Twilight(ish) in Volterra

I can completely understand why Stephanie Meyer chose to set Volterra as her “Vampire” town in the Twilight series – it’s 100% perfect for the scene.  Volterra is filled with a alleyways, tall walls, random stairs, dead ends and lots of "secretive looking" doors. The city is very small and it seems as if only one store is open at a time. There are no “hours of operation” for businesses; they just do whatever they want here. It’s very family-oriented and laid back. I also found out today that Volterra is much older than Rome and other Italian historic cities - in fact it is one of the oldest. There are even ruins of an amphitheater and forum on the north side of the city.

Since the sun set during our soccer game earlier (see football blog) there wasn’t much time left to explore the city – we just went to grab some dinner. First thing I noticed: The language barrier is certainly MUCH greater here. It makes sense because it’s such a small and non-touristy city. It's going to take some getting use to but I think it's going to be such a great learning experience. Even though the menu was in Italian, I managed to order gnocchi with fresh crabmeat for dinner. The crabmeat was so juicy and delicious, probably because Volterra is so close to the Tyrrhenian Sea.

After dinner we went to an underground (literally underground) cafee that served desserts and hot chocolate (aka fresh melted milk chocolate in a mug). They also had a game room with slot machines (?), a foosball table, an Internet cafee and a closed bar. The downstairs was 200x larger then the upstairs counter. It was sort of packed – this must be the local thing to do on a casual Monday night... I personally have no complaints.