The little town seemed stone dead when we drove in. There was not a soul to be seen.
I got out of the car on the square and shouted hello!. The walls stared back blankly.
My wife took out the map and our travel papers. They showed we were booked to stay in Titignamo, and that was what the signboard at the entrance to the town said.
Hellooooo! I bellowed. A few buildings further on a door opened. The woman who appeared assured us we were in the right place. It turned out the entire town was a hostelry, to the point of having its own church which is highly favoured for weddings. The reason it was so quiet was because the rest of the guests would only arrive later that afternoon.
Titignamo’s church and adjoining old buildings facing on its town square.
As with just about everything in Italy we found Titignamo to be soaked in history. It started as a fortress built somewhere around the 10th Century by a powerful family from Florence named Montemarte. In the drawn-out battle between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy it got confiscated by the latter and turned into a palace with an attendant village.
At an auction held by candle light in 1800 it was bought by Prince Don Tommaso di Filippo Corsini. The beautifully restored palace, the village and its church, and the 2 000 hectare estate with is indigenous woodlands and vineyards and olive groves still belong to the powerful Corsini family. It is now one of the country’s foremost agriturismos, as Italy’s rural and small-town hostelries are called.
That evening the town came alive when a school group from the south of Italy turned up. The square rang with the voices of young people. The word resurrection sprang to mind.
Not far from there, atop a hill with near-vertical volcanic cliffs, loomed the high-walled city of Orvieto. Rightly described as one of the most dramatic cityscapes in all of Europe, it had me spellbound from a distance. Inside was no different, most especially so at the sight of its sizeable cathedral with walls striped with narrow bands of white limestone and dark-green basalt.
Orvieto as seen in the hazy distance from a high hill near Titignamo.
It is said the Etruscans had Orvieto as one of their major centres before the Romans took it over about 300 BC. Then passed through the Goths and after them the Lombards. In the struggle for power, the city-state sided with the Papacy, which put it at odds with nearby Todi, another striking commune straddling a hill which happened in turn to favour the Holy Roman Empire.
The rivalry in fact reached back much deeper into history. Todi is said to have been founded about the 8th Century BC by the Umbri people who had it serve them as a frontier town against the Etruscans. It too suffered the same fate of successive take-overs and is left with a wealth of art, artifacts and architectual evidence spanning the ages.
Back in Titignamo that afternoon I enjoyed the serenity of rural Italy on a walk through the woodland and along the banks of the Tiber River that flows through the estate.
That evening in the dining room, in front of a fireplace dating back to the time of its original Montemarte owner, we toasted the boisterous school group so enthusiastically that the complimentary bottle of red wine that came with our meal soon ran dry. The manager came over from his table to graciously help us with a refill from a bottle that also came from the estate’s winery but seemed of distinctly finer quality.
Titignamo guests at dinner in front of the fireplace dating back a thousand years.
There entered a note of sadness on hearing in our chats with the teachers and students about conditions back home. Theirs was a story of two countries, a struggling south and a better-off north which they additionally thought to be aloof. Job prospects for these students were grim. But, said one teacher quietly, let’s not spoil this moment of happiness.
The students invited us to join them for songs at the piano. We did not know the words but were asked to just hum and clap along. At first the tunes were lively, but by the last they were slow and mournful. It was their last night before returning home the next day.
We said our goodbyes, some with hugs, and went our separate ways. How touching small-town Italy can be.