Volterra

Volterra carves light from stone on a hill of wind. The Etruscan Velathri, among the twelve great cities, mined its alabaster from these slopes and never stopped: the workshops of the historic centre still turn the translucent stone — Volterra is the world capital of alabaster craft, its ecomuseum and ateliers keeping a trade of the seventh century BC in daily practice, lamps and vessels glowing in the shop windows like captive moons.

The Etruscan inheritance crowds the Guarnacci Museum, one of Italy's oldest public museums: six hundred carved funerary urns and the mesmerising "Ombra della Sera" — the elongated bronze youth whose modern-before-modernism silhouette has become the city's talisman. Rome added the theatre spread below the walls; the medieval commune added the Palazzo dei Priori — Tuscany's oldest civic palace — and the tower-framed piazza; the Medici clamped the fortress on top, still serving as a prison whose celebrated inmate-run gourmet evenings are Italy's most exclusive reservations.

D'Annunzio called Volterra the city of wind and rock, and the balze — the crumbling ravines devouring the hill's edge, Etruscan necropolises and all — keep the drama geological. Twilight fiction borrowed the name for its vampire lords; the town, amused, offers tours. Alabaster's glow, an evening's shadow in bronze, wind over the crags: Volterra was always half-spirit.