Edward Hutton: Volterra

Edward Hutton's Siena and Southern Tuscany was published in 1910, over a hundred years ago. Walking from S. Gimignano to Volterra he encountered what he called "traveller's fear" before arriving at the gate of that ancient and storied city. Most of the chapter on Volterra deals with its long history.

 

The road for Volterra—for it was thither I was bound one fine October morning at dawn—descends from S. Gimignano into the valley, and climbing again through that quiet and delicate country that marks all the Val d’Elsa, joins the high road from Colle…Thence the way lies over vast and barren watersheds, across an uplifted wilderness of sterile clay hills, past blue-grey chasms of volcanic tufa, till at evening “lordly Volterra” rears itself up suddenly against the sky, haggard with loneliness and age like the dreadful spirit of this strange country so full of a sinister desolation. No traveler can, I think, approach this outraged stronghold of old time without a certain hesitation, a certain apprehension and anxiety. The way is difficult, precipitous, and threatening, full of dangers that cannot be named or realized; and long ere you climb the last great hill into the city an eerie dread has seized your heart. As far as the eye can reach that battered and tortured world rolls away in billow after billow of grey earth scantily covered with a thin dead herbiage that seems to have even burned with fire. On either side the way vast cliffs rise over immense crevices seamed and tortured into the shapes of raped and ruined cities: yonder a dreadful tower set with broken turrets totters on the edge of sheer nothing; here a tremendous gate leads into darkness, there a breached wall yawns over an abyss. If there is such a thing as traveller’s fear, it is here you will meet it, it is here it will make your heart a prize. As for me, I was horribly afraid, nor would any prayer I know bring my soul back into my keeping.

And if the way is so full of fear, what of that lofty city that stands at the high summit of that narrow road winding between the precipices? It too is a city of dread—a city of bitterness, outraged and very old. Seven hundred years before the fall of Troy it had already suffered siege. Surrounded in those days by walls forty feet high, 12 feet thick, and eight thousand yards in circumference, that have worn out three civilizations, and still in part remain, Volterra was one of the great cities of the Etruscan League. Like vast fortresses her gates were held impregnable. Enemy after enemy, army after army broke against those tremendous bastions; she scattered them, and they were lost in the desolation in which she is still entrenched. From the lower valley of the Arno to the forgotten citadel of “sea-girt Populonia,” which the Maremma has destroyed, she reigned supreme.... (39-40)

 

Encamped within these ruins he will find the debris of more than one later civilization—Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance—cheek by jowl with the fugitive and impermanent work of to-day. Still enthroned and guarded by the wall of the Etruscans, and entered by their gate, the shrunken medieval city of Volterra waits for him among the ruins of four different ages, like some herb hidden in a crevice of the temples of Karnak. (41)

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910.