A pleasant guided tour along a very easy route makes it possible to get to know Orvieto’s underground world, created by its ancient inhabitants over about 2500 years of uninterrupted digging. An hour-long tour on a discovery of a millenary, surprising and unexpected “Underground City”.
Orvieto, a millenary city suspended almost by magic between heaven and earth, has revealed another of those aspects that make it unique and extraordinary: a labyrinth of grottoes is hidden in the silent darkness of the rupe (rock).
The distinctive geological nature of the mass of stone on which it stands allowed its inhabitants to dig, in the course of about 2500 years, an incredible number of cavities extending, overlapping and intersecting beneath the modern structure of the city.
They make up a precious repository of historical and archaeological information, only recently studied systematically and scientifically. If the “superficial” aspect of the city has changed with the passing of time, the hypogean structures that were functional to it have remained, mostly, intact.
The guided tour of “Orvieto Underground” is therefore, the most suitable tool for coming into contact with this new, very unusual cultural aspect of a city extremely wealthy in history and artistic “jewels”. Step after step mysterious and fascinating echoes tell of Etruscan Velzna, while phantoms of the medieval and Renaissance city appear out of the damp shadows.
Wherever the winding underground route runs parallel to the rupe, from panoramic openings, daylight contends with the darkness for an apparently endless series of tunnels, stairs, unexpected passageways, overlapping rooms on whose walls you can read, in thousands of small quadrangular niches, the ancient adventure of the birth of this “underground city”.