Il muro etrusco di Volterra

Whoever arrives in Volterra from the road of the south meets immediately a wall of stone yellowish. It is not a wall ordinary: the blocks are enormous and laid without mortar, one on top of the other, as if someone had had all the time in the world. That someone were the Etruscans, and they built that perimeter more than two thousand and five hundred years ago.

Volterra itself sits on a hill high and windy between Florence and the sea. The Etruscans it called Velathri and it was one of the twelve cities main of the their federation. The stone of the wall comes from the quarries nearby, a tuff warm that at sunset turns almost orange. Perhaps it is for this that the city seems always suspended in a time that is not the our.

The Gate of the Arch is the piece most famous of the whole the wall. Three heads dark and worn protrude from the arch: they are deities Etruscan of which today we no longer know the names. The archaeologists believe that they may be gods protective of the gate, placed there to watch over those who entered and those who left. During the Second World War the Germans wanted to blow it up , but the residents filled the arch with stones in one single night and saved it .

We know little about the Etruscans, because their language has not yet been fully deciphered . We read the names on the tombs but we do not understand the their poems. We know however that they were skilled metalworkers, sailors cautious and farmers refined. The women Etruscan had rights that the Roman ones would only have dreamed of: they could own land, banquet with the men and sign contracts. Rome absorbed them slowly, first with trade and then with arms, and in the end took from them many things: the arches, the priests who read the future in the flight of birds, even the name of the toga.

Walking today through Volterra means crossing layers of time. Above the wall Etruscan stands a theatre Roman with the tiers still in place. Above the theatre, a convent medieval. Above the convent, the palaces Renaissance with the their windows narrow. And between all this, the workshops of alabaster, a craft that the Volterrans have practiced for twenty-five centuries. Even alabaster it was discovered by them, the Etruscans, and since then the work has never stopped.

The city modern lives in a quiet strange, a bit like if it knew that it is a survivor of many things. In winter the wind cuts the streets and the tourists are few. The residents greet each other by name in the square and know who lives in which house for how many generations. Yet it is enough to lay a hand on the wall to feel that beneath the their feet there is another Volterra older , more silent, that is waiting.

Perhaps this is the true lesson of the wall Etruscan: that a people can disappear as a nation and continue to live in the stones, in the gestures of those who carve alabaster, in the way in which a city smiles at the wind. Rome won the war, but did not win entirely the memory. And the blocks yellow of Volterra are there to remind us, every day.