 [BBC Travel] Wildflowers grazed my legs as I hiked down from the volcanic-rock hilltop fortress of Pitigliano into the Tuscan valley below. At the base of the hill, I crossed a burbling stream and followed a winding trail as it inclined. All of a sudden, I was walled in.
Huge blocks of tuff, a porous rock made from volcanic ash, rose as high as 25m on either side of the trench I found myself in. I felt spooked — and I'm not the only one who's felt that way in vie cave like this. These subterranean trails have been linked with lore of devils and deities for centuries.
"When we were kids, nobody really went there," said Elena Ronca, a hiking guide who has been leading tours around this area of Tuscany, where she grew up, for 12 years.
That's because there wasn't much information about the trails, nor about the Etruscan civilisation that built them. The ancients didn't leave road maps or written records, and many pathways were abandoned and overgrown with shrubs. But in the last few decades, archaeological discoveries in tombs across central Italy, and as far as Corsica, have revealed more about the Etruscans and their mysterious vie cave, which are said to connect the land of the living with the land of the dead.
At their simplest definition, vie cave (via cava is the singular) were walled pathways used to travel from the highlands to the riverbanks and vice versa. While they're found in various places across central Italy (where the Etruscans thrived from 900 BCE to about 700 CE until they were absorbed into the Roman Empire), the vie cave here in southern Tuscany between the towns of Pitigliano, Sorano and Sovana are among the oldest andmost intact. "It's incredible that the vie cave have lasted so long," Ronca said. "During the Etruscan times, they knew what they were doing." 
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