I found myself time to travel to Orvieto, while traveling around the center of Italy often while on the highway I felt myself overlooked from the nearby hills, a city popped on top of the hills and this time I went up to give the look back.
Orvieto is built on tuff hill(Tufo/ Tuff is one of the most found piroclastic rock and was often used to build the cities in the south of Toscana/Lazio/Umbria, espacially Pitigliano has the look of actually being terraformed directly from the rocks)
The town develops from the beautiful Well of S. Patrizio and the gardens surrounding the east walls of the city, from there you take on a main road full of tiny markets and local shop that guide into the Torre del Moro.
Urban notes
At first you feel very restriced on your path, Corso Cavour is the main street to reach the center and although many tiny roads open up on the left and right but they dosen't look very exciting and most of them lead only into houses. But upon reaching the Tower the town open up with many sprawling roads that leads to many interesting Piazze. I took some gamedesign notes from Orvieto as I really did like how it unfolded, that main road where everybody walked created a sort of low expectation just to be blowed away when the chains were took of into the city open structure.
In no particular orders the places that you can reach from the Tower of Moro
Then on coming towards the center, as much like the city structure and guiding entrance there was another surprise looming around the corner.
Since the first steps on Corso Cavour there was a presence on the left, what seemed like a beautiful Duomo but a very common look that you can find in many other places, with that classic coloration made with the alternance of basalto and travertino stones. But then upon reaching the Duomo from the west side of the city an unexpected vision was due.
The facade of the Dome show itself in all the splendor, so different from the other sides of the church and full of details, paintings and statues coming alive from it. The columns reminded me of eastern temples from Thailand and Combodia in way, maybe it's just me being mental though and finding strange connections.
To further the peculiar look of this church here's a side shot that show the difference in detail work from the parts.
It feels like the plan has changed somewhere, maybe the lack funds or maybe materials, but I do really like the patched look of it. I even apprecieted back part with it's tripping curves and shapes
Il Pozzo
On the next day I visited the Well of S.Patrice, the main attraction of the city and a sight to behold. With it's helicoidal ladders going down to 54 meters through 248 wide steps that were made for animals to walk up and down to help take the water. Finding that the stairs for who was going up were different from the ones leading down was like a small epiphany as I tried to wrap my head around on how the stairs were working. The whole structures is 13 meters of diameter with many windows open in up on different levels.
My phone wasn't probably the most apt device to take photos in there as the light change quite a bit at different levels and the cheap camera didn't captured the bright rays against the dark very well resulting on some washed up photo. If you happen to go there I reccomend having a camera that have some option to adapt to the lights.
Have a good weekend everybody !