Orvieto, an easy day trip north from Rome, sits on a roundish plateau of soft volcanic rock - favourite stuff for the Etruscans to dig into. The plateau was also a perfect place to fortify. For many centuries in the Papal states, it even had a papal palace. Popes again.
The main tourist attraction is the cathedral which has a colourful gilded medieval facade, mosaic floor with the “tumbling blocks” pattern, striped stone walls and a chapel frescoed partly by Fra Angelico but mainly by Signorelli.
Low down on the San Brizio chapel walls, decorative frescoes of medieval mythological creatures turned out on closer inspection to be pecking at eyes, and other rather cruel actions. Looking back to one side of the entrance Signorelli shows the start of the last judgement: the trumpet blasts, some creature with wings zaps red lines of power down from above onto people below who in their medieval tights and caps cover their ears to block out the terrible sound. Too late! The torment increases as one moves around and upward to Signorelli's seriously violent and scary scenes of the last judgement, hell and assorted forms of torture by demons. Some of the poor naked humans are taken up to heavenly realms at the highpoints of the ceiling, others languish in hell. Signorelli also included a self portrait, nonchalantly standing next to, it is assumed, Fra Angelico, in one corner - as a man is garotted nearby.
Thankfully there are other less disturbing frescoes in the duomo including another major chapel and some side niches where older medieval frescoes were rediscovered after removing baroque alterations. In the gothic semi gloom, the side windows above these niches glow like glass but they are are stone, like the ones in Ravenna.
Orvieto reputedly has many underground escape tunnels dug by medieval aristocrats, and we were invited to look at a cellar in a local bar which turned out to go down at least three levels into the damp rock. On one edge of the town plateau which is ringed by walls, a small building hides the entrance to the Pozzo di San Patrizio, a 16 th century well commissioned by ( no surprise) a pope who was worried about being under seige from yet another pope. Ingenious double helix staircases have surprisingly shallow steps until one learns that they were designed so donkeys could walk up and down the 258 steps to get water supplies. 53 metres deep and 13 metres diameter: impressive!
