The history of Orvieto is shaped by a volcanic rock called tufa. Tufa is a soft rock deposited in the valley a hundred thousand years ago after a volcanic explosion. Erosion has cut away all the surrounding rock, leaving a bluff hundreds of meters high...the perch upon which Orvieto sits.
People have lived atop this butte for thousands of years. The town has a rich pre-history as an Etruscan settlement. Walking down the road from the hilltop to the train station, we passed one of the archeological excavations. The artifacts from that excavation are stored in the national archeological museum in the heart of town.
The museum is filled with pots and vases discovered in hundreds of Etruscan tombs.
The oldest are dated to the 6th century BCE.
The old city is divided into four quarters. The main intersection, where via Duomo crosses Corso Cavour...
...is where the four quarters of the city meet. (The rectangular white plaques on the corners of the buildings mark the boundaries of the quarters)
During the middle ages, this was important because the four quarters engaged in a decades-long civil war between the Guelphs (supporters of the Holy Roman Empire) and the Ghibellines (supporters of the pope).
The conflict decimated the population of the city. The Ghibellines finally prevailed, and Umbria became one of the first Papal States.
Fast-forward a few hundred years to 1527. The Holy Roman Empire under Charles V sacks Rome and chases Pope Clement VII out of the Vatican.
Pope Clement flees to Orvieto for refuge. He fears the Emperor’s army will follow and lay siege to the city. Since Orvieto sits high on a bluff, any siege would cut off the city’s water supply. His solution: dig a hole down to the water table, and create a well to help the city withstand a siege.
The result was an engineering marvel of its age... Pozzo di S. Patrizio.
It took 10 years to dig the well. Pope Clement did not live to see it finished. The well has two spiral stairways, one atop the other, so that a man and his mule could descend to the bottom of the well while another man and his mule could use the other stairway to bring water up to the town.
Believe us, the well is really deep. Had the rock beneath the city not been tufa, there’s no way 16th century technology could have finished this job in just 10 years.
Fast forward another two centuries. The city has been re-populated and is running out of space. The locals come up with a solution...
The Orvieto Underground....
Caves...twelve hundred of them...dug in the tufa to create work space beneath people’s homes. In many cases, the caves were used as pigeon coops to breed the birds for food.
In the case of this particular cave, the space was used to press olive oil.
...which, as it turns out, will be the subject of our next blog post.
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