Pots.

One can suppose modern man began making pots soon after perfection of the hand-adze and the spear-point, and that these accumulated millions of pots must have gone somewhere - surely many thousands were knocked off the table by children pursuing family pets through the kitchen, and many thousands more shattered against a wall, just having missed the heads of an insolent slaves. Still millions more doubtlessly survived beyond their usefulness or fashion, and would have required renting storage space outside the city walls, except that another solution was hit upon: that everyone would be required, upon embarking for the afterlife, to take along at least a pot or two, or perhaps a pot and a few oil lamps, or a pot and a character mug and then, best of all, to be actually interred inside yet another, somewhat bigger pot.
Of course, as we all know, much later, closer to our own time, it became a fashionable pursuit, and later an established science, to discover these discarded pots and to collect and admire them. Tuscany, having been inhabited territory for quite a few years, is possessed of ground chock-full of pots, and a large fraction of them have already been dug up and cleaned up, and when necessary, reassembled; and gentlemen aristocrats built giant collections of them, large enough to irritate their wives; subsequently they were obligated to turn them over to whatever provincial museum would have them. Windy Volterra, perched high on a rocky promontory, appears to have been an especially safe and secure place to make pots, which would explain why their museum is so richly endowed with them; so many, in fact, that beyond room upon room with large examples, the curators are obliged to stack row upon row of smaller ones on shelves that reach to the 25-foot ceilings, well beyond where it would be credible that visitor could appreciate their qualities; add to this, glass cases of what might what appear to be various finger bowls, egg cups, ointment jars, flower vases, wine jugs, candy bowls, chargers, salad plates and assorted Etruscan and Greco-Roman bric-a-bric of the sort that must have had Legionnaire husbands rolling their eyes when they got back to the house after a long campaign.




Which is not to say that we didn't a have swell time in Volterra. We found a small family-run villa-hotel outside one of the main city gates, and choose a very small but clean room built into the attic space (provided with a partial area of standing-height by the device of a dormer-roof-balcony construction). Our visit coincided with that a large cycle-touring group from Seattle, whom seemed to be occupying half of the rooms. The staff were very kind to us and understood - or let pass - some fairly ambitious Italian-speaking on our part.
One of the surprises for us was the cathedral at Volterra, a fairly elaborate affair that was scarcely mentioned in our tour-books. Although there were a lot of tourists in town, largely American, there was enough space to so that we didn't feel crowded; it rained or threatened to rain during most of our visit, but after many weeks of warm humid weather it was a welcome relief.