The ruins of the Etruscan city of Vulci are one of my favorite sites on our Birds and Art tours of Tuscany. We wander among the temples and tombs, the palaces and the privies, while hoopoes, crested larks, and cheerful little Italian sparrows go about their own feathered business on the fields and forest edges.
We aren’t the first to have noticed that a visit to Vulci combines art, archaeology, and nature in an especially exciting way. The signs directing drivers to the visitor center feature one of the site’s most “desirable” birds, the golden oriole.
Or maybe not. Maybe not quite.
“A” for effort indeed, but we smile each time, and wonder what the ornithologist son of Vulci’s nineteenth-century owner Lucien Bonaparte might have thought.
