This month sees the launch of ‘The Soul of Volterra’, a project for the optimisation of that part of the city that best represents not only the heart of the community of Volterra but also its soul.
Piazza San Giovanni is the most significant religious space in the city and Diocese of Volterra, with the Cathedral, the Belfry, the Casa dell’Opera, the Oratorio della Misericordia, the former Hospital and the Baptistry all facing onto it. In fact, it has lent its name to the whole of this significant portion of the city’s fabric, lying at the heart of the area of jurisdiction pertaining to the Bishop of Volterra which tradition would have us believe dates back to the apostolic era but which, at any rate, is certainly documented as far back as the final decades of the 5th century. The city’s first episcopal church dedicated to St. Mary, situated where the Cathedral now stands, is known to have already been in existence in the age of Charlemagne. But the heart of the city is also its soul, in its dual role as the guardian both of religion and of the loftiest civic and social values (as St. Catherine explains in a letter: He who is renewed in spirit “possesses the city of his own soul…”), which is why the Soul of Volterra project is based on a single itinerary taking in all the various sites giving onto Piazza San Giovanni: the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, the Baptistry and the former Hospital, now the Santa Maria Maddalena Exhibition Centre.
Thus our aesthetic and spiritual itinerary sets out from the Cathedral, the community’s most significant and emblematic monument with its countless masterpieces ranging from the early Middle Ages to the present day. Its earliest works of art include an imposing sculptural group depicting the Deposition from the Cross, termed Opus Crucifixi in documents and dating back to 1228, which is likely to have been carved by a master active in Pisa in the early decades of the 13th century.