Tuscany’s mysterious ‘cave roads’

Wildflowers grazed my legs as I hiked down from the volcanic-rock hilltop fortress of Pitigliano into the Tuscan valley below. At the base of the hill, I crossed a burbling stream and followed a winding trail as it inclined. All of a sudden, I was walled in.

Huge blocks of tuff, a porous rock made from volcanic ash, rose as high as 25m on either side of the trench I found myself in. I felt spooked – and I'm not the only one who's felt that way in vie cave like this. These subterranean trails have been linked with lore of devils and deities for centuries.

"When we were kids, nobody really went there," said Elena Ronca, a hiking guide who has been leading tours around this area of Tuscany, where she grew up, for 12 years.

That's because there wasn't much information about the trails, nor about the Etruscan civilisation that built them. The ancients didn't leave road maps or written records, and many pathways were abandoned and overgrown with shrubs. But in the last few decades, archaeological discoveries in tombs across central Italy, and as far as Corsica, have revealed more about the Etruscans and their mysterious vie cave, which are said to connect the land of the living with the land of the dead.

At their simplest definition, vie cave (via cava is the singular) were walled pathways used to travel from the highlands to the riverbanks and vice versa. While they're found in various places across central Italy (where the Etruscans thrived from 900 BCE until they were absorbed into the Roman Empire), the vie cave here in southern Tuscany between the towns of Pitigliano, Sorano and Sovana are among the oldest and most intact. "It's incredible that the vie cave have lasted so long," Ronca said. "During the Etruscan times, they knew what they were doing."

On my hike through the area, each vie cave I walked was different than the next. Some were narrow, with walls not much taller than me, and finely cut stairs. Others were lush jungles of moss and ferns contained by giant walls, or residential roads wide enough to fit a car or two.

Originally, Ronca explained, the vie cave were carved only a few feet deep, using a rock-cutting technique first seen in ancient Egypt that involved drilling a hole into the tuff, inserting a piece of wood and then filling the hole with water. The wood would expand, forcing the tuff to fracture. They would do this again and again, lengthening and deepening the road to its desired size. "It's not a simple and easy technique," she said.

Over centuries, the vie cave were further altered by various empires, including the Ostrogoths, Lombards and Franks, that used them to suit their needs. At some unknown point along the way, stairs were added and ravines were deepened, but even the original vie cave had a way to channel out the rainwater: in each path I walked, I could see some form of water trough system cut into the tuff rock to prevent erosion and drain rainwater. "Etruscans were extremely skilled hydraulic engineers," Ronca said. "We know that they levelled some lakes and then drained huge wetlands in order to have lands that were possible to farm."

As I continued my hike, I came across deep diagonal pits with rock monuments above them that appeared to be carved by human hands. These were Etruscan necropolises, with tombs for individuals or families cut deep into the tuff and filled with gold, food and clothing for safe passage into the afterlife.

Unfortunately, many Etruscan tombs in the area were robbed long ago. As English writer D H Lawrence wrote in Etruscan Places after a visit to Tuscany in the 1920s: ''to the tombs we must go: or to the museums containing the things that have been rifled from the tombs". But historians like Luca Nejrotti, an archaeologist working with the Italian government in the region, have managed to find pottery and painted frescoes in the necropolises that may answer some questions about Etruscans and their vie cave. "Most of the Etruscan tombs have been robbed since ancient times, but the robbers used to take just the gold," he said. "So, for archaeologists, it's quite interesting because you can still find pottery and stuff that is really, really important for the historical research," he said.

BBC