Orvieto – A ‘Wow’ moment on our Umbria Bike Tour

Last month I asked Chat GPT to tell you a bit about our first day of cycling on our Umbria bike tour.

My turn now, and I want to tell you a bit about Orvieto. We arrive in Orvieto at the end of our second day of cycling, ie Monday afternoon. It is an incredible sight.

Anyone who already knows Orvieto will be nodding along in agreement, but also thinking ‘Hold on, isn’t that the place built on the top of an ancient volcano, at the top of a bloody great hill?’ Yes, that’s the place, let’s park the hill for a minute – we’ll come back to it.

There’s a ‘wow’ moment as we cycle towards Orvieto. We cycle out of the Maremma, through Acquapendente, past the Lago di Balsano, and then we get our first sight of Orvieto.

Here are two photos of me and Bill Moser, both taken from the exact same place

(please click to enlarge, or you won’t know what I’m talking about).

 

 

Orvieto is built on top of a 300 metre high volcanic plateau (that’s 1,000 feet for our British and American friends). Often, where you find towns or villages at the top of a cliff, there’s a back way. Beynac is a good example, in Dordogne. The chateau sits 150 metres above the river Dordogne on its spectacular cliff top, but if you arrive from the North, it’s flat! There ain’t no cliff. The same is true of Rocamadour.

Not so in Orvieto, it’s cliff the whole way round. The first time I visited, armed with a map from the Tourist Office, I walked to the hotel I’d booked by telephone, and found myself staring over a set of railings 1,000 feet down a massive cliff to my hotel, about 100 metres away according to my map, but a 4Km drive away in the real world.

So however you approach Orvieto, it’s amazing.

Around the beginning of the Roman Empire it was the pre-eminent Etruscan settlement, and still boasts hundreds of excavated Etruscan caverns and tunnels. It’s easy to forget that ‘Rome’ didn’t start off occupying the whole of Italy, it was just Rome! It’s early battles were against other Italians, and one of the most significant and brutal campaigns was the war against a coalition of Samnites, Etruscans, and Umbrians which culminated in the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BC.

The significance of this was that the Etruscans of Orvieto were exiled to the area around Lago di Bolsena, which we cycle past on our way to Orvieto. There’s almost nothing Roman about Orvieto, amazingly, which only became repopulated after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Orvieto became important again in the middle ages as a fortified city on the trading route between Rome and Florence. Pope Urban IV moved there in 1262 because of civil war in Rome, and it was he that commissioned the amazing Duomo. This took 300 years to complete, and it is absolutely beautiful. Sat in the main piazza at the top of the city, this huge cathedral is built from black and white stone in a stripe pattern. The frontage is gorgeous, the huge bronze doors are amazing, the inside, with its huge pillars, is almost equally beautiful – and you can see the Duomo from miles away.

Over time Orvieto became a popular retreat for Cardinals and Popes because of its tranquility and safety, compared to the frequent unrest in Rome. One key example was in 1527, during the sacking of Rome by the Holy Roman Empire, when Pope Clement VII retreated to Orvieto. He inspired the construction of a a spectacular well, St Patrick’s Well, more than 50 metres deep. We’ll take a stroll down the well on Tuesday morning – get the thighs warmed up.

I did promise to come back to the hill. There are 3 ways to get to the top of Orvieto, where we’ll be staying. There’s a direct road up – hello Doug DeJonge, I still remember your grace when we raced up this hill, in our Team Italy cycling jerseys, and when we got towards the city gate where our mates were waiting, you slowed right down so that everyone thought I was just behind you. We know it wasn’t true!

There’s a longer way up, a less-steep road that winds more gently 4Km to the top.

But much more importantly, there’s a funicular railway that takes bikes! So there’s a way up for everybody, no excuses.

The history of Orvieto is pretty amazing, but to be honest the reasons I love it are the truly spectacular views as you approach, and the beautiful piazza with its very special Duomo. What a place. The trouble is, it’s hard to deliver an ‘Orvieto’ every day, there’s only one of it.