CIVITA DI BAGNOREGIO

Civita di Bagnoregio

Mini-medieval town : a magic alternative for a different holiday

It is an unusual location not very far from Rome: the most characteristic, the most comfortable and the most convenient.

Although it is distant only Km. 100 from Rome, many people have never heard about it. One small secondary road leads directly from Orvieto to Bagnoregio. Once there, a not passable bridge to the vehicles but only to back of mule or on foot, long 500 meters and slightly in climb, leads to Civita.

"Saint Maria Door", of Etruscan origin, rises to defy the time that suddenly seems to be stopped in an indeterminate point of the bridge. The sounds seem more limpid and more muffled at the same time.

Amazed, one runs along the main narrow lane flanked by small medieval houses with balconies and windows cheered up by geranium and climbing plants : the colors seem more bright and the air more pure and stirring. Small devils and sly faunes seem to jump outside from ancient coats of arms and blazons that overhung the small doors of each house.

And suddenly, noises of steps on those ancient small roads made by stone, Italian and foreign voices in a little square where there are anachronistic signs: pizzeria, furnace, tavern, make a crown to a high bell tower of the church a little romantic, a little of the renaissance, a little baroque. And few steps further on there, small craftsmen shops and resales of local wine and oil, sometimes offered for tasting with tiny pieces of crisps bread.

Civita: the charm of the old fashioned and its "calanchi" - the geologic clay formations eroded by water and wind in unequal way. The panorama enjoying from Civita, of the valley below, with crete and the whitest or grayish ridges, steeps and sharps, is so characterized to give the feeling of a lunar landscape. It would need to have known Civita just in one night of full moon. In that moment it lives a dimension that is no more real. It seems a moon over a white foamy sea, almost an advancing ship. The apparent isolation (Bagnoregio, modern city distant approximately 500 meters) concurs to discover again the "sound of the silence".

The first historical news that speaks about the existence of Civita di Bagnoregio go back to the 599 d.C. It was called Balneus Regis or Regium, and was an ancient city perched on a reddish spur, leaning forward on the valley below. Then the land flaked off and devided becoming Civita and Bagnoregio. Probably it is of Etruscan origin. Under the town there are caves and underground passages, today used as stables and shelters for hens. It was very appreciated for its sulphureous spa but, since the zone is of volcanic origin, it was completely swallowed by an earthquake in 1696. It remained stand more or less what we see today.

Civita is placed on 500 meters on a stratified drum of tuff that in its turn presses on the softest and the mellowest Pliocenice sandstones It is like a geologic raft on an unstable land: with rains the tuff resists to the water but sandstones not. Therefore, sometimes, some house of the small village's external belt slips down in the valley. Since 200 years none has built houses in Civita. And obviously elapsing the time, slowly, it will remain very little of Civita.

It has been called "the dying city" but, from a certain point of view is not died at all. Its magical atmospheres have fascinated various Americans, Germans and Italians who have bought house there and slowly restore it without to alter the architectonic characteristics. Civita belongs to the unknown cities. It does not attract the popular tourism, neither that of the "great stuff "... It is a place forcing you to think, overbearingly to watch inside yourself. There is not the usual tension that today disturbs the relationship with yourself. Civita is not "to visit", "is not to watch", but "it is to feel".