Volterra
— the way light walks through stone.
Not only on a wall.
“A walled hill town in western Tuscany, above the Cecina valley. The stone is the same grey-gold as Siena but cooler, harder, older. Etruscan walls underneath everything. The trade is alabaster: small lit shops down the side streets where it's still cut on lathes, where the cream and the milk and the storm-cloud veins come out of the same hill. The wind is the constant fact, the tramontana coming down off the ridge for most of the autumn. The light comes up off the alabaster from inside.
Volterra, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Volterra sits on a hilltop at 531 metres in the Province of Pisa, western Tuscany, between Florence and the Tyrrhenian coast. The site has been continuously inhabited for nearly three thousand years, first as the Etruscan city of Velathri, one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan League, then as the Roman Volaterrae. The town is reached by the SR68, a winding road that climbs from the Cecina valley. Within the medieval walls, the Palazzo dei Priori, begun in 1208, is the oldest communal palace in Tuscany. Outside the walls to the west lie Le Balze, the eroded clay cliffs that have been slowly swallowing the edge of town for centuries.
Alabaster has been quarried and worked in Volterra since the Etruscan period. The local stone, a fine-grained gypsum laid down by an ancient lagoon, is unusually pure and translucent, which is why it was carved into cinerary urns for Etruscan tombs by the second century BC. Hundreds of those urns survive in the Museo Etrusco Guarnacci, one of the oldest public museums in Europe, founded in 1761 from the collection of Mario Guarnacci. The trade never fully stopped; today around two dozen workshops still cut and polish alabaster in the alleys below the cathedral, working the same milky cream, dove grey, and storm-veined blocks the Etruscans took from these hills.
The wind is the constant of Volterra. The town sits exposed at the top of its ridge, with the Cecina valley falling away on three sides, and a strong cold north wind, the tramontana, moves through the streets for much of the autumn and winter. The exposure has shaped the town physically: the medieval houses are built tight together with narrow alleys that break the gusts. On the windward edge of the hill, Le Balze, the soft clay is being eroded at a measurable rate, taking ancient walls and Etruscan tombs over the cliff each century. The Badia abbey was abandoned in the nineteenth century after the cliff edge moved up to its walls.