Church of San Donato historical timeline

What a visitor stands in front of is a demoted cathedral. San Donato held the see of Bagnoregio from the year 600 until 1699, and it lost it to an earthquake: the shock of 1695 did enough damage that Innocent XII moved the diocese down to Bagnoregio four years later. Inside is the wooden crucifix that has outlasted the bishopric, still carried out on Good Friday. And two Etruscan sarcophagi are built into the campanile's footing, because this hill was a town a thousand years before the church was a church.

Chronology

1. 6th c. B.C. The Etruscans found Civita on one of the oldest roads in Italy, joining the Tiber -- then a major navigation route of central Italy -- to Lake Bolsena. The street grid of cardi and decumani that San Donato's square sits at the centre of is theirs. Its Etruscan name is unknown, probably through the damnatio memoriae imposed after Rome conquered Etruria.
2. 280 B.C. Earth tremors and landslips hit the area. The Etruscans were already answering the instability by embanking rivers and cutting drainage channels to carry the water off the hill -- the oldest engineering here, and still the subject the museum beside the church is about.
3. 265 B.C. The Romans arrive, and take up the Etruscans' rainwater canalisation and torrent containment on an imposing scale. After them the works are neglected, the ground degrades quickly, and Civita is eventually abandoned.
4. 400s Tradition dates the founding of the church to this century. Traces of a first Romanesque building survive under everything done to it since.
5. 600 San Donato becomes the cathedral of the diocese of Bagnoregio, and holds the see for the next eleven centuries.
6. 1499 Plague strikes the territory around Bagnoregio. By the legend attached to the church's wooden crucifix, a pious woman praying before it daily hears a voice telling her the pestilence will shortly end -- which it does, days later, at the same moment as her own death. The crucifix is still here.
7. 1511 To Nicola Matteucci of Caprarola's design, the eastern wall, the two choirs, the crypt and the high altar are demolished and replaced by the present presbytery and choir, and the façade is reworked into a Renaissance front.
8. 1524 The central portal is installed in that new façade.
9. 1547 The two side portals follow, finishing the front thirty-six years after it was begun.
10. 1695 An earthquake does serious damage to the church, in a place whose base layer is a marine clay especially prone to erosion.
11. 1699 By the brief Super Universas of 20 February, Innocent XII moves the seat of the diocese to nearby Bagnoregio, where the collegiate church of San Nicola becomes the cathedral. San Donato has been a parish church ever since.
12. 1940 The building is made an Italian national monument -- recognised in its own right two and a half centuries after losing the bishop.
13. 1965 The reinforced-concrete footbridge is built, giving Civita the only access it now has. Everything that reaches San Donato crosses it on foot.
14. 2005 The calanchi of Civita are proposed as a Site of Community Importance, protecting the eroding landscape the church stands in.
15. 2013 Access to the borgo becomes chargeable in June, at 5 euros. The receipts prove large enough to abolish communal taxes in Civita and in Bagnoregio itself.
16. 2025 About ten people live in Civita. The church still holds two patronal feasts a year and sends its crucifix out every Good Friday.

Survival and restoration

San Donato's losses were seismic and then administrative. The earthquake of 1695 damaged it badly enough that the diocese left in 1699, and a cathedral that becomes a parish church in a village of a few families does not get rebuilt to its former state. What the sixteenth century had already removed was the Romanesque east end -- wall, both choirs, crypt and high altar, demolished in 1511 for Matteucci's presbytery and choir -- so the building a visitor enters has lost its original front and its original back, and keeps traces of the first Romanesque fabric underneath.

The threat now is the hill rather than the building. Civita's base layer is a marine clay especially subject to erosion, overlain by tufaceous and lavic material, and the erosion is fast: torrents, weather and historic deforestation together. Most of the Etruscan chamber tombs that once lined the base of the cliff and the neighbouring tufa walls have gone into landslides. The anti-erosion works the Etruscans began after 280 BC and the Romans continued were neglected after antiquity, and that neglect is what emptied the town.

Two things have gone the other way. The church was listed as an Italian national monument in 1940, and the calanchi were proposed as a Site of Community Importance in 2005. Since June 2013 the 5-euro access ticket has funded the comune that maintains them both.

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