Called by Bonaventura “city that dies2 Civita di Bagnoregio, at 10 km from the bed&breakfast Farm of the Mulberries and 10 km from Orvieto, are an easily attainable destination from the B&B in the middle of the green of Umbria and Lazio region. You can easily reach it by motorbike and by mountain-bike.
Founded by the Etruscans 2.500 years ago, this suburb. that reenters in the list of the most fascinating suburbs of Italy, sinks the roots of his name in Balneum Regis, or “the king’s bath”, according to a legend, the waters would have recovered the wounds of the Lombard king called Desiderio that wanted to call this place like him. The rare documents explain that Civita di Bagnoregio and Bagnoregio were two regions from a same denominated city Balneum Regis up to the XI century.
At east of the inhabited area there is a road and then a narrow pedestrian bridge, along 300 meters, it links the Belvedere, the sparkling insertions of tuff can be admired from the small center almost depopulated of Civita, on the top of a hill that keeps on crumbling. That’s why this earth’s child, San Bonaventura, born in Bagnoregio in 1221, defined it the city that dies.
Civita rises on a hill of tuff under which streams flows and provokes unstoppable erosions as the erosive activity due to the atmospheric agents. Entering in the small suburb the Renaissance buildings and the typical of the middle ages houses struck (low houses with small balcony and external short flight of steps), characteristics of the architecture from Viterbo. To observe the Door of S.Maria, overhung by a couple of lions, that conducts to the romantic church of S. Donato, building from the middle ages rehandled in the
XVI century.
We suggest to visit in Bagnoregio: the Tempietto of S. Bonaventura where a Bible of the XII century are guarded, perhaps from the same saint and the reliquary that preserves his own relics; the Cathedral of S.Nicola; Porta Albana and the Romantic-Gothic church of the Annunziata with an enchanting cloister. Dug in the tuff rises the cave of S. Bonaventura, on the oriental edge of the Belvedere: a legend narrates that here Bonaventura recovered after his mother had begged San Francesco.