fiore.



The Etruscans had built three bridges over the river. Two of them collapsed after centuries of use.

But the third bridge remained.



(The red stone you see holding up the arch in the bridge date from Etruscan times).



In the year 809, the bridge was updated and the Church built a customs house to collect tolls from those wanting to cross the river.

Over the years, the customs house expanded into a monastery and then a fort.  It became known as the Castello della Badia.

In the 15th century, it was rebuilt in its present form.

A small community grew up around it.

In the 19th century, the newly unified Italian government required the Church to sell off its non-ecclesiastical holdings, and the residents of the Castello della Badia abandoned Vulci a third time.







Today, Vulci is a national archeological and nature park.  It has Etruscan tombs and a museum...all of which were closed the day we visited.

Many of the most valuable pieces of Etruscan art were pillaged by amateur archeologists in the 1800's and now reside in places like the British Museum.