th September

Ekkehard took another dreaded bus back to Grosseto at the crack of dawn and will hopefully speak to me when I?m back in Geneva?..
After a coffee with Roberto Merli, who owns the hotel, restaurant and bar in SOVANA, I walked down to the Etruscan necropoli, where work is slowly done to get the sculpted tombs of the Death Valley out of the overgrown woods.
Go and see it, it?s not too busy with people and you wander around imaging what this place must have looked like 2000 years ago. It?s rather mind-boggling. There are the VIE CAVE, canyons of impressive proportions sculpted out of the turf rock, that were used for transport and interlinked with hundreds of tombs that must have been carved along the rock walls of the Fiora valley.
If the financial means and archaeological knowledge were freely available, one would have to get rid of all the overgrowth, consolidate the crumbling rocks and you would be looking at something on a rather impressive scale, I think.
The range is from simple caves to what must have been tombs to the size of entire temples.
Most of it is badly eroded because of the softness of the rock, but one wanders about imagining, projecting shapes, colours, structures.

Walk back to SOVANA and on to PITIGLIANO along a road that was not to busy, fortunately.
I managed to find an ancient VIA CAVA that takes you up to the centre of PITIGLIANO, THE city perched on a hill in Tuscany.

A bit of wandering round the back streets and all the usual tourist stuff: walking around (re-taking the measure of the place) locating the tourist office, waiting for it to open, trying to locate a bookshop that would sell half a decent map, inventorying the local TRATTORIAS etc?.
The Albergo I checked in offered half pension for decent price and after cross-examining the menu, I also head a dinner of local dried meats and grilled cheese with vegetables, which was actually nice, given the price.

With the money saved, I was available to afford a very pleasant bottle of red wine from SOVANA, which place I would recommend to the wine lover on the lookout for novelty. (Morellino, Sassotondo, Cigliegaio etc)
I was now just about awake enough to turn back to my room watch some news and stupid games on Italian TV, before hitting the sack.

P.S. My room was looking out over the valley, below PITIGLIANO. Pigeons live in the holes of the city wall and seem to fly and tweet at night. I think I fell asleep to that sound??.unless that red wine had some funny effect upon my auditory system