Orvieto: The rock, the cellars, and the table above them

by Joseph Harris

Orvieto does not sit on a hill. It sits on a single block of volcanic tufa that rises three hundred feet straight out of the valley floor, with cliffs on every side, and from a distance the town looks less like a place people built than like a place that was already there and people moved into. The Etruscans thought so, they called it Velzna and made it one of the twelve cities of their league. When Rome finally took it in the third century before Christ, the survivors walked down the cliff and founded a new town on the lakeshore below, which is why Orvieto's name is really just the Latin for "old city." Everything about the place is old in that particular way, not preserved, not restored, just still there.

The Bartolomei olive grove that I wrote about in the Umbria chapter is twenty kilometers from here, in Montecchio. Their DOP is called Colli Orvietani, the hills of Orvieto. So this is not a new place for this book. It is the place that produced the oil that has been on our tables since spring.

Tonight we go up the cliff and two things happen when you go up. The first is the Duomo. It is one of the great façades in Italy, a wall of gold mosaic and carved marble that took three centuries to finish, and inside it, in the chapel of San Brizio, Luca Signorelli painted the Last Judgment. Michelangelo came to look at it before he painted his own. It is the most theatrical painting in central Italy, the dead climbing out of the earth, the damned being carried off by demons the color of bruises, the Antichrist preaching with the devil whispering in his ear. The story that everyone in Orvieto tells is that Signorelli's contract with the cathedral specified, along with his fee, a regular allowance of the local white wine. Whether or not the document says exactly that, the town believes it, and the belief tells you what you need to know. The wine of Orvieto was good enough to pay a painter.

The second thing that happens is that you go underground. The whole rock is hollow. Over two and a half thousand years the people of Orvieto dug more than twelve hundred caves into the tufa beneath their own houses — wells, cisterns, olive presses, pigeon lofts, wine cellars, and during the last war, shelters. When Pope Clement VII fled here after the Sack of Rome in 1527, he was so afraid of a siege that he had Antonio da Sangallo dig a well two hundred feet down through the rock, with two spiral staircases wound around each other so the mules going down for water never met the mules coming up. It is called the Pozzo di San Patrizio and it is, in its way, as astonishing as the Duomo. One is a city trying to reach heaven. The other is a city trying to reach water.

That is the tension I keep coming back to in Orvieto, and it is the reason I chose the menu I chose. On top of the rock is one of the most spectacular buildings on earth, built to overwhelm you. Underneath the rock, and in every kitchen in the town, the food is about as humble as Italian food gets. The dish Orvieto is known for is called acquacotta. Cooked water. It is what a shepherd or a woodcutter made at the end of the day from what he had carried: an onion, a bit of celery, whatever tomato was ripe, a handful of mint from the roadside, stale bread, an egg, a piece of pecorino. You put the bread in the bowl and pour the soup over it. That is the whole recipe. It has been made that way on this rock since before there was a cathedral.

I have thought about why a town would build Signorelli's heaven upstairs and eat cooked water downstairs and see no contradiction in it, and I think the answer is the same one I found everywhere in Umbria. These are people who are entirely themselves. The Duomo is not for them. It is for God, and for the pilgrims, and for the world. The acquacotta is for them. Nobody has ever tried to improve it, because nobody in Orvieto ever thought it needed to be better than it was.

The rest of tonight's menu comes from the same kitchen. Aglione is the giant, sweet garlic of the Val di Chiana, the valley that runs up the Tuscan border just north of here, and pasta all'aglione is what the farmhands ate on a Sunday when there was no meat — a sauce of garlic cooked so slowly it melts, and tomato, and nothing else. Sausage with beans and chard is the dish of every osteria on the rock in autumn, when the first cannellini come in and the chard is in every garden. None of this is refined. All of it is exactly right.

A word about the wine, because we have to be honest about it. Orvieto Classico, the white that paid the painter, almost never leaves Umbria, and it is not on our list. The grapes in it are Trebbiano and Grechetto. So tonight we pour a Trebbiano from the Abruzzo side of the Apennines that is as close to the real thing as we can get, a Soave that has Grechetto's almond-and-stone character, and for the sausage, a Chianti from a few miles over the Tuscan line, where the same Sangiovese that goes into Rosso Orvietano grows. The osteria on the rock would do the same. You pour what you have and you pour it with a clear conscience.

Orvieto is a city on a rock that is also a city inside a rock. It looks up and it digs down, and it has never for a moment confused the two.

Reservations: (707) 964-6844 or click here

124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California