The window over the Tiber Valley, where landscape, history and trails meet
Before passing through Tenaglie’s Gate, Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II opens into a natural balcony: your gaze runs along the Tiber Valley, over ridgelines, olive groves, cultivated fields and water-carved gorges.
It is an ancient vantage point where the landscape tells the choices of past communities: on the slopes descending towards the San Lorenzo and Raiano streams you can make out the sites of the San Lorenzo Valley Necropolis, excavated in the local friable sandstone (“matile”), which preserves rock-cut chambers and open-air corridors. Here nature becomes a map of memory: the river, the hills, the routes.
The Belvedere is also the starting point of the Cammino dei Borghi Silenti. From the overlook, once through the Gate, the route threads the village and then continues among hills and towns, before re-entering the Municipality of Montecchio with the evocative passage through the necropolis.
What better way to deepen the experience than visiting the AMAT – Tenaglie Archaeological Antiquarium, which preserves the grave goods from the necropolis (7th–4th c. BCE) and weaves their meanings with maps, contexts and details of daily life? From AMAT you return ideally to the Belvedere with a more informed gaze: what you admire from above finds its voice in the museum rooms.
If you’ve decided to walk those few metres to discover Tenaglie’s points of interest, this is the first stop: now climb towards the Gate to enter the medieval village.
Umbro-Etruscan frontier land, land of contested castles, land of a landscape shaped by silent hamlets and rolling hills of olive, oak and chestnut trees.
Fondo Europeo Agricolo per lo Sviluppo Rurale: L’Europa investe nelle zone rurali
The European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development: Europe investing in rural areas
