Civita di Bagnoregio sits on a hill of volcanic tuff that is quietly leaving.
It is an outlying village of Bagnoregio, in the Province of Viterbo, about 120 km north of Rome. The Etruscans founded it more than 2,500 years ago. Then the clay beneath the tuff began to wash away, and the edges of the plateau kept falling.
By the 19th century it was isolated enough that people called it la città che muore — the city that dies. At the end of the 17th century a major earthquake had already pushed the bishop and the town government across the valley to Bagnoregio. In 2021 the permanent population was estimated at 11 people. A CNN piece in January 2020 noted that the town had more cats than its twelve human residents.
You reach it only by a footbridge: a reinforced concrete one, built in 1965. A toll came in 2013, and by August 2017 it was €3 on weekdays and €5 on Sundays and public holidays. Because of the toll, communal taxes were abolished in Civita and nearby Bagnoregio, which reportedly makes Bagnoregio the only town in Italy without them.
Saint Bonaventure was born here and died in 1274. The place where his boyhood house stood fell off the cliff long ago.
In 2006 the World Monuments Fund put Civita on its Watch List of the 100 Most Endangered Sites. Visitors: about 40,000 in 2010, and an estimated 850,000 in 2017.
The strange part is the arithmetic. A place nobody could reach became, because it was dying, a place everybody wanted to see. The dying is the exhibit. And still, slowly, the hill keeps going.
Sources: - Wikipedia, "Civita di Bagnoregio" (English): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civita_di_Bagnoregio - Comune di Bagnoregio / visitor site: https://www.civitadibagnoregio.cloud/