Volterra Culture

The Etruscans, and what survives of them

Volterra was Velathri, and it has been a city since at least the end of the 8th century BC. What makes it exceptional is not that there are Etruscan remains — there are those all over Tuscany — but that the town never stopped, so the Etruscan city is underneath and inside a living one. The Porta all'Arco of the 3rd–2nd centuries BC is a working gate, not an exhibit.

The Museo Etrusco Guarnacci

One of the oldest public museums in Europe, and the finest Etruscan collection outside the national museums. It was founded in 1761 when the abbot Mario Guarnacci gave his archaeological patrimony and a library of over 50,000 volumes to "the public of the city of Volterra" — an extraordinary act for its moment, when museums open to the public were barely an idea.

The collection holds thousands of funerary urns of the Hellenistic and Archaic periods. The scale is the experience: individually these are carved chests with reclining figures on their lids, but in that number they become a whole society, portrait after portrait of people who commissioned their own likeness.

Two pieces are famous. The Ombra della sera — "evening shadow" — is a bronze figure drawn out so thin it is nearly a line, and it looks disconcertingly modern. The Urna degli Sposi shows a married couple on the lid of their own urn, portrayed with a frankness about age and character that Roman portraiture rarely allowed.

The museum moved twice: into the thirteenth-century Palazzo dei Priori on Guarnacci's death in 1785, and in 1877 to Palazzo Desideri Tangassi, where the director Niccolò Maffei installed it and where it still is.

Alabaster: twenty-eight centuries of one craft

Carving began here in the 8th century BC and continues today as the traditional Volterran trade. That sentence deserves to be read slowly. This is not a revived heritage industry or a demonstration for visitors; it is an unbroken working craft about as old as the city, still practised in workshops in the streets, with the Ecomuseo dell'Alabastro to explain it. Very few places in Europe can claim anything comparable.

The medieval and Renaissance town

The Palazzo dei Priori, begun in 1208 and finished in 1257, gives the centre its austerity: height, bare stone, and almost no decoration. The Pinacoteca and civic museum holds the picture collection.

The fortress that is still a prison

The Fortezza Medicea was built in the 1470s, after Florence took the town, and it is a prison today. Most such fortresses became museums, barracks or ruins. This one has simply carried on doing what it was built for, for over five centuries, and that continuity is part of Volterra's particular seriousness.