The way was strewn with flowers, like all the paths of Umbria, and it led us through the undergrowth at the foot of the rock of Orvieto to the olive garden of the Mancini Necropolis. Barren figs sprouted from the gaping crevices overhead, and sometimes the bearded ivy hung half-way down the cliff. Once we came upon two rude wooden crosses nailed to the brown tufa, with the marks of a third between them, making the desolate valley more like a Golgotha than ever.
ETRUSCAN NECROPOLIS BELOW THE WALLS OF ORVIETO.
The necropolis below the hanging church of Sant'Agostino is more interesting than romantic now that the tomb has been dismantled, which Signor Mancini used to show to the traveller, intact, with the inmate lying on his rough bed, surrounded by his last possessions. The sepulchres are not hollowed out of the living rock like most Etruscan tombs, but are built in a sort of honey-comb of rough masonry, back to back, with chambers about 12 ft. long by 8 ft. wide, and perhaps 10 ft. high. The round cippi on the mounds which cover them make them appear curiously like Oriental villages.
But it is to the student rather than to the pilgrim in the world of Beauty that this sombre burial-place of the ancients will appeal. We found more joy in the painted tombs on the hill of the Cappuccini, where in the cavernous depths of the tufa rock we caught a fleeting glimpse of Proserpine seated beside the Lord of Hades, and heard the flutings of Etruscan slaves as their princes drank libations to their own departed souls. And it is worth while crossing the valley in the early morning to see the loveliness of Orvieto, crowning her great rock in the heart of her wide pale valley, with the sunlight gilding her towers and the jewelled face of her cathedral.
Orvieto: Etruscan Tomb.
It was very early when we emerged from the frowning gate of the city and dipped down among the dewy vineyards. Beside the road an aqueduct rose out of the earth, a crumbling mass of ancient masonry. As we climbed down into the valley it towered above us, spanning the ravine, but when we toiled over the penitential stones of the Via dei Cappuccini, thankful for its shade as we mounted, it sank again into the hillside, and the leaping green things clambered upon it, eager to drag it back to the ditch. So we went leisurely through the play of light and shade, and always as we looked back we saw Orvieto rising sheer out of the valley like a queen on her brown rock. The morning mist wove a magic beauty round the spires of her Gothic cathedral and the giant pine-tree on the edge of her precipice, until she seemed the very city Turner immortalised.