The city beneath the city
Under the streets, squares and houses of Orvieto, the tuff cliff on which the town stands is riddled with a second, hidden city: a labyrinth of over 1,200 caves, tunnels, wells, cisterns, quarries and cellars, dug by hand over almost three thousand years, from the Etruscans to the present day. The tuff, a soft volcanic rock easy to dig but solid, allowed every family to extend their house downwards, creating rooms where they could work, store food, produce wine and oil, and find water, so that almost every building in the historic centre has its own underground space.
The Orvieto Underground guided tour, which starts from Piazza Duomo, leads into a network of caves dug into the edge of the cliff, with windows overlooking the valley, and tells the story of the town through the traces left in the rock: Etruscan wells dug with incredible precision to reach the water table, with the footholds carved in the walls for climbing; cisterns; a medieval olive press, with its millstone and its press; quarries of pozzolana; ceramic dumps with fragments of medieval and Renaissance pottery; and above all the colombaie, hundreds of small niches dug in the walls to raise pigeons, a typical food of Orvieto since the Middle Ages, still found today on the menu of local restaurants, in the form of "palombo alla leccarda". Another underground site that can be visited is the Pozzo della Cava, an Etruscan well enlarged in the sixteenth century, with caves and kilns.
Tip: the tour lasts about an hour and must be booked at the office in Piazza Duomo; wear comfortable shoes and bring a jacket.
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