Etruscan Roads Part 1

Today we woke up to sunny and gorgeous! We had breakfast out on the patio then headed off to Pitigliano to hike the Etruscan roads! We started at one by a church outside of town (Via Cava Madonna delle Grazie) and it was so much fun! They are these deep paths in the tuff rock that they used to use as roads (but it wasn’t as deep then - erosion has made them way deeper!). It was just walking in these giant rock cliffs on either side of you and I loved it! I had originally planned on going out and back and then driving to the next one, but when we got to the bottom of the first one as realized the others are not very far away so as decided to walk to them instead. We did another short one (Via Cava di Fratenuti - out and back) then realized before we started the next one (Via Cava di San Giuseppe) the we could make it loop and go up that longer one, then walk along the road at the top of the cliffs and come down the one we were going to do after that (Via Cava dell'Annunziata ) so we wouldn’t be going up and down twice. I think Via Cava di San Giuseppe is one of the more popular trails, but it wasn’t as nice as the other two even though it did have some big caves carved into the walls. Still fun though and when we got to the top the road hike was gorgeous! You could see out over the hills and see Pitigliano too! It was great.

We took a break before heading down Via Cava dell'Annunziata and there was a info map there and I realized they had a whole trail set up from the middle of town going down all the roads and basically making big loops and then around back to town that was only 10km! If we would have continued on the one we turned back on we would have looped back to where we started…so we decided to continue on the trail into town and wander around there. Originally I was going to go to 2 other towns to walk their Etruscan road trails today then explore this town tomorrow, but since we were right there and there was a trail we thought why not? So that’s what we did, but town photos are up next!Read more