Once a very/very/very/very/very long time ago – it’s been about 20 years, – I almost accidentally got here –  to a farm which was close to the city-castle-on-a-high-hill™.

And in an instant I was head over heels in love…

… with the poppy fields, which had barely ever been trampled upon: there was neither the “eat-pray-fuck” ™ thing yet, nor the hyper-dull teenage saga move “Twilight”™ (to me, the presence of the City in the frame is the only thing that keeps the series from a complete failure). All this was absolutely absent back then.

… and with ramsons near the country road, which you could just tear and eat; and with the waterfall of hills – there/right there downward/downward fast – into the purple clover: you stumble, fall and roll downhill upside down with your sunbathe tower. The sky’s blinking, the grass stains all your cloths with its green color; but back then you didn’t even know what the word “Prada” meant – so you did never mind. You finally crash into the grass, and then catch your breath, and listen to the eternal cuckoo, and count how many times it sings its song – that is the number of years you’re going to live. In here, the cuckoo will easily grant you immortality, because together with its comrades they don’t shut up for days handing over the baton to each other from one hill to another.

… and with these hills themselves, endlessly trying on shadow, then light, and then shadow again, throwing these two on one another. Their colors are unstable too: May – everything’s green, rose, lemon and violet with splashes of red marks of poppies here and there; the very beginning of June –  it all at once is changed into bronze/gold – as if it was autumn; but they are just playing.

… and with the greedy drinking from the jug out in the heat: you nearly suffocate because no way could expect to have let flow into your mouth a stream of cool red wine …

“?! ??!”

“But that’s what you asked for, to drink, not to wash yourself” (c).

… in love with-all-this.

Back then I didn’t realize that I’d have even a bigger crush on the city-castle-on-a-high-hill™ than on those hills and ramsons.

So, to put it briefly, the second city like this does not exist. Perhaps, that’s for the better.

It floats high above Tuscany. There a quay for promenades along the river, like in normal cities, but here it goes along the cliff with some truly airplane views, which you see behind the streetlights and passers-by, – they look like a genuine photo wallpaper.

Talking about this city is difficult and simple at the same time – it’s a visual tool for time observation™. It’s been here for more than 3500 years (and this isn’t any figurative expression); and while you’ve become 20 years older, the city doesn’t give a shit. Rome’s changing, but Volterra never is.

It was founded by some mythical Etruscans. They left behind some statuettes, incredible in elegance and imagery, with legs up to the sky, and their bronze horses –  and then disappeared. (Their statuettes are sort of weird, especially if you think about the things that were normally been sculpted in the area at the time). The local museum has them on display.

And that was the last that was ever seen of those Etruscans.

And where am I going with this?

Hmmm – you’ll be surprised, but the city remains the CITY: it goes on living behind this huge half-kilometer high rampart, inside of which there’re medieval houses packed with people as tightly as a Moscow bus. It pretends to be a fucking normal city! NORMAL, sure.

And this is incredible.

It’s quite challenging to get here. There’s no railway, you can go only by bus or by car, and there aren’t many hotels inside this multi-kilometer wall, which, if compared to Kremlin, would make the latter look like a toy.

There are some tourists, but only during the day. They almost vanish in the evening, and that’s when the miracle happens.

You start seeing locals everywhere: for example, in the park, which is hanging on the plateau above everything – and even higher; a lot of young folks are all around there, playing football and lying on the grass, kissing under the age-old Harry Potter trees. Or in the most popular bar, where there are so many people that there’s a crowd outside many dozens of meters long, blocking the street, which looks like a narrow twisted gap. Restaurants, bars and cafes are full of people, who just hang out outside and talk. Children, there’re lots of children around. There’s light in the houses of 12-15^th century. EVERYTHING’S ALIVE.

And you are inside of it.

There’s no other place where so much life would coexist with so much death. Centuries, millenniums of history. The amphitheater is here since the Roman times, and now they use it for a summer opera festival. Nothing remains idle or abandoned/uninhabited. The streets look like they’ve been cut through the solid stone –  but there also are islands of parks at every step. Alabaster quarries are the three hundred meter caves, located right under your feet in the center of the city. The towers are extremely high and have narrow windows, and upon all this right here…

… there’re children with their silly games and grown-ups on Aperol. During the night the retractable road blockers crawl right out from the millennial sampietrini, like teeth, and blink with their red eyes of LEDs; that’s because with your car you can squeeze EVERYWHERE, though at your own risk and peril – signs don’t mind that. There’s Wi-Fi, and a bunch of young blood, and laughter, flying through the rays of the streets and echoing for a long time as clashing against the stone.

Hair, breath, hair, breath, you two are together, and there’re millions of days inside the stones that surround you. Everything is real, even too real.

And, of course, there’s ALTITUDE.

It’s when each route, each glance faces the sky and the horizon, which is far far away, where the burgundy lights flash upon the blades of windmills up in the hills: u-u-uffff-Uf, u-u-u-fff-Uf as they pulse.

As if you were looking at the ghost of Tokyo in the distance.

Everything is connected.

PS: Well, of course, the most Tuscan food is here, boars/pigeons/pheasants, florentine, lentils, truffle, pecorino, pasta and ragout – everything’s in there for you to lick your plate.