Viterbo - Main Sights

Main Sights

Viterbo's historic center is one of the best preserved medieval towns of central Italy. Many of the older buildings (particularly churches) are built on top of ancient ruins, recognizable by their large stones, 50 centimeters to a side.

The main attraction of Viterbo is the papal palace, the (Palazzo dei Papi), that served as a country residence and a retreat in time of trouble in Rome. The columns of the palace are spolia from a Roman temple.

The second most important monument of the city is the Cathedral of S. Lorenzo. It was erected in Romanesque style by Lombard architects over a temple of Hercules. It was variously rebuilt from the sixteenth century on, and was heavily damaged in 1944 by Allied bombs. The notable Gothic belfry is from the first half of the fourteenth century, and shows influence of Sienese artists. The church houses the sarcophagus of Pope John XXI and the picture Christ Blessing by Gerolamo da Cremona (1472).

Other notable monuments are:

• The Palazzo Comunale (begun 1460), Palazzo del Podestà (1264) and Palazzo della Prefettura (rebuilt 1771) on the central square Piazza del Plebiscito. The Palazzo Comunale houses a series of sixteenth century and Baroque frescoes by Tarquinio Ligustri, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi and others.
• The small Gothic church of Santa Maria della Salute, which has a rich portal.
• The Romanesque Chiesa del Gesù (eleventh century). Here the sons of Simon de Montfort stabbed to death Henry of Almain, son of Richard of Cornwall.
• The Palazzo Farnese (fourteenth-fifteenth century), where Alessandro Farnese, the future Pope Paulus III, lived in his youth together with his beautiful sister, Giulia Farnese.
• The Rocca (castle).
• The Romanesque churches of Santa Maria Nuova (twelfth century), San Sisto (second half of the ninth century), and San Giovanni in Zoccoli (eleventh century).
• The Palazzo degli Alessandri in the old district, a typical patrician house of Middle Ages Viterbo.
• The Fontana Grande, begun in 1206.
• The Gothic church of San Francesco, built over a pre-existing Lombard fortress. It has a single nave with a Latin cross plan. It houses the sepulchre of Pope Adrian V, who died in Viterbo on 17 August 1276, considered the first monument by Arnolfo di Cambio.

The Museo Civico (City Museum) houses many archeological specimens from the pre-historic to Roman times, plus a Pinacoteca (gallery) with paintings of Sebastiano del Piombo, Antoniazzo Romano, Salvator Rosa, Antiveduto Grammatica and others. The Orto Botanico dell'Università della Tuscia is a botanical garden operated by the university.

In the valley of the Arcione River just to the west of Viterbo are a number of springs celebrated for the healing qualities of their waters, and in use since Etruscan and Roman days. In fact, the imposing ruins of a great Roman bath are still to be seen and were drawn in plan and perspective by Renaissance masters, including Giuliano da Sangallo, Michelangelo, and Giorgio Vasari. One of most famous of these thermal springs was that known as the "Bulicame", or bubbling place, whose reputation had even reached the ears of the exiled poet Dante Aligheri. Canto 14 (lines 79–81) of Dante's Inferno describes how:

In silence we had reached a place where flowed
a slender watercourse out of the wood—a stream
whose redness makes me shudder still.
As from the Bulicame pours a brook whose
waters are then shared by prostitutes, so did this
stream run down across the sand.

Not far from the Bulicame whose waters, apparently, were always taken in the open, is the Bagno del Papa (Bath of the Pope). Almost totally concealed within the structure of a modern luxury spa hotel are the remains of a Renaissance bath palace that attracted the active attention of two popes. Actually, the origins of this bathing establishment go back to the Middle Ages when it was known as the Bagno della Crociata (so named either after a Crusader who supposedly discovered the spring or from a corruption of the Italian word for crutch). Early 15th-century documents provide a description of the medieval bath building that covered three distinct thermal springs all under one roof.

This bath house was radically transformed by the first humanist pope of the Italian Renaissance, Nicholas V, who, c. 1454, ordered the construction of a bath palace to be built (according to Nicholas's biographer, Gianozzo Manetti) "with such magnificence and with such expense that it was not only deemed suitable for a stay and salutary for the sick but seemed an edifice destined to have rooms fit for princes and for living regally." A more precise description of just what Pope Nicholas ordered constructed is found in the writings of the Viterbese chronicler Nicola della Tuccia, who, in the 1470s, described the new Bagno del Papa as a battlemented building about 30 x 20 m in size with high towers at the corners of its southern facade. Its appearance would have been more fortress than watering place. Located outside Viterbo the thermal spa would have been an easy target for roving bands of bandits had the building not assumed a militant character, one which also affirmed papal authority in this region. Aside from the regal apartments described by Manedtti there were vaulted chambers at the lowest level to accommodate the patrons of the several thermal springs.

Manetti, followed by Vasari, named the Florentine architect and sculptor Bernardo Rossellino as the person responsible for a series of building projects carried out throughout the Papal States at the orders of Pope Nicholas and his name is usually associated with the project in Viterbo. There is, however, no reason, either through documentation or architectural style, to connect Rossellino directly with the construction of the Bagno del Papa. To the contrary, Vatican payment records from 1454, preserved in the state archives in Rome, identify a stonemason from Lombardy, named Stefano di Beltrame, as the builder who "had done or was doing in the house ordered by the pope at the bagni della Grotta and Crociata of Viterbo.".

Construction work at the Bagno del Papa was continued on through the reigns of several popes who followed Nicholas V. The Vatican account books make mention of payments "for building done at the bath palace of Viterbo" during the reigns of Calixtus III, Paul II, and Sixtus IV. There also is strong evidence that Pope Pius II was responsible for the addition of a western wing to the building.

Travelers' descriptions, etched views, and local guidebooks chronicle the fate of the Renaissance Bagno del Papa over the years and through several rebuildings resulting in a general assumption that most of the original 15th-century structure had vanished. A guide to Viterbo from 1911 does note that some remnants were still to be detected in basement piers and vaults. In operation as a thermal hospital in 1927, the building was blown up by retreating German forces in 1944.

Despite all the rebuildings, the demolition attempt, post-war reconstruction and the latest modification as a resort destination, much of the original Bagno del Papa of Popes Nicholas V and Pius II survives, including the corner towers and the vaulted chambers where Renaissance patrons once bathed.

The Villa Lante, an example of Mannerist gardening, is located in the frazione of Bagnaia.