Journeys
around Vitalonga
THE “SCARZUOLA”:
St Frances of Assisi and the Città Buzziana
It is a charming and mysterious place; St Frances of Assisi is said to have dwelt here. Nowadays it has a new look, thanks to the architect Buzzi from Milan, who planned and realized an architectural complex full of symbols and quotations. The Scarzuola owns two faces: the holy city, constituted by the recovered convent and by the gardens, and the profane city, or “Città Buzziana”, that looks like a bizarre and upsetting tuff citadel, whose factories seems to be moulded from sand, as the castles that you build on the seaside.
A surreal construction, inserted in a nature that was once virgin and quiet, it represents a fully personal Utopian project in which Buzzi pours his words turning them into stone. To visitors it appears as buildings and monuments following one another, bringing inside something miraculous and magic, a passage in the syncretic meeting between the quiet of the surrounding nature and the whirling motion of the architecture.
UNDERGROUND LABYRINTHS – Orvieto
Orvieto Underground: a labyrinth of grottoes, 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 quantity of cavities extending, overlapping and intersecting beneath the modern urban structure.
“It is an extraordinary journey through time, an exciting and easy route into the hearth of Orvieto, that sinks its roots here and preserves, almost intact, an unsuspected and evocative reminder”.
A suggestive maze of tunnels, waterfalls, bridges and overpasses opens on the craggy cliffsides of the limestone massif in the valley of Parrano, immediately under the village. The Devil’s Dens, as are commonly known the grottoes filling the cliffsides of the ditch of Bagno and enclosing already in their name the load of suggestion and mystery that goes with them. They develop into a route of labyrinths, stretching in the Beech Den, in the Inferior Principal Den and in the Superior Principal Den. The ditch of Bagno, sheltering the Devil’s Dens, springs from Montegiove, flows into Chiani river and, thanks to its sulphurous waters, colours the mirror of the last lake vivid azure. A touch of colour for a natural sight of limestone corridors, running after each other in a continuous play of suggestions and discoveries.
