Published in Guardian Travel
April 2019
‘Here there are wild boars with four legs, and wild boars with two,’ says Walk Italy tour leader Roberto Carpano. We are drinking volcanic wine in the tiny village of Sovana, and he is referring to the fact that locals in this part of Tuscany – the forested, hilly, rarely visited backcountry 50 miles south of Siena – are sometimes nicknamed cinghiali, ‘wild boars’, for their stubborn and bristling nature. Not that there are many locals about – Sovana has fewer than 100 residents, and the piazza is deserted apart from a small, self-important dog trotting past on his own business. My partner and I are here, along with four others, to join a two-day walking tour of the mysterious Vie Cave.
We are not exactly off the beaten track, for these tracks have been beaten since the Bronze Age. The Vie Cave are a network of roads built by the Etruscans, the civilisation that ruled these lands until 100 BC, when the last of their cities were absorbed into the expanding Roman Republic. The ancient thoroughfares were cut with hand-tools into the tufo – the porous volcanic rock that thickly layers this landscape – connecting settlements, religious sites and necropolises. Some are mere holloways and some are 20-foot-deep ravines broad enough to drive a chariot down, complete with miniature microclimates of lichens and mosses. Were they carved for concealment, to evade detection from the neighbouring Romans, or did their meandering twists and turns have some mystical significance? No one really knows, but in places the walls are carved with medieval ‘devil-scarers’ – Christian symbols and alcoves for saints to protect against the pagan spirits that later inhabitants of these lands believed might haunt these pathways.
Our journey begins at the castle of Sorano, the Renaissance stronghold of the powerful Orsini family, perched on top of a tufo bluff riddled with tunnels and caves. We are given a tour of the catacombs by Sean Lawson, a New Zealander who came on holiday here 18 years ago and accidentally stayed, and now works for the ZOE Cultural Co-op that manages local sites. He leads us through the cramped passageways that honeycomb the rock – their walls coated in saltpeter, an ingredient of the gunpowder that fuelled the Orsinis’ incessant wars – and into the wooded valley below, where the Vie Cave begin.
Immediately we have the sensation of plunging from the old to the ancient. The sunlight disappears as we enter the shaded depths, burrowing deep into the valley, the scars of 2,000-year-old picks still visible on the walls. This first section isn’t long – soon we emerge into an open landscape of vineyards and olive groves, roads more Roman than Etruscan – but eight miles later we have arrived at a place of even greater mystery: the ancient necropolis of the Città del Tufo. The largest, most majestic tomb is the Tomba Ildebranda, carved from the living rock, with hundreds of smaller burial chambers pitting the surroundings. Sean shows us the Tomb of the Winged Demons and the statue of Vanth, Angel of Death, pausing to chat to some local ladies picking wild asparagus, which, they assure us, is perfect in risotto. Built on an older Etruscan settlement, Sovana was the ‘City of the Living’ that faced the ‘City of the Dead’ – tonight we are glad to be sleeping on the living side of the valley.
The next morning’s Vie Cave take us not to a necropolis but to the Sassotondo vineyard, owned by biodynamic wine producers Carla Benini and Eduardo Ventimiglia. ‘He is the mind and I am the nose,’ explains Carla, after a tour of the cellar – cut deep into tufo, like everything else – pouring red, white and orange wine as an icy wind shakes the mimosa trees outside. Lunch is unsalted Tuscan bread and sheep’s cheese sprinkled with oregano, then we are back on the sunken roads heading for Pitigliano – an unreal vision of a town with steeples, towers and defensive walls perched on an outcrop of naked rock, its terracotta rooftops circled by rooks. We pass beneath the arches of the 16th-century aqueduct and find ourselves in a warren of vicoli, narrow twisting alleyways unnavigable for cars. Roberto shows us the synagogue of the ancient Jewish quarter, which thrived from the 15th century but didn’t survive the 20th – its members fled or were deported, with others reportedly finding refuge with neighbouring Christian families during the Nazi occupation – and is now another sad monument to a vanished culture. A full moon rises in a blue sky as we get settled in the local Magica Torre guesthouse for the night.
Sleep is a long way off, however, for something special is about to happen in the main piazza. There stands the Invernacciu, an effigy made of canes and straw, who represents the departing spirit of winter. As darkness falls, a line of flames bobs and weaves through the Vie Cave on the far side of the valley, making its way to the town from the forest. We see a procession of young men dressed in the sackcloth cowls of monks, bearing ten-foot bundles of burning canes on their shoulders, trailing sparks behind them as they stagger up the hill. Their chants get louder as they come: ‘Eppe, eppe, viva San Giuseppe!’ Officially this festival, the Torciata of San Giuseppe, is dedicated to the town’s patron saint, but – like the devil-scarers in the Etruscan holloways – the veneer of Christianity is highly unconvincing. Tonight is the spring equinox, and this is a pagan celebration to bid goodbye to winter.
The monks touch their torches to the pyre and the straw man goes up in flames. There is a fierce wind, which immediately turns the piazza into a maelstrom of swarming sparks. Chunks of burning wood rain down on the crowd, and parents brush embers from their children’s hair – to the total disinterest of the firemen on duty, who are chatting and smoking cigarettes – as music blasts from powerful speakers and inebriated monks dance hand-in-hand around the inferno. It is a glorious end to our walk. Winter is truly over.
By midnight the streets are deserted again. We return to the smouldering heap to gather a handful of still-warm ashes to take home on tomorrow’s train – good luck for the coming year.