The Art of Dying Cities:
A Visit to Civita di Bagnaregio

The secretive Etruscans, whose language and culture remain an eerie puzzle to archaeologists, always divided their villages into two worlds, a city of the living and a city of the dead. In the north of Latium, the tiny medieval town of Civita is built upon such a necropolis, and it too, is slowly withering away. It has been known for centuries as "the dying city." The pockmark holes of the cave-tombs of these ancient mystagogues line the cliffs that ring the great wind-bitten outcrop on which the tiny village stands.

I visited the dying city last Friday.

Civita lies some miles outside of Viterbo, and is itself the old quarter, now isolated and abandoned, of the equally tiny city of Bagnaregio, sometimes also called Civita di Bagnaregio. The strange outcrop on which it stands rises in striated geological strata. It is now mostly a plug of hardened clay, its outer casing of porous tufa lost to the ages, scrubby yellow-green plants clinging precariously to its slopes.

As it rises, strata soon shape themselves into knife-hard edges which slowly themselves become the steep golden-brown pepperino ramparts of the town, seemingly forged from the living rock by the hand of God or perhaps some darker Etruscan deity. Some day soon the plants on its slopes will wither and the clay will start to crumble like the stone did before it.

The town is a sea of low-peaked tile roofs, the only verticals the tower of the single church and its cross-crowned pediment rising against the pale cerulean silhouettes of the mountains r ising ghostly in the distance. A handful of stubby, bizarre chimney-pots occasionally break the rhythm.

There are few who still live here, and it seems they live in another age, one where the distinctions of the centuries seem to fade. The church seems just as old as the truncated half-buried Roman columns that stand in the dirt-floored main piazza, used for the yearly donkey race, one tiny shard of a vast civic calendar now abandoned. Flower garlands had gone up in honor of this single town event on the church, a vast geometric carpet of wilting leaves and blooms blanketing the floor of the nave.

I spent some time wandering through the jagged streets, catching slitlike glances of the verdant valley hundreds of feet below me, and then came back to the church. Someone was using a vacuum cleaner, but only that broke the silence. Somewhere around here, the Seraphic Doctor and cardinal St. Bonaventure grew up, and his image adorns one of the tiled street signs of a narrow alleyway near the main piazza, little more than six feet wide. His image adorns one wall in the little church as well, a strange, inexplicable little sanctuary crowded with millenia of memories.

It seems more like some incogruous Catholic outpost of Indian Mexico or some contested shrine in the Holy Land than the parish church of a dying town in Italy. Outside, ionic volutes slowly shrivel while the cracked pepperino stands solid against the piebald, stained pink stucco crumbing in great dry gaps. Dozens of unlit oil lamps and candelabra hang from the arches of the nave. The sanctuary's high altar still faces eastward, festooned with gilding and bizarre shades of sea-foam green. Every pillar is marbled in weird, unnatural colors, purple pophyries and aquamarine, vying with the great boughs of scarlet and yellow flowers that decorate the altar.

Yellow-wax votive candles stand in great banks on the floor. The place is a riot of pious clutter, with abandoned Corpus Christi torches and a canopy propped up against bare walls studded with torchere-bearing angels, fragments of fresco, and unsettlingly baroque shrines. Two side-altars flank the sanctuary, the right serving as the tomb of the wax-encased skeleton of a bishop St. Hildebrand buried in faded pontificals. It is a weirdly taxedermic memorial, his beard looking like a disguise and a thick gold wire halo encircling his mitre.

To the left is the town's patroness, the delicate martyr Vittoria, a beautiful little creature dressed in silk with perfect classical features sharp as the prop dagger that pierces her small wooden breast beneath faded robes, rich as her sculpted gilt hair. Her bare toes peep out from the embroidered hem of her robe bound in scarlet-banded sandals. Hildebrand’s sleep seems fitful, Vittoria's strangely peaceful, the very allegory of this dying city.

It may seem secretive as the indecypherable tongue of the Etruscans who went before them, but the mystery that lies behind this town's eerie moldering serenity is not completely lost to us.

The death of a city is not always one of decadence and decay or urban decline. We forget that as inner cities collapse into graffiti and murder. But death can be holy too, something we are afraid to admit nowadays. I was once amused to see that St. Robert Bellarmine, another holy cardinal, wrote a book entitled The Art of Dying Well, but now I can’t scoff. Civita made me understand some small bit why he wrote it, and only reinforced in my mind that the timely death of a whole miniscule civilization sometimes is as solemn and pious a passage as that of an aged monk, confessed and pure, waiting for his Redeemer.

I passed through the new town’s cathedral, all imitation purple marble and gilding, a respectable late version of the little village’s shrine, and stood before the silver-encased reliquary of St. Bonaventure's arm in the transept. However, I realized I had seen another reliquary of something perhaps even stranger, a shrine entombing an entire town going to its death with the same eternal grace that conveyed the Seraphic Doctor to his Maker.