Living close to one of the world's great monuments is a different experience from visiting them as a tourist. I should know, since I'm lucky enough to live near to two of them. In London I'm just up the road from Westminster Abbey, while in Italy my house is outside Orvieto and its cathedral, considered one of the greatest examples of Italian Gothic: "the golden lily of Italian cathedrals", according to Pope Leo XIII.
Sadly, long queues and a hefty entrance charge mean I can no longer pop into the abbey for a quick visit, even in midwinter. But things are easier in Orvieto.
This ancient Etruscan city, built strategically high up on its volcanic plug, half way between Rome and Florence, was the scene of an impromptu deal during the second world war. German and Allied commanders agreed to stage their battle on the plains below rather than risk damaging Orvieto itself.
Construction of the cathedral began in 1290 and took 300 years to finish. Its only false notes are the garish gold mosaics on the façade, heavily and badly restored in the 19th century. Sometimes, I fancy the black and white horizontally striped walls make the building look like a giant Liquorice All-Sort: they are actually alternating bands of grey basalt and white marble.
If the sun is warm, I stay outside to study the twisted columns studded with red, black and gold mosaics around each of the doors, and the four tall bas-relief marble panels intricately carved to illustrate a scene from the Bible.
The work of Sienese architect/sculptor Lorenzo Maitani and his associates, these panels tell all the familiar stories from creation to crucifixion. But my favourite is on the far right, an account of the last judgment, with an army of inventive devils doing horrible things to hopeless and helpless sinners.
Spiritually, Orvieto's cathedral is, like all cathedrals, about salvation. Artistically, it's more like a cathedral of the damned. Step inside and at first the place seems to have been stripped bare by the celestial removers. It's surprisingly uncluttered - a big, empty, barn. All the light and colour - and in summer all the crowds - are down at the far end, by the altar, and in two side chapels. The gated chapel on the right (the only part of the cathedral you have to pay to enter) is the home of Orvieto's artistic masterwork, Luca Signorelli's famous frescoes.
Once again, the last judgment is the subject. But while the devils gnawing the damned, and the angels supervising the gratefully arisen, were portrayed with quintessential 14th-century medieval craftsmanship in the bas- relief on the exterior façade, Signorelli gives the same theme the full 16th-century Renaissance pictorial treatment in the San Brizio chapel.
There's a Hollywood flair - and a Hollywood obsession with beautiful bodies - about the frescoes. As angels blow the last trumpet, the dead push and pull their way out of the ground, some of them decayed into skeletons, while the Whore of Babylon rides to hell on the back of a gleeful winged demon - she is rumoured to be a portrait of Signorelli's former mistress. If Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel is the ultimate Renaissance-Hollywood blockbuster, then Signorelli's (earlier) work comes a close second.
I keep the Signorellis to re-visit on special occasions or when guests come to town. For everyday, I never tire of the frescoes above the altar and in the left-hand chapel. Both are by a local 14th century artist, Ugolino di Prete Ilario. Both are brilliantly coloured religious comic strips.
The former tells the legendary history of the Virgin Mary; the latter the story of the miracle of Bolsena, a lakeside village 15 miles from Orvieto where a priest who had doubts about the doctrine of transubstantiation was celebrating mass when the wine turned into real blood and stained the altar cloth. The priest ran all the way to Orvieto, where Pope Urban IV was staying at the time (because of its impregnable position, the Popes often took refuge from unruly Rome in Orvieto). The Pope ordered this cathedral to be built to house the miraculous cloth. He also instituted the feast of Corpus Christi.
All cathedrals have their mysteries. For the past 25 years, Orvieto's secret has been hidden in plain sight, in the broad niche above the main doors. It is empty now but old photographs show that originally it held a statue of the Madonna and child seated under a bronze canopy flanked by angels.
What had become of them? No one seemed to know, though there were rumours they were being restored. Then, a few years ago, the Madonna and child reappeared but this time inside the duomo, where explanatory panels described how difficult the restoration had been to accomplish. There was nothing about the artist Andrea Pisano and no sign - nor mention - of Maitani's canopy and his bronze angels.
After being on display for a while, the Madonna vanished again. By now, the mystery had deepened. In 2003, an English journalist, Alasdair Palmer, discovered that the cathedral's treasures, "one of the choicest collections of medieval sculpture and painting anywhere in Italy" had been locked away, out of public view, for 15 years - even though a special museum had been created for them in the early 1980s in the Palazzi Papali, next door to the cathedral. Reportedly, the museum no sooner opened than it closed again, the victim of a power struggle between two strands of the civic and regional arts bureaucracy.
"It seems to have been the kind of pointless bureaucratic wrangle over precedence that should have been cleared up in a couple of weeks," Palmer wrote in The Spectator magazine. "Deliberately to shut away such a collection of treasures is an artistic crime."
Another three years passed until, this April, the deadlock was broken at last and the museum of the Opera del Duomo reopened, albeit in the truncated and temporary form of an exhibition of the choicest pieces under the title of Le Stanze delle Meraviglie (The Rooms of Wonders). The hope is that by the time the show closes in January 2007, the museum will be able to reconstitute itself on a permanent basis.
In the meantime, this is a show full of marvels, such as two small angels carved by Arnolfo di Cambio; a sumptuous Signorelli Mary Magdalene; a polyptych and panel by Simone Martini; and an unusual lectern with exquisite marquetry.
Apart from the added fillip of seeing things that few people have set eyes on for years, the display is at eye level and there are no barriers, no guards and no glass, enabling you to have a relationship to the objects that's all but unknown in museums nowadays. I could see the wormholes in the lectern and the gold paint on the crucifix that has been fractured by time into tiny mosaic-like squares, while I felt that the wooden, larger-than-life-sized Christ by Pisano was really blessing me.
And the missing Madonna? That's the best news of all. She's sitting in the exhibition foyer, reunited with her ÂÂcanopy and her six angels.
Being eyeball to eyeball with a work of art designed to sit 20ft above your head is a moving experience: you can see the gentleness of her features and the tenderness with which she holds the child. But it's also disquieting to see her like this. Both the heads on the Madonna and the baby are too big for their bodies since they're meant to be viewed from below. As for the angels, ethereally thin and two-dimensional, almost like early Giacomettis, they raise their arms and with long fingers carefully hold back the curtains to let us see mother and child.
After so much literally "divine art", the best way I know to come back to earth is to sit outside the Gelateria Pasqualetti, in one corner of the Piazza Duomo, watching the ragazzi kick their footballs against the black and white cathedral walls and remembering, as I lick my stracciatella (chocolate chip) ice-cream, that children have been doing much the same thing in this place for the past 700 years.
ETRUSCAN EXPERIENCES
■‘Le Stanze delle Meraviglie da Simone Martini à Francesco Mochi’ at Orvieto Palazzi Papali until January 7 2007. Tel: +39 0763-343 592. The exhibition includes a second site in a local church. www.opsm.it
■Luca Signorelli frescoes in the duomo: entrance by ticket bought in advance from the tourist office across the square from the cathedral. Information, tel: +39 0763-342 477
■Etruscan Necropoli – Necropoli del Crocifisso del Tufo: on the road up the hill to the city. The necropoli make up a miniature city of the dead in little houses, now overgrown and covered in moss but tranquil and atmospheric – although all artefacts are now in museums in Orvieto (Museo Claudio Faina, opposite the duomo information office, tel: +39 0763-341 511) and elsewhere. Necropoli information, tel: +39 0763-343 611.
■Orvieto underground: 3,000 years of history dug into the soft tufa of the ancient volcano – wells, caves, drains, pigeon lofts. Guided tours available. Not one for the claustrophobic. www.orvietounderground.it
■Gelateria Pasqualetti, Piazza Duomo 14. Tel: +39 0763-341 034
■International Rail, tel: +44 (0)1962-772 702
