Viterbo (Vetèrbe in Viterbo dialect, Viterbium in medieval Latin)
is an ancient city of 67 595 inhabitants, capital of the province of
the same name in northern Lazio, also known as Tuscia or Alto Lazio.
It has ancient origins (it is believed that Viterbo derives from
the Latin Vetus Urbs, meaning Old Town) and has the largest medieval
historic center in Europe: with some well-preserved neighborhoods,
it is surrounded by walls and surrounded by modern neighborhoods.
Viterbo is known as the City of the Popes: in the 13th century it
was in fact the papal seat and for about 24 years the Papal Palace
hosted and saw several Popes elected. The University of Tuscia is
located in the municipality.
Cathedral of San Lorenzo, next to the Palace of the Popes. The
cathedral was built in Romanesque style during the 12th century, on the
land where a small 8th century church dedicated to San Lorenzo was
located, which in turn was built on the ruins of a pagan temple
dedicated to Hercules, but its façade dates back to 1570, when it was
rebuilt in Renaissance style on the orders of bishop Giovanni Francesco
Gambara. The cathedral suffered considerable damage during a bombing of
the city by the allies in 1944. The subsequent restoration restored part
of the Romanesque structure that pre-existing the alterations carried
out during the Baroque period. The fourteenth-century bell tower is
formed in the upper part by layers marked by double mullioned windows
and horizontal polychrome bands. The internal space is divided into
three naves separated by two rows of columns culminating in elegant
capitals. The floor is in Cosmatesque style. In the apse area of the
left nave there is the tomb of Pope John XXI (†1277) and not far away
there is a valuable 12th century panel depicting the Madonna della
Carbonara in Byzantine style. Pope Alexander IV († 1261) was certainly
also buried in the church, but his tomb has been lost.
Church of
Santa Maria Nuova, one of the oldest in Viterbo. It dates back to 1080
and was built on the remains of a temple dedicated to Jupiter Cimino,
whose sculpted head (which many believed in the past depicted Jesus)
protrudes above the portal. In an external corner of the building, there
is a small stone pulpit which was accessed via a wooden staircase, from
which, according to legend, St. Thomas Aquinas preached in 1266. In
reality, the very small dimensions of the pulpit are not compatible with
the well-known size of the great Dominican saint, whose cycle of sermons
commissioned by Pope Clement IV was most likely held inside the church.
Inside there is a collection of Viterbo paintings from the period from
the 14th to the 16th century. In the left nave, at the end, there is a
valuable Byzantine leather triptych from 1180 depicting Christ. The side
naves have a ceiling supported by wooden trusses and decorated with
ceramic tiles. In the Baptistery, note the fresco with Saints John the
Baptist, Jerome and Lorenzo, by Antonio del Massaro da Viterbo, known as
Pastura, similar in some respects to Antoniazzo Romano and in others to
Perugino. On one side of the main altar, there is an entrance to the
ancient early Christian crypt. A staircase located outside the apse
leads to a cloister, erroneously defined as "Lombard". The cloister
remained buried and unknown until the 1980s (there were no references or
testimonies to suggest its existence), until the collapse of a wing of
the refectory led to its discovery.
Church of San Silvestro, an
ancient church in which, in 1271, the brutal assassination of the
English prince Henry of Cornwall took place, which caused enormous
dismay in the 13th century and which was also remembered by Dante.
Abbey of San Martino al Cimino, an example of Gothic-Cistercian
architecture.
Basilica of the Madonna della Quercia, two kilometers
from Viterbo, is one of the most notable examples of Italian Renaissance
art: the first national monument of Viterbo; on the majestic facade you
can admire three lunettes by Andrea della Robbia, inside the church
paintings by Fra Bartolomeo della Porta, coffered ceiling of the central
nave, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, small temple by
Andrea Bregno. It has the rank of minor basilica.
The other
churches in the historic center are the following.
Basilica of San
Francesco alla Rocca
Church of Sant'Angelo in Spatha
Church of
Santa Rosa, in which the body of the city's patron saint is venerated
and where the route of the Santa Rosa Machine ends; it is built on a
small hill next to the so-called Casa di Santa Rosa.
Church of
Sant'Egidio
Church of Santa Maria del Suffragio
Church of San
Sisto, next to Porta Romana, where the Macchina di Santa Rosa route
begins.
Church of Santa Maria della Verità
Church of Sant'Andrea
Church of the Holy Trinity
Church of San Giovanni in Zoccoli
Palace of the Popes, built between 1255 and 1266 on the hill of San
Lorenzo to host and protect the pontiffs during their stay in Viterbo,
with the famous loggia formed on one side only by seven arches supported
by slender paired columns that intertwine to form an elegant
entablature. From the loggia you enter the large Conclave Hall, scene of
the famous election of Pope Gregory
Medieval neighborhood of San
Pellegrino, in the historic center, on the route of the Via Francigena.
The main axis starts from Piazza San Carluccio and continues along Via
San Pellegrino up to the square where side alleys converge and
overlooked by the small church of the same name and the Palazzo degli
Alessandri. Numerous houses are equipped with profferlo, the exposed
staircase typical of medieval Viterbo architecture.
Rocca
Albornoziana, home of the National Etruscan Museum, built in 1354 by
Cardinal Egidio Albornoz and renovated in 1506 by Bramante on behalf of
Pope Julius II.
Medieval fountains called "spindle" or "overlapping
cups" due to the characteristic shape of the central stem, in Piazza
della Rocca, Piazza Fontana Grande, Piazza delle Erbe, Piazza della
Morte, Piazza di San Faustino, Piazza Fontana di Piano.
Palazzo dei
Priori (Town Hall) and Prefecture on Piazza del Plebiscito, better known
by the people of Viterbo as "Piazza del Comune".
Villa Lante in
Bagnaia, in the hamlet of Bagnaia, famous for its Italian garden
attributed to Vignola, and defined by Sitwell as One of the most
beautiful places in the world.
Medieval walls, extending for about four kilometres, the oldest section of which dates back to 1095 and whose layout is preserved almost perfectly intact, with the two main gates (Porta Romana and Porta Fiorentina) and the other minor ones (San Pietro, Fiorita, del Carmine, San Lorenzo, di Valle, Faul, Bove, Murata, San Marco, della Verità, San Leonardo); near the Faul gate stands the Branca tower, known as the Bella Galliana tower.
Ferento, an archaeological site on the Teverina road, with
interesting remains from the Etruscan, Roman and medieval times, and a
beautiful Roman theater in a good state of conservation in which summer
theatrical and musical shows take place. A notable boost to the findings
at this site and in nearby Acquarossa came from the various excavation
campaigns conducted personally between 1960 and 1973 by the
archaeologist King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden.
Necropolis of Castel
d'Asso, the first to be discovered and probably the largest in the area.
Necropolis of Norchia, prehistoric, Etruscan, Roman and medieval
archaeological site near Vetralla, but in the municipal territory of
Viterbo.
Excavations of Musarna and Acquarossa, brought to light in
the 20th century.
Bullicame, a source of hot sulphurous water with important
therapeutic properties, which feeds - even if its flow rate shows
significant reductions - a spa and various free pools, cited by Dante in
the Inferno.
Valle dell'Arcionio Regional Nature Reserve, of
particular environmental, geological and archaeological interest with an
area of 438 hectares, extends from the offshoots of the medieval civic
walls up to Mount Palanzana (802 m) including the gorge of the Urcionio
ditch. It presents the phenomenon of vegetation inversion with plants
from cold and humid climates such as beech at lower altitudes, while
plants such as holm oak, typical of hot climates and low altitudes, grow
at higher altitudes at the top of the walls, well exposed to the sun .
Prato Giardino, the main park of the city, located just outside Porta
Fiorentina, between Via della Palazzina and Via del Pilastro and with an
extension of approximately 4 hectares. Inside the park busts have been
erected in honor of Vittorio Emanuele II, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Amedeo di
Savoia, Duke of Aosta, Giuseppe Mazzini and Cesare Dobici (musician from
Viterbo).
San Martino al Cimino
The hamlet of San Martino al Cimino presents
an innovative urban design of terraced houses, built in the first half
of the seventeenth century by order of Donna Olimpia Maidalchini, one of
the most powerful women of her time, who called a group of prestigious
architects to work there, including which Francesco Borromini.
The numerous underground tunnels dug into the tuff, which connect most of the buildings in the historic centre, create a vast network of tunnels and walkways, sometimes partially submerged, where historical-archaeological finds have been found. They are mainly used as cellars, but in the Second World War they served as a refuge for the population during the air raids that hit the city hard in 1943-44.
The city rises 326 meters above sea level, with a surface area of 406.23 km², which places it in second place among the municipalities of Lazio, within a large false plain, located on the first northern slopes of Mount Palanzana (which the people of Viterbo simply call it La Palanzana), belonging to the Cimini Mountains group, reliefs of volcanic origin which are in turn part of the Lazio Anti-Apennines. The slight slope on which the city center is located extends west towards the Maremma plain. The city is crossed for its entire length, running east-west, by the Fosso Urcionio, which today flows almost completely underground, while it flowed on the surface until the first decades of the twentieth century. The city has an administrative island located between the municipalities of Vetralla and Ronciglione, named "La Scorticata".
Climate classification: zone D, 1989 GR/G
There are traces
of Neolithic and Aeneolithic settlements and various traces,
especially in the subsoil, of Etruscan presences in the distant
history of Viterbo, but some historians are led to believe that in
the Etruscan period the settlement did not reach the state of vicus,
while the imaginative fifteenth-century theories of the scholar
friar Annio (author of that complex and monumental historical
falsehood known as Antiquitatum Variarum) even assumed that there
was an Etruscan tetrapolis on the spot, based on the initials FAVL
which, according to these theories would be an acronym formed by
four towns (Fanum, Arbanum, Vetulonia, Longula). More plausible is
the identification of Viterbo with the Etruscan city of Surina,
supported by scholars of the twentieth century.
After the
Roman conquest, in all probability, a military settlement was
established there, called Castrum Herculis due to the presence in
the area of a temple that was believed to be dedicated to the
mythological hero (the lion symbol of Viterbo derives from this
anecdote).
More certain information can be found with the
town of the early Middle Ages, which originates from a "castrum",
that is a Lombard fortification located on the border between the
Longobard possessions in Tuscia and the Byzantine duchy of Rome: the
hill of San Lorenzo, mentioned in donation of Sutri among the
properties that Liutprando promised to the Church in 729, it was
fortified in 773 by Desiderio, in the last period of his dispute
with Charlemagne. A papal document from 852 recognizes the Castrum
Viterbii as part of the lands of San Pietro, while Ottone I counts
the castle among the possessions of the Church.
In the 11th century, the demographic increase contributed to the
birth of residential areas outside the castrum, and, around 1090, to
a first stretch of walls; in 1099 the choice of the first consuls
sanctioned the transition to municipal institutions. It is the
twelfth century the period in which Viterbo, a free municipality,
secured the possession of numerous castles: in this sense the
protection of Frederick I Barbarossa (present in the city in 1162),
and his recognition of the municipality of Viterbo, gave legitimacy
to its expansion policy. In 1172 the city of Ferento was destroyed
whose symbol (a palm tree) was added to the lion, the symbol of
Viterbo (the current emblem consists of a lion placed on a palm);
around 1190 Corneto (now Tarquinia) was besieged, while the emperor
attacked Rome with the Viterbo army.
The districtus of the
municipality increased considerably in those years.
Another
element that increased the prestige and political importance of
Viterbo was its elevation to the bishop's chair in 1192 against
Tuscania, whose previous predominance in Roman Tuscia was thus less.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century the city was finally
included in the papal orbit and thus began a period of great
splendor, especially with the design of Pope Innocent III, who tried
to establish a territorial state: in 1207 Viterbo hosted the
Parliament of states of the Church. However, due to the presence in
the city of important families intolerant of papal dominance, the
protection of Frederick II was invoked: thus, until about 1250, a
period of internal struggles between Guelphs (the Gatti family) and
Ghibellines (the Tignosi), with an initial prevalence of the latter.
The life of the most illustrious daughter of Viterbo: Santa Rosa da
Viterbo, who lived between 1233 and 1251, was inserted in this
context of bitter civil and religious struggles. Not only are her
miracles in life and post mortem remembered, but also, although was
very young dying at just 18 years, his courageous preaching against
the heretics and the Ghibellines, which animated the Viterbo to
resist against the assault of the army of Federico II. In the same
years the city saw the political and military initiatives of the
Viterbo cardinal Raniero Capocci, a historian and bitter enemy of
the emperor.
The failed siege of Frederick II in 1243 with the great victory
of the Viterbo people, led by Raniero Capocci, over the imperial
army and the consequent success of the Guelphs, sanctioned, for the
second half of the 13th century and also for future centuries, the
definitive pro-papal politics: the wealthy Gatti family monopolized
the municipal offices and the popes chose Viterbo as the papal seat.
The discriminating episode, which even attracted world attention to
Viterbo, was the papal election of 1268-1271, which led Gregory X to
the papal throne: the cardinals who had to elect Clement IV's
successor had been meeting in vain for almost 20 months, when the
people of Viterbo, indignant from so much delay, under the
leadership of the Captain of the people Raniero Gatti, came to the
drastic decision to lock the cardinals in the election room (clausi
cum clave), feed them with bread and water, and uncover the roof
leaving them exposed to the elements, until they had elected the new
Pope; in the end the cardinals - also pressured by the continuous
reprimands of Bonaventura da Bagnoregio - chose the Piacenza Tedaldo
Visconti, archdeacon of Liège, who had received only minor orders
and in those days was in the Holy Land for the ninth crusade.
The new pope took the name of Gregory X, (1272), and, given the
goodness of the "cloister", established with the apostolic
constitution Ubi Periculum that future papal elections would also
take place in a locked seat: the Conclave was born. Five conclaves
were held in Viterbo from 1261 to 1281. In the last of these the
people, artfully stirred up by Charles I of Anjou, broke into the
Conclave hall and put Cardinal Matteo Rubeo Orsini, protodeacon, to
hard prison. The pontiff who was elected by this conclave,
devastated by the invasion of the people of Viterbo, was a
Frenchman, Cardinal Simon de Brion, just as Charles of Anjou wanted.
Moreover, the new pope, who chose the pontifical name of Martin IV,
just elected, instead of thanking the Viterbo people who, putting
the cardinals of the Orsini family in difficulty, had favored his
election, launched a heavy interdiction on the city of Viterbo and
abandoned in a hurry with the entire papal court, without returning
to Rome, as many wished, but going to Orvieto. The golden period of
Viterbo ended with this unpleasant episode.
The popes will no
longer come to reside in the city, although several popes will
sometimes stay there for quite long periods; examples are Pope Urban
V, who stayed in Viterbo for a few months between 1367 and 1370
during the unsuccessful attempt to bring the papal seat back to
Rome, and Pope Nicholas V, who in 1454 even had Rossellino built in
Bullicame area a beautiful thermal palace (almost completely lost)
to come to the city to cure his serious illnesses, as well as Julius
II, who was often a guest, in the first decade of the sixteenth
century, of the Augustinians of Viterbo, given the friendship that
bound him to Egidio da Viterbo, and Leone X, who came hunting in the
surrounding area. During the permanent presence of the papal curia
in Viterbo, the city had reached its maximum splendor, both
economically, as a center located along important communication
routes, such as the Via Cassia and the Francigena, and
architecturally, with the construction of municipal public buildings
, towers, churches, in the flourishing of both the Romanesque and
the Gothic style, which the Cistercians had inaugurated in the place
with the abbey of San Martino al Cimino.
The Avignon exile of
the popes contributed to the decline of the city and the reopening
of internal struggles. The ephemeral reconstitution of the patrimony
of San Pietro by Cardinal Egidio Albornoz, did not prevent the noble
Gatti and the prefects of Vico from establishing themselves in
Viterbo with institutions of a noble type. In the first decades of
the 16th century Viterbo once again hosted popes from Julius II to
Leo X, thanks - as mentioned above - to the extraordinary work of
the Augustinian cardinal Egidio da Viterbo. In the mid-sixteenth
century the city experienced a new, albeit brief, period of cultural
and spiritual fervor due to the presence of Cardinal Reginald Pole,
who gathered his famous club in Viterbo, which included, among
others, the Marquise Vittoria Colonna and at whose meetings
Michelangelo often attended. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth
century, Viterbo was the seat of a Jewish community, until the
expulsion decree of 1569.
For Viterbo it was a period of scarce economic and
cultural vitality: from the end of the 16th century the city
followed the fate of the Papal State and saw the international
vocation it had assumed in the late Middle Ages completely waned.
Occupied in 1798 by the French troops of General Championnet,
who intervened in defense of the Roman Republic, it rebelled,
imprisoning the garrison left there by the French, when in November
the troops of the Austrian general Mack and the King of Naples
Ferdinand IV of Bourbon entered Rome . However, shortly after they
were driven out by the Championnet, Viterbo was attacked by the
troops of the French general François Étienne Kellermann, to whom it
had to surrender after he had defeated the 6,000 men of the French
émigré, Roger de Damas, nearby.
In 1867, with the Garibaldi
column Acerbi, he witnessed the unfortunate campaign of the Agro
Romano for the liberation of Rome, which ended in Mentana on 3
November with the defeat of Garibaldi by the papal and French
troops. The city had to wait until 12 September 1870 to be freed
again by the Italian troops, this time those of the regular army
marching towards Rome.
With the unification of Italy, almost
all of Lazio aggregated in the province of Rome, Viterbo lost the
status of capital, which was returned to it only in 1927 with the
reorganization of the provincial districts, implemented by Benito
Mussolini.
On this occasion, however, Civitavecchia also
aspired to the rank of province but Viterbo managed to win,
increasing its territory and number of inhabitants, suppressing and
incorporating as fractions, with government consent, the
municipalities of Bagnaia, San Martino al Cimino, Grotte Santo
Stefano, and other small neighboring towns. (see Italian
municipalities suppressed).
During the Second World War the
city was quickly occupied after 8 September 1943 by the German
troops of the 3. Panzergrenadier-Division who were moving towards
Rome. During the occupation it was the seat of a German command and
was therefore subjected by the allied air force to repeated
bombings, of which the one of January 17, 1944 was particularly
heavy, which led to the death of hundreds of civilians and the
destruction of large areas of the historic center. and other
neighboring territories.