Why Volterra?

Can I have one caffè first? It is 33° at noon on 27 July… but Volterra is on top of a mountain (531m). The heat doesn’t feel oppressive.

Volterra is like an open-air shopping mall… the city is smaller than an airport, with shops for everything from delicious bread and garden-fresh vegetables to computer cables and washing machines, clothes, cosmetics, perfumes, pet supplies and… more alabaster shops than you ever wished for. The best ice cream shop in Italy with a queue in front of it from April to October. Good restaurants and pizzerias, wonderful pastry shops, great coffee shops and bars. There is a sushi restaurant, a bio vegan trattoria, a shop with freshly roasted coffee, interesting wine shops worth exploring, even a first class enoteca.

The town layout is more than 2000 years old. The foundations of most houses are Roman or Etruscan. People use cars to deliver goods but otherwise everybody, duke (there is a duke with a palace see Visconti’s Vaghe stelle del Orsa) or peasant (there are many successful farmers), walk. People stay healthy and on average live more than eighty years. Most of the historic buildings are subdivided into apartments with different owners. The whole town is a protected monument. Nothing will or can change. The policemen are so handsome and the police-women so charming you want to tip them if they tow your car. The streets get cleaned almost continuously. Garbage collection, water, gas, electricity, Internet… everything works. There is a duomo with a bishop, many churches, an opera, three theaters, a cinema, two amphitheaters, an indoor swimming pool with a gym, a rollerblade rink, an open air disco, a hospital with a helipad and several pharmacies, two banks, two ATMs, two large supermarkets, good hotels, schools with lots of suprprisingly well-behaved students, two bookshops, a music school, a manga academy, and a radio station.

There are many museums, a public library, the interesting ruins of a Italy’s largest lunatics asylum, more wild boar than inhabitants, glamorous Netflix vampires with a solid fan base (see Twilight)… Wine, olives, wheat, cheese and tourists keep the small city on top of a mountain going. Around Volterra there are hundreds of country houses and the owners or renters all end up in Volterra for shopping and for eating.

The inhabitants are friendly, polite and honest. Volterra’s only drawback is that you cannot order it through an app on your phone, you have to get up and come here yourself.