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.