Orvieto Culture

A town with another town underneath it

The defining fact of Orvieto's culture is its material. The tuff it stands on is soft enough to carve with hand tools and firm enough to hold a vault, and the Orvietani have been exploiting that for three thousand years. Beneath the streets is a system of Etruscan wells, medieval cisterns, quarries, olive presses, wine cellars and dovecotes cut straight into the rock.

This is not a tourist attraction bolted onto a normal town. It is how the place has always worked: the cellars under the restaurants are routinely older than the buildings above them, and the grilles and low doorways in the streets lead somewhere real. The guided cave tours are the only way in, and they explain Orvieto better than the cathedral does.

The papal refuge

The second thread is who came here. A flat summit ringed by vertical cliffs is among the most defensible sites in central Italy, and popes used it as such — which is why the town punches so far above its weight architecturally. The Duomo is papal in scale, not municipal. The Pozzo di San Patrizio was ordered by a pope who had just watched Rome be sacked in 1527. Orvieto's grandeur is borrowed from people who needed a safe place to be.

Corpus Domini

The cathedral was built to house the relic of the miracle of Bolsena of 1263, kept in the Cappella del Corporale. In 1316 Pope John XXII instituted the first Corpus Domini procession here, and the feast spread from Orvieto through the whole Western Church. It remains the town's own day and its largest, and it is a moveable feast tied to Easter rather than a fixed date.

Signorelli

The Cappella di San Brizio holds a fresco cycle begun by Fra Angelico in 1447 and completed by Luca Signorelli between 1499 and 1504. It is one of the major works of the Italian Renaissance and among the least crowded — a Last Judgment of extraordinary physical force, studied by the generation that followed. That it sits in a town of 19,000 and can usually be seen without a queue is one of the genuine anomalies of Italian travel.

Wine and table

Orvieto Classico is the town's white wine and it is aged in cellars cut into the tuff, which is as direct a link between geology and economy as Italy offers. The cooking is inland Umbrian — umbrichelli, wild boar, pigeon, lentils, black truffle in season — frugal, meat-and-grain food from a region with no coast and no foreign border.