We had lunch at a highly recommended restaurant in the town piazza, pictured here. The indoors was very atmospheric and the outdoor seating a very nice way to spend a couple hours. However, if I were to do it again, I wouldn't eat during those two hours. Actually my food was ok, but Somchai ordered probably the most vile dish ever eaten, or smelled, by either of us, wild boar carpaccio. About three minutes before this plate of bloody raw pieces of a very gamey, very stinky wild boar, Somchai smelled the disaster being prepared. I don't have such a delicate sense of smell, but boy, when that dish came outside, the entire piazza filled with the odor. Do you remember the really fat man vomiting in Monty Python's Meaning of Life? It was like that, only worse.

Since I've been fairly negative on poor Volterra, I'll end with this panoramic photo of the town, which I think shows a pretty beautiful place, contradicting most of the negativity I've been expressing. Just stay away from the alabaster and the wild boar and you'll be fine.

Again, like the rest of Tuscany, the town is perfectly preserved at its medieval peak. But the town is a bit depressing feeling, somewhat empty and dark. You can easily spend an hour walking around town, around the walls and gates and up through the narrow brick roads. It's also got a cathedral to go with its bishop, but it's not particularly interesting. It's brick and dark like the rest of the town. The other big strike against the town is alabaster. I didn't know what alabaster was before I came here, but I sure do now. It's a translucent white stone that Volterra made famous. It's a pretty stone, but the way to emphasize the translucence is to light it from inside and see the glow of the stone. This can easily become a very kitsch exercise, and as you pass the hundreds of alabaster workshops with displays lining the streets, you'll be amazed at the variety of tacky objects can be carved with alabaster and set alight.

75. Volterra

We then drove along some beautiful countryside to the home of the big bad bishop, Volterra. Volterra is situated on a very steep mountain, one of the most picturesque spots in Tuscany. The town used to be a major Etruscan center, and the Etruscans, not hating each other as much as the Tuscans, built an enormous city wall. The Romans eventually conquered the town and it fell in importance, so that the Roman town occupied only about a third of the walled in area of the Etruscan predecessor. The extensive walls were too expensive to maintain, so the Romans rewalled their smaller town. Interestingly, when it was the Romans turn to be conquered, the bishop of Volterra, while not saving the day, at least postponed the day or reckoning. While the barbarians were swarming all over Europe in the 5th century, they surrounded Volterra and tried to starve it into submission. After months of being cut off from food, the starving Volterrans were close to surrender, but the bishop came up with a bizarre idea that supposedly worked. He gathered all the remaining food rations the town had, and started throwing them over the walls to the barbarians. The barbarians fell for the ruse, and thinking the town had so much food left they could afford to throw the stuff away, moved on. The upshot of all this history is there are lots of Etruscan and Roman ruins scattered about the town, mostly around the walls and gates into town. The Roman ruin-y looking things are the Roman ruins, while the brick arch and surrounding wall are Etruscan, i.e. really old.

Like most of the towns of Tuscany, each one seemed to have their 15 minutes of fame, which they used to amass great wealth, built extravagantly costly infrastructure, invade the neighbors, fall apart in chaotic civil war, and get taken over by a neighbor. San Gimignano did not have an auspicious start, as it was controlled by the bishop of Volterra. Any town that is occupied by a bishop from another town has to be pretty weak, and when you see Volterra in the next post, you'll agree that this couldn't have been one of the top bishoprics by any stretch of the imagination. But they managed to wrest free from the bishop's altar boy army around 1100, then squandered their freedom on these crazy towers. An interesting point here is that the towers are all inside the city since they were used to kill each other. They never got around to building a city wall, so Florence swooped down on a slow day and gobbled it up.