Volterra Geography, Climate & Nature

Volterra sits on a high, isolated hill west of the classic Tuscan wine country, and its position explains both its long history and its modern quietness.

The site

The town is at 531 metres in a municipality of 252 km² — a large territory with only 9,366 residents in it. The hill stands clear of its surroundings and falls away steeply on several sides, which is why there has been a city here since at least the end of the 8th century BC: it is a defensible height with a long view in every direction.

A different province, and a different orbit

This is worth stating plainly, because it is the thing most visitors get wrong. Volterra is in the province of Pisa, not Siena. San Gimignano and Siena lie east and south-east; Pienza, Montalcino and Montepulciano are much further off, in the Val d'Orcia country. Volterra's roads and historic affinities run west toward the coast and Pisa, not south into the wine hills.

The country around

The landscape here is bare, broken hill country — pale clay, wide horizons, thin woodland in the gullies and very few people. It is harder and emptier than the cypress-and-vineyard landscape further east, and it is a large part of why Volterra feels older and more austere than its neighbours.

The stone

Alabaster is the local material, quarried in this territory, and carving it has been the town's trade since the 8th century BC. A geological accident has sustained one craft here for about twenty-eight centuries.

What it means for a visitor

Volterra is further from everything than it looks on a map, and all the approaches are slow secondary roads over hills. That is the single practical fact to plan around: it is not a detour from somewhere else, and a day trip squeezed in between other towns wastes most of itself on the drive. Stay the night.

Volterra stands at 531 metres on an isolated hill with little shelter, and it is noticeably rawer than the Val d'Orcia towns.

What each season does

• Winter is cold, grey and genuinely windy — an exposed hill in bare clay country catches everything, and the wind is the thing visitors remember. Bring a layer more than you think you need.
• Spring is the best season here. The hard landscape greens up briefly, the light is long on the pale stone, and the Guarnacci returns to daily summer hours on 10 March.
• Summer is hot but more bearable than in the towns to the south-east, because the hill is exposed and catches a breeze. The town is also the least crowded of the five in August, a direct benefit of being hard to reach.
• Autumn is excellent through to the end of October, with clear air and warm days. Summer museum hours run until 2 November.

The practical point

In Volterra the calendar matters more than the thermometer. The Guarnacci is open 10:00–18:30 every day from 10 March to 2 November; from 3 November to 9 March it drops to 10:00–16:00 on Monday and Wednesday to Friday, keeps 10:00–18:30 at weekends, and is closed on Tuesday. Winter afternoons are short and the museum shuts at four, so a winter visit needs an early start.

Volterra's commune covers 252 km² with only 9,366 people in it, which makes it one of the emptier territories in Tuscany — and the landscape here is quite different from the vineyard country to the south-east.

What is here

• Bare clay hill country dominates. These pale, erodible soils carry thin grassland and scrub rather than woodland, and they are a genuinely distinctive Tuscan habitat: open, dry, sparsely vegetated, and good for species that need bare ground and space.
• Oak and mixed woodland survives in the gullies and on the steeper slopes, with holm oak, downy oak and hornbeam, and these fragments hold most of the commune's woodland species.
• Scrub and abandoned farmland is extensive, because this is marginal agricultural country and a lot of it has gone out of cultivation. That succession habitat — brambles, broom, juniper, young trees — supports more breeding birds than the surrounding fields.
• The town's stonework is a cliff substitute, as in every hill town: swifts, swallows, house martins and bats use the walls and roofs, and the exposed hilltop means they hunt over open air.
• Streams in the valleys are small and seasonal but carry the only riparian vegetation for some distance.

The honest framing

This is not a biodiversity destination, and the interesting thing about it is emptiness rather than richness: a large, thinly populated territory of open clay hills and reverting farmland, which is a scarcer condition in Tuscany than vineyard and holds a different set of species because of it.

Volterra sits in some of the emptiest country in Tuscany — 252 km² with 9,366 people — and the wildlife reflects open hills and abandoned farmland rather than woodland or wetland.

Birds of open country

This is the best habitat in the group for raptors that hunt bare ground. Common buzzard and kestrel are everywhere, and from the walls you often look down on them rather than up. Common raven works the broken hills. Little owl uses the farm buildings and ruins, of which there are many, and is easy to see at dusk on a wall or a post.

In the town

Swifts, swallows and house martins nest in the old masonry and hunt the air off the hill all summer; bats emerge at dusk from the walls and towers. Black redstart uses the stonework year-round, and jackdaws nest in the taller buildings.

Mammals

Wild boar are common in the gullies and the scrub, and are the mammal most likely to be met on a track at dusk — not dangerous if left alone, a sow with young excepted. Roe deer use the woodland fragments, and red fox, badger, stone marten, crested porcupine and European hare work the margins. The hare does better here than in the wine country, because there is more rough open ground.

In spring

Hoopoe and European bee-eater both arrive and both suit this landscape — the bee-eater nests in soft banks, and soft erodible banks are what this country is made of. Nightingale sings from the scrub in May, and golden oriole from the woodland in the valleys.

Where to look

The walls at dusk, for swifts, bats and the raptors below, with no walking required. Otherwise the tracks out into the clay hills early in the morning, where the emptiness is the point, and the scrub on the slopes below the town in May for the migrants.