SURROUNDINGS:
The first town that one finds after the boundary with Latium is Capalbio: a town with double city walls, a summer holidays’ destination, which attracts also visitors in every season.
A way to follow is surely that around the city walls.
Towards the sea one can just see Monte Argentario, a tourist place famous for its amazing coasts. Further on there is Orbetello, the old capital city of the Spanish Presidios, divided from Monte Argentario by a lagoon.
Archaeology and history
In the upper Maremma there are three towns of tufa: Pitigliano, Sorano and Sovana.
An amazing walk on foot or on horseback could be through this wonderful landscape, through fields, olive-grove, beech-wood and farmhouses. Thanks to the tufa and its utmost malleability keeps lots of symbols of the Etruscan civilization such as graves, vaults lined with burial niches, hollow streets and grottos.
Near Sorano it is worth to visit the necropolis of San Rocco made up of groves divided in rooms dug into the vertical walls, which are datable in the 3rd-2nd century b. C.
Near Sovana is the most spectacular necropolis of the upper Fiora’s Valley: the “grove of Ildebrando”. It dates back to the 3rd century b. C. and the discoverers called it in Ildebrando’s of Sovana honour, who ascended the papal throne with the name Gregorio VII.
Together with the proof of the worship of the dead there are interesting old built-up areas: the Vitozza, in the borough of Sorano, is one of the biggest rupestrian settlements of Italy. It’s made up of two hundred grottos of different kinds and size, divided in one or more rooms, often with more floors connected by stairs.
A walk through these surroundings is really like coming back to the past.
Natural park of Uccellina
The Regional Park of Maremma looks as an impervious and wild mountain chain, surrounded with marshes, pine-wood, fields and pastures, which reaches the sea with beaches of fine sand and rocky shores.
Saturnia Hot springs
The thermal baths of Saturnia are located in the middle of the lower Maremma and were already famous during the Etruscan time, who thought that the spring had therapeutic and miraculous virtues. Saturnia is nowadays a thermal centre able to satisfy the most demanding clientele’s needs thanks to a varied and well organized structure. The waters have a sulphureous-carbonic matter; they gush out with a flow of 800 litres per second at 37° C.
This is the secret of their wholesome properties, good for the skin, the breathing and the muscle-skeleton apparatus.
The garden of tarots
In Garavicchio you can admire the Garden of Tarots: an original and eccentric work of the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. This work represents the 22 Tarots’ Major Arcane made with wonderful sculptures of reinforced cement and polyester, covered with ceramic mosaics, glasses and mirrors.
