Velathri was one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan dodecapolis, and Volterra never stopped being one: the Porta all'Arco gate keeps its worn Etruscan stone heads, while the Guarnacci museum — among Europe's oldest public museums, founded in 1761 — holds the "Evening Shadow", the elongated bronze that looks like a Giacometti two thousand years early, plus hundreds of alabaster urns.
Alabaster is still the family trade: workshops turn it into translucency. The Roman theatre, the Medici fortress and the crumbling Balze cliffs complete a town balanced between sky and clay hills, miraculously still real.
Near Volterra
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
