Text and photos by Richard Dvořák (phpto) 

To enlarge the images click on the icon at the right bottom.

This summer, Aischa Gianna Mueller — an Italy-based artist and scholar whose recent work “Choreographies of Unsettlement” explores the discrepancies between Earth’s irregular rotation and the precisely measured atomic time that underpins IT systems, two timescales that slowly drift apart — took us on a journey a few thousand years back into Etruscan times. The Etruscan civilization flourished from about the 9th century BCE until the late 1st century BCE, when Rome absorbed its lands and culture.

The “cities of tufa” — Sovana, Sorano, and Pitigliano — are built directly upon, and in many cases carved out of, volcanic tufa stone. These towns reveal layers of history where sacredness and daily life overlap, from the Etruscan period through medieval Christianity to the present day.

We began with the vie cave, the enigmatic hollow-ways. These are immense sunken corridors, sometimes 30–60 feet (10–20 meters) deep, cut vertically into the rock. Most scholars today interpret them as sacred routes: processional paths linking the settlements of the living with the necropoleis — the cities of the dead. Walking through them today, the towering rock walls and shifting light evoke a sense of entering a threshold space, a liminal passage between worlds.

Vie Cave south of Sovana 

We continued on to the Necropoli di Sopraripa, where the monumental tombs stand as some of the finest examples of Etruscan funerary architecture. These include the grand Tomba Ildebranda, shaped like a temple façade, and others such as the Tomba della Sirena and the Tomba dei Demoni Alati. Recently, archaeologists made a rare discovery here: a sealed, undisturbed loculus, intact for over 2,500 years. Grave goods including cups, bowls, and ollae were found inside, dating to the late 7th–early 6th century BCE. Finds like this are extraordinary, since most tombs were looted in antiquity. They offer a glimpse into the sacred trust the Etruscans placed in preparing their dead for the journey beyond. 

From there, we followed the continuity of sacred places into Christian times. In Sovana, an early church was built in the 8th century on the site of an Etruscan temple. In the 11th–12th centuries, this evolved into the magnificent Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.

We entered the crypt, dating from the earlier church, carved from the tufa bedrock and imbued with an austere stillness.

Above it rises the Romanesque–Gothic altar, with its elegant lines and luminous stonework. Here one senses that the sanctity of the place itself compelled each generation to build anew, while preserving what came before. The cathedral thus embodies a living palimpsest of faith, with Etruscan, early Christian, and medieval layers coexisting in one sacred space.

Finally, our journey brought us to Pitigliano, a town whose history stretches from Etruscan chamber tombs through medieval streets to Renaissance palaces. We strolled through the Palazzo Orsini’s 12th-century walkways. Pitigliano is a living example of time layered upon time — Etruscan caverns below, medieval masonry above, and a vibrant town still very much alive today.

To walk through Sovana, Sorano, and Pitigliano is to experience a dialogue across the millennia. People still live in these ancient places, side by side with tombs, temples, and cathedrals. The rock itself carries the memory of sacredness, holding within it both the mundane and the transcendent.

And so, this was truly Time Travel in Tuscany. From Etruscan hollow-ways that echo with the symbolism of the underworld, to medieval cathedrals raised upon pagan temples, we find the thread of human striving to connect the material with the spiritual.

For the Theosophical seeker, these landscapes remind us that time is not linear but layered — that the past, present, and future intertwine like the veils of consciousness. Walking here, we journey not only through Tuscany, but also through the unfolding story of the human soul.