Italy
Civita di Bagnoregio
A dying city on an eroding mesa, reached only by a footbridge over the ravine.
The footbridge stretches for hundreds of metres across empty air, the valley falling away into clay badlands scored by rain. Ahead, Civita floats on its tufa pedestal like something that forgot to fall. No sound comes from the village, only the mineral smell of crumbling rock.
Civita di Bagnoregio has been eroding out from under itself since the Etruscans settled the mesa more than two thousand years ago. Italians call it la città che muore, the dying city: the clay slopes around it visibly recede, streets have gone over the edge within living memory, and only a handful of residents hold on year-round. Everything crosses the pedestrian bridge, the sole way in, carried on foot or on a resident's moped. What waits at the top is one piazza, a Romanesque church, and the birthplace of the medieval philosopher Saint Bonaventure, suspended in a silence that feels geological.
Solo
Cross the bridge with the first light and the dying city becomes a meditation; few places in Italy hand you this much silence.
Couple
There is something about sharing a place that is actively disappearing; walk the single piazza at dusk and watch the badlands turn amber.
- Italians have called Civita la città che muore, the dying city, for generations.
- The pedestrian footbridge is the only ordinary way in; nothing on four wheels can reach the town.
- Streets have collapsed into the ravine within living memory, and the fresh cliff faces show it.
- The whole mesa is tufa sitting on soft clay, which is why the erosion never stops.
Acquacotta, the Tuscia cowherds' bread-and-egg soup, is the honest lunch beyond the bridge.
Nocciola Romana hazelnuts from the Monti Cimini turn up in cakes and gelato all over the district.
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