By Henry
An hour or two north of Rome lies the town of Alviano. Like many of the region’s towns it is actually two separate towns, upper and lower Alviano. This distinction dates back to ancient Roman times and even farther, to the unrecorded past. The upper town would enable inhabitants to watch for and protect the more fertile valleys from bandits or neighboring city states. When driving in from the train station, you can even see the ruins of an ancient watch tower testifying to the town’s former purpose. Although the need for watch towers has long since passed, one of the town’s main industries is still the same—olive trees, both wild and cultivated, dot hillsides as far as the eye can see.
I am a Roman history enthusiast, which is why I came to Italy during my Duke Gap Year. In my free time I planned to see the ancient sites, but my main business was with the olive trees. I had come to Upper Alviano to prune them. The trees in question were long overdue for pruning, and looked it. They resembled bushes more than trees, and it was hard to find a place even to lean the ladder against the trunk. After some brief instruction: “prune all the new growth above the tallest main branch, the growth pointed up, and the growth pointed in,” I got to work. It only struck me later that many young Romans might have received the very same instructions, though they probably didn’t prune while listening to power metal. The relaxed atmosphere was only disturbed by the occasional gunshot and the barking of dogs from local boar hunters, intent on making the most of the final days of boar season. To get lunch, I would drive up the hill to another village and grab some pizza to go from the local pizzeria. On the drive back, if it was still early enough, clouds would fill the valley below until you could just see the tips of power lines or neighboring hills peaking out above the white sea.
One of those hills, though too far off to see, contained the town of Orvieto. It sits atop its hill like an elephant on the back of a mouse, invoking the image of a Greek acropolis. Surrounded by old walls and a cliff, the original reason for Orvieto’s inhabitation is clear: protection. The early Etruscan inhabitants had a problem however: the geography was great for defense, but there was no water source. The Etruscans therefore dug a 120ft-deep well through the stone. In order to get that deep, they had to be able to climb up and down the well, so they built foot holds into both sides of the narrow rectangular shaft. Later, the wells were expanded and renamed after saints. Nowadays, the well shaft is intercepted by one of the many caves in the Orvieto underground, so you can look both up and down it. The caves were also made into a breeding ground for doves, with many rectangular holes carved into the walls for nests. In a siege, these doves were meant to forage for food outside and serve as a food source for the city when they returned. Even in World War II the underground provided security to the inhabitants as an air raid shelter. The back streets of Orvieto form the narrow web that nearly all cities dating back to the medieval era have. Unlike the city of Rome, many of the streets are so tight that they are nearly impassable by car, and simultaneously much steeper.
Since Rome is only an hour or two from Alviano and Orvieto by train, I took day trips there to wander Rome’s backstreets. Rome’s streets are less scenic, but they’re a wonder of hidden gems. Near the Colosseum, you can find a hidden garden filled with fragments of Roman columns, milestones, tomb stones, and sarcophagi. If you wander to the top of a nearby hill, you will find an old chapel. My favorite sites, however, were the Aurelian wall and the pyramid of Cestius that the wall was built through. The pyramid of Cestius dates back to the reign of Augustus, 300 years before the Aurelian wall was built to ensure the safety of Rome during the crisis of the third century. To the Romans of that time, the pyramid was distant history even older than the revolutionary war is to us. They chose to preserve the pyramid all that time, and then to change its purpose when the times called for it. Other layers were buried, disregarded, now lying underneath apartment buildings and malls.
Americans don’t have the same perspective on the layers of history that Europeans take for granted. Indigenous history is poorly preserved, so we are stuck with history at most a few hundred years old along a narrow stretch of our eastern coast. We hardly have any messy, millennia-old growth of history to prune back. But without understanding the way history layers on itself, we might assume that the history we make will be preserved forever. But it will always be up to future generations to decide how to prune the great tree of our past, for better or for worse.
