The Tuscia

The Tuscia is the part of Lazio north of Rome, and it has little to do with the rest of the region. The ground is tufa, soft and diggable, and for three thousand years the people living on it have hollowed it out: tombs, cellars, roads, houses. The result is a landscape where what is built and what is cut merge into each other.

The Etruscans left two Unesco necropolises. Cerveteri is a district of burial mounds with streets, and you walk through it as through a village. Tarquinia is the opposite: you go underground into chambers painted with banquets, dancers and fish, two and a half thousand years old and still bright.

The vie cave and the villages

Between Sutri and Blera the tufa is cut by corridors up to twenty metres deep and two wide, dug by the Etruscans and used as roads for centuries. You walk them in the shade, between mossy walls. Around them are villages standing on isolated spurs: Civita di Bagnoregio is the best known, and it is reached only by a footbridge.

Bomarzo

In the sixteenth century a prince had an ogre with a gaping mouth, an elephant crushing a soldier and a deliberately crooked house carved in the wood, straight into the outcropping rock. The Parco dei Mostri resembles no other Italian garden and is one of the few places where children enjoy themselves more than the adults.