Bagnoregio, Viterbo, Italy

A Town Divided

In Bagnoregio there is a small town spread across a hillside. This town is a pleasant rather than a notable town, tucked into the midst of rural central Italian countryside. At the east end of Bagnoregio the houses become more scattered and the road comes to an end. A valley fallls away below the hillside, and across this narrow valley there rises an isolated knoll with steep drops into a ravine on all sides.

Civita de Bagnoregio

This knoll is tall and narrow - rising well above the surrounding countryside in every direction. On the very top of this craggy knoll a walled village perches precariously  -  its houses pressed together on the needlepoint of this small mountain. This is the village of Civita di  Bagnoregio - a compressed cluster of a village, magnificent in its isolation.


There are no roads leading up to Civita, - just a thin causeway on piers, rising dramatically upwards as it stretches across the valley and ascends the rocky cliff face. Visitors and villagers alike, take this path up to the church and tiny village clustered behind stone walls.

Expansive Views on All Sides

From Civita di Bagnoregio the views stretch out in every direction across the rugged chasms, peaks and valleys below. Civita was once joined on to the main part of the village of Bagnoregio as an elongated hilltop plateau town. As time passed, landslides, earthquakes and erosion caused parts of this plateau to drop away leaving the pinnacle where Civita now sits, all alone. Today the battle against the earth's forces continues, as locals strive to prevent more of the small plateau slipping away into the deep chasms below.

A beautifully preserved walled village

Only a handful of villagers still reside permanently on the mountain top. The visitors come and go, fascinated by this perfectly preserved town, saved from modernisation by the blessing and the curse of its glorious isolation. Civita di Bagnoregio - unique, lonely and splendid, but forever quarantined from the town it was once a part of.

Civita's Causeway Access

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