Orvieto Underground-Lilyanna Reed

 

One of the most interesting things I saw in Orvieto was the underground city carved right into the cliffside, especially with their important role in the city's community and economy. I thought it was incredible how there was and entire world underneath our feet created by a resourceful society using what they had in order to found a thriving city.


To start the tour, we visited an active archeological site in the cellar of a couple's home, learning about how integrated the ancient past is with people's lives in the present. It was crazy to go from a basement much like my own in Washington into a centuries old man-made tunnel system used by Etruscans with their own lives very similar to mine.

One of the main purposes of the tunnels we saw was the removal of waste from the city above, making it one of the oldest landfills we know of today, and an interesting look into how our landfills may be observed in the future. The archeologists in charge of the site found broken pieces of ceramic and animal remains in the piles of compact dirt, giving us a look into the daily lives of the ancient societies who previously occupied the city. It is believed that Etruscans regularly ate many of the same animals we eat today, and often traded with Greeks to obtain ceramic art and tools.

Another interesting use of the tunnels was to store goods like wine and olive oil in a cool, dark place where it would be able to develop and mature properly away from the surface. The stone mined to make these cellars was then used to construct a majority of the buildings in Orvieto as it was a soft, but useful material.

The final use of the tunnels was to lure in pigeons with premade nests and eat them as a dependable food source. There are holes in the wall perfect for nest-building that the birds still use today, but that are now cleaned out by weasels that eat their eggs and deter them from creating a home in the walls of the underground.

By the end of our trip to Orvieto, I felt like I had learned a lot about the Etruscans and their way of life.

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